Chapter 1: The Last Human
The air tasted of ozone and old graves.
Rut’Aba’s world was a jagged, skeletal maze of black monoliths. They weren’t smooth anymore. They were cracked, fractures webbing across their surfaces like frozen lightning. From those cracks bled a slow, pulsating violet light. It wasn’t light, not really. It was raw Warp-stuff, seeping through the dead Necron stone like infected blood from a wound that wouldn’t close.
The ground trembled, a constant, faint shudder under his boots.
He stood with his back to one such monolith, the hum of his pike a competing vibration in his teeth. Before him, the silver tide advanced. Not with rage, not with haste. With the terrible, silent patience of machines that had already won ten thousand years ago.
Necron warriors. Their eye-slits glowed a malevolent green, a color that felt like a violation in this violet-drenched hellscape. They came in a loose phalanx, gauss flayers raised. The air around their weapons shimmered with the promise of atomic dissolution.
Rut’Aba’s frame—all lean muscle and scar-tissue cable under stained fatigues—trembled. It wasn’t fear. It was the feedback scream from the haft of his pike, a stolen piece of tech he barely understood. Energy, unstable and angry, coursed up his arms and made his vision pulse in time with the tomb’s heartbeat.
“One at a time,” he muttered to himself, his voice swallowed by the ambient whisper. The tombspeak. It was always there, a ghost-noise in the substructure: the warped, lingering consciousness of the Necrons, stretched and melted by the Warp’s touch. It sounded like a chant. It sounded like a scream. It sounded like his own thoughts, sometimes.
The first warrior stepped within range.
Rut’Aba moved. He wasn’t fast in a blurring sense; he was efficient. A sidestep, the hum of the gauss blast searing the air where his head had been. He didn’t shoot. The gun built into the pike’s base was drained, a dead weight. He lunged, driving the crackling energy-blade at the tip up through the warrior’s thorax.
The metal didn’t just cut. It screamed. Violet energy met necrodermis and unraveled it. The warrior came apart in a shower of molten silver slag and spasming green light.
He yanked the blade free, already spinning. The second warrior was there. He parried a flayer strike, the impact jolting his shoulders. Close.Too close. He could see his own reflection, warped and desperate, in the creature’s impassive faceplate.
He headbutted it.
The crack was satisfyingly solid. The warrior staggered back a half-step. It was all the opening he needed. He reversed his grip, slammed the pike’s butt into its leg joint, and heard something crunch. As it went down, he drove the blade through its skull.Two down. A silent sea of green eyes advanced behind them.
He was breathing hard now. Sweat stung his eyes. Each parry, each kill, drew a little more of the pike’s unstable feedback into his bones. It felt like holding onto a live wire in a storm. Memories, not his own, flickered at the edges of his perception: cold stars, silent dynasties, the bitter taste of a sleep that lasted millennia.
“Shut up,” he growled, to the tomb, to the weapon, to the ghosts in his head.
He broke the next warrior’s arm with a sharp kick, used its falling body as a shield against a volley of gauss fire. The disintegrating metal hissed as it absorbed the blasts. He shoved the dissolving wreck forward, bowling into two more, and followed in the chaos.Thrust. Parry.Twist.
He was a dirty, violent smear of motion in a landscape of monolithic order and daemonic seepage. He fought without elegance, without prayer. He fought to occupy the next second, and the second after that. There was no grand cause here. No Imperium to serve. No Emperor to hymn.
There was just Rut’Aba, the last human, in a universe that had long since forgotten what the word meant.
A blast grazed his side. He felt a line of cold fire etch across his ribs, the smell of his own cauterized flesh bitter in his nose. He snarled, spun, and severed the offending warrior’s weapon arm at the shoulder, then took its head.
The tremor in the ground deepened. A deep, grating thud echoed from somewhere far below, as if something massive had turned over in its sleep.
The Necrons paused. Their green eye-lights flickered. The whispers in the stone changed pitch, becoming more urgent, more afraid.
Rut’Aba used the heartbeat of hesitation. He darted back, putting precious meters between himself and the front rank. His lungs burned. The pike’s hum was becoming a shriek, the violet energy along its blade spitting and flaring. It was going to blow. He could feel it. He had minutes, maybe less.
He looked past the advancing silver. Past the bleeding monoliths. The whispers coiled around him, not in words, but in feelings. A profound, ancient dread. The thing that was stirring below wasn’t Necron. It was what the Warp had made of them, fusing nightmare with immortal machine.
He was alone. He had a failing weapon. He had a side wound leaking warmth down his leg. And he had a tide of immortal killers between him and whatever exit might still exist in this crumbling hell.
A grim, cracked smile spread across his face. It was the most human expression left on the planet.
“Okay,” he whispered, hefting the screaming pike, his knuckles white. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The ground beneath the nearest Necrons erupted. Not with fire or rock, but with thick, tendril-like projections of the same bleeding violet energy. They lanced upwards, wrapping around limbs, torsos, pulling them down into the suddenly-soft stone. The silent advance broke into a silent, chaotic struggle.
The deeper thing was awake. And it was hungry.
Rut’Aba’s smile vanished. This was worse. This was so much worse.
He turned and ran, not from the Necrons, but from the ground itself, as the tomb world began to consume itself around him.@Saber-Pike
He turned and ran, not from the Necrons, but from the ground itself, as the tomb world began to consume itself around him.
The floor was turning to slurry. Solid black stone softened into a thick, sucking mud that glowed from within. Those violet tendrils snaked up from every crack, feeling the air like blind worms. One brushed against his boot. The armorweave covering it sizzled and died, the material dissolving into grey dust. He jerked his leg away, heart hammering against his ribs.
Silence was gone. Now the air was filled with a wet, grinding sound, stone grinding against stone deep in the planet’s gut, and a high, keening whine that might have been the Warp-tainted energy or the tombs’ final screams.
A corridor.He needed a corridor. Something with walls.
He vaulted over a sinking console, its runes bleeding light. The ceiling above him dripped molten metal. He dodged, feeling the heat kiss his cheek. There—an archway, still holding. He slid through it just as the section of floor he’d been standing on collapsed inward, vanishing into a luminous violet sinkhole.
This new passage was narrower. The walls here were veined with the same pulsating energy, but they were still solid. For now. The hum of his pike was a shrill note in the symphony of collapse. Its light flickered wildly, casting jumping, monstrous shadows.
He slowed, back against the wall, breath sawing in his throat. The side wound was a persistent burn. He pressed a hand to it.Came away wet. Not good.
A shape moved in the gloom ahead.
He raised the pike, its sputtering blade the only thing between him and the dark. Not a Necron. This shape was wrong. It was tall, but it slumped. It had too many arms, or parts that looked like arms, hanging limp and twitching from a distorted torso. It shambled, each step a shaky compromise with gravity.
One of the tomb’s own. A Necron, maybe a warrior, maybe something else, warped by the seepage. Its silver was stained a bruised purple. One of its green eyes was shattered, weeping tendrils of light. The other fixated on him.
It made a sound. Not the usual mechanical click. A wet, gargling rasp, like gears grinding in oil.
“Great,” Rut’Aba muttered. “Just perfect.”
It lurched forward, faster than its broken form should allow. He didn’t have the space for a proper swing. He shoved forward, driving the pike like a spear. The energy blade punched into its chest. It didn’t scream. It wrapped its twitching, multi-jointed limbs around the haft, pulling itself closer along the weapon, ignoring the energy chewing through its core.
Its shattered face was inches from his. He could see the tiny, mad fractures in its metal skull, violet light pulsing beneath. The gargling sound formed a word, stretched and broken.
“Fffrrreeeee…”
He put his boot on its torso and kicked hard, yanking the pike free. The thing stumbled back, a gaping, sizzling hole in its chest. It took two more wobbling steps, then its legs gave out. It fell, collapsing into a heap of malfunctioning parts. The violet light in its fractures dimmed and died.
Rut’Aba stared at it.Free. Was that what it was trying to say? Was that the Warp’s cruelty, giving a dead machine a ghost of its ancient desire just before its end?
The tremor hit again. A section of the ceiling in the archway behind him sheared off and crashed down, sealing his retreat.Dust choked the air. The only way was forward, deeper into the tomb’s shuddering heart.
He moved on, the encounter sitting cold in his gut. This wasn’t just a structural collapse. The world was being unmade.Digested.
The passage opened into a vast chamber. It must have been a central nexus once. Now it was a cathedral of ruin. Huge obsidian pillars, each as wide as a dropship, rose into a darkness punctuated by falling sparks. Far below, a sea of that same violent energy churned and bubbled, tendrils licking up the pillars, slowly climbing. Across the chamber, maybe two hundred meters away, was another archway.A way out. Maybe.
Between him and it, spanning the abyss, was a narrow walkway. It was intact, but just barely. Sections of its railing were gone. The entire thing glittered with unstable energy, vibrating in time with the tomb’s death throes.
“No other choice,” he said to the empty, screaming air. His voice was swallowed whole.
He stepped onto the bridge. It hummed underfoot, a different frequency than his pike. The sound went straight up his spine. Each step was a negotiation. The surface was slick, not with liquid, but with a repellent energy field that made his boots want to slide. He focused on his feet, on the next meter, on not looking down into the luminous, hungry dark below.
Halfway across, the world tore open.
Not the bridge.The space above it. A silent, black rip in reality, edges bleeding violet lightning. From it, a figure descended.
It was humanoid, but that was where any familiarity ended. Its armor was the color of tarnished silver and dried blood, ornate in a way that hurt to look at, all wrong angles and screaming faces forged into the metal. It wore no helmet. Its face was pale, stretched, eyes pits of the same churning energy that was eating the tomb. It held a long, wicked blade that crackled with negative light.
It landed lightly on the walkway ahead of him, blocking his path. The bridge didn’t even shudder. It simply accepted the weight.
Rut’Aba stopped. He hefted the pike. Its dying light seemed feeble against this new presence.The thing smiled. Its teeth were sharp, metal, and too numerous.
“A little rat,” it said. Its voice was a chorus of whispers, layered over a core of grinding stone. “Scurrying in the walls of a dying god. You smell of fear… and something else. Fading sunlight. Dead grass. Primitive things.”
“What are you?” Rut’Aba’s own voice sounded raw, small.
“A consequence,” it said, taking a single, graceful step forward. “The echo of a prayer these silent ones never meant to utter. They slept in the dark, and the dark listened. It always listens.” It gestured with its blade at the chaos around them. “This is a becoming. You are just a stain that needs to be cleaned before the feast.”
It moved.
It was fast.Impossibly fast. Rut’Aba threw himself to the side, the black blade slicing the air where his neck had been. He swung the pike in a wide, desperate arc. The thing didn’t parry. It leaned back, the tip missing its chest by a millimeter. It chuckled, the sound like breaking glass.
“That toy,” it hissed. “A shard of the old logic. It offends me.”
It pressed the attack. Rut’Aba retreated, blocking, parrying. Every clash sent violent jolts up his arms. This wasn’t the straightforward, mechanical threat of the Necrons. This thing fought with a cruel, playful intelligence. It was testing him. Toying.A feint. A slash. Rut’Aba blocked high, and the thing’s other hand, which he hadn’t even seen move, slammed into his wounded side.
White-hot agony. He cried out, stumbling back. His heel skidded off the edge of the walkway. For a second, he was balanced over the abyss, arms windmilling. The thing watched, its pit-eyes gleaming.
Rut’Aba twisted, throwing his weight forward. He fell onto the bridge, the impact driving the air from his lungs. The pike clattered from his grip, skittering towards the edge. He scrambled for it, his fingers closing around the haft just as it started to slide over.
The thing was on him. It raised its blade for a final, downward stab.
Rut’Aba did the only thing he could think of. He rolled onto his back, pointed the sputtering, overloaded pike at the creature’s chest, and channeled every last bit of its unstable energy into a single, point-blank discharge.
There was no beam. There was an explosion of violent light and a concussive wave of wrongness.
The blast hurled the thing back. It shrieked, a sound that wasn’t sound, a frequency that cracked the stone beneath it. Rut’Aba was flung in the opposite direction, his back slamming into the base of a pillar. Stars exploded in his vision.
The pike was dead in his hands. Just a cold, inert metal rod. The energy was gone, spent.
Across the bridge, the thing was rising. Its beautiful, horrific armor was scorched. A crack ran up its pale face, leaking light. It was hurt. It was furious.
“Mortal,” it breathed, the word a curse.
Rut’Aba pushed himself up.Every part of him screamed. He had no weapon. The bridge ahead was blocked. Below was the devouring energy. Behind him was a sealed tomb.
The thing began its advance again, slower now, more deliberate. The playfulness was gone. This would be execution.
Rut’Aba’s eyes darted around, desperate, landing on the pillar he’d hit. The tendrils of energy had climbed high, weaving a glowing, pulsing web across its surface. The stone itself was fracturing, stressed to its limit.
He looked at the advancing creature. He looked at the pillar. A stupid, desperate idea formed.
He ran.Not away. He ran straight towards the edge of the walkway, towards the pillar. As his boot hit the lip, he jumped.
Not across the gap. Up.
He slammed into the pillar, wrapping his arms around it, his body smacking against the hard, vibrating stone. He started to climb. Hand over hand, boots scrabbling for purchase on the ornate carvings. He was climbing away from the bridge, away from the thing, straight up into the crumbling darkness.
A roar of fury echoed from below. He didn’t look down. He focused on the next handhold, the next pull. The energy veins were hot under his fingers, burning him, but he used them, jamming his hands into cracks, pulling himself higher.
A black blade shrieked through the air, burying itself in the stone a foot below his leg. Chips of rock stung his calf.He climbed faster. The top of the pillar wasn’t a ceiling. It connected to a tangle of broken architecture, a spiderweb of shattered walkways and collapsed galleries hanging over the abyss. A maze of ruin.
He heaved himself over the lip of the pillar’s capital, rolling onto a tilting slab of black marble. He was in the wreckage. Below, he heard the thing wrench its blade free. It would follow. It would climb, or simply fly.
Rut’Aba forced himself to his feet, swaying. He was in a jagged landscape of shadows and lethal drops. The only light came from the sickly glow below and the violent cracks in the world. The archway exit was still there, across the chamber, now level with him. But it was on the other side of a broken jigsaw of gaps and dangling stone.
No bridge.Just jumps.
He took a breath, the air tasting of dust and ozone and his own blood.
And he ran, leaping from one crumbling platform to the next, into the dark, the sound of something beautiful and terrible giving chase close behind.
And he ran, leaping from one crumbling platform to the next, into the dark, the sound of something beautiful and terrible giving chase close behind.
Stone turned to grit under his grip.A jump. His boots skidded on landing, sending a shard of black marble spinning off into the void. He didn’t watch it fall. He was already moving, lungs burning, side screaming where the thing had hit him. He could feel it behind him. Not hearing it, not seeing it.Feeling it. A cold pressure against the back of his skull, a wrongness in the air that made his teeth ache.
Another gap.Wider. He launched himself, arms cartwheeling for balance. He landed hard on the next platform, the impact shooting pain up his knees. This one was smaller, just a tilted spear of rock jutting from the wall. It shuddered. A network of cracks exploded beneath his feet like frozen lightning.
He heard a laugh. It came from everywhere, echoing off the monoliths.
“Run, little rat. The maze is closing.”
He looked back. The thing was simply standing on the platform he’d just left, watching. It made no move to follow the same path. It just… waited. As the platform beneath Rut’Aba’s feet gave a final, grating shriek and began to peel away from the wall.
He threw himself forward, not at another platform—there wasn’t one—but at the wall itself. He hit it, fingers clawing for purchase on the carved necrodermis, boots scrambling against smooth stone. He hung there, spreadeagled, as the spear of rock he’d been standing on sheared away and tumbled silently into the luminous violet sea far below.
The carved symbols provided just enough lip. He began to climb sideways, a crab-like shuffle along the vertical face. His arms trembled with the effort. The thing watched, head tilted.
Then it stepped off its platform.
It didn’t fall. It walked, casually, across the empty air. Each footfall sent a ripple through reality, a faint, bruise-colored bloom in the atmosphere. It was coming straight for him, a straight line across a gap he couldn’t possibly cross.
Panic, pure and electric, fired through his veins. He looked down. Bad idea. The churning energy seemed closer. He looked up. The architecture above was a tangled mess of broken bridges and collapsed archways. One, a rust-colored metal gantry from some ancient invasion maybe, angled down from the darkness. It was rusted, twisted, but it was structure. It was twenty feet above his head.
The thing was ten paces away, walking on nothing.
Rut’Aba let go with his right hand, reached to his hip, and unclipped the last functional piece of gear he had: a grapnel launcher, meant for utility climbs, not combat. He didn’t aim. He just pointed it in the general direction of the gantry and fired.
The hook shot upwards, trailing its mono-line. It clanged against metal, skidded, and caught on a broken strut. He wrenched the trigger again. The motor whined, hauling him up the wall just as the thing’s shadow fell over him.
A black blade whispered through the air, slicing the stone where he’d been clinging. He rose, dangling, spinning slowly on the line. The thing looked up, annoyed. It reached a pale hand toward the mono-line.
The entire wall section Rut’Aba was attached to decided to die.
With a sound like a mountain breaking its spine, a vast portion of the necron structure detached. Not just falling. It was dissolving, coming apart into geometric chunks that tumbled and spun. The gantry above shrieked, tearing free from its last moorings. The world became a deafening, vertical avalanche of black stone and rusted metal.
Rut’Aba’s grapnel line went taut, then slack. He was falling with everything else. He saw the thing swallowed by a sliding cliff-face of obsidian. He saw the luminous abyss rush up to meet him. He saw only noise and doom.
Then, absolute white.
It wasn’t sound. It was solid light. It hammered into him, bleaching the world, erasing the violet, the black, the silver. For a second, he was nothing but a silhouette burned onto his own retinas.The roar hit next. A physical wall of thunder that drowned the tomb’s death rattle. It was the scream of turbines, the heaven-shaking fury of thrusters burning atmosphere that shouldn’t exist this deep underground.
AS THE AREA AROUND HIM CRUMBLED HE WAS LIT UP BY THE FLOOD LIGHTS OF A VALKYRIE.
The carrier-gunship hung in the chaos, a blocky, angular angel of war. Its nose was pointed straight down into the collapsing chamber, its assault ramp yawned open like a mouth. From within that lit hold, heavy bolters chattered, painting lines of explosive fire across the falling debris. Chunks of necron architecture disintegrated into shrapnel and dust.
Rut’Aba was still falling, spinning through the beam of light. A dark shape shot from the Valkyrie’s open ramp on a zip-line. It slammed into him, an armored grip locking around his chest. A carabiner clicked onto his harness.
“Got you!” a voice yelled, mechanical and distorted through a helmet vox. “Now hang on to your lunch!”
The zip-line snapped taut. His fall became a savage, swinging arc. The world was a strobe of white light, exploding rock, and the geometric hellscape crumbling away below. He was hauled upwards, towards the blazing light of the hold. He caught a final glimpse of the chamber. The thing, the beautiful terrible thing, was standing on a single, falling obelisk, looking up at the Valkyrie. Its cracked face showed not fear, but a kind of wrathful, infinite curiosity. Then a curtain of dust and falling rock swallowed it whole.
He was dragged into the belly of the gunship. He hit the deck hard, rolling. Armored figures stood silhouetted against the light, weapons trained outward. The ramp began to whine shut, cutting off the view of the apocalypse.
The vibration of the ship changed. They were climbing.Fast.
Rut’Aba pushed himself up onto his elbows. A suited figure crouched in front of him, helmet reflecting his own filthy, blood-streaked face. The figure popped the seal on their helmet with a hiss, revealing a woman’s face. She had close-cropped black hair, eyes the colour of gunmetal, and a scar that pulled her lip into a permanent half-sneer.
She looked him up and down, taking in the dead pike still clutched in his white-knuckled hand, the necron-soot, the bleeding gash on his side.
“Rut’Aba?” she shouted over the turbine scream.
He just nodded, breath heaving.
She nodded back, a quick, professional jerk of the chin. “Nice view down there.” Her eyes flicked to the closed ramp. “What the hell was that?”
He spat dust and blood onto the deck. His voice came out a raw scrape. “A consequence.”
She almost smiled at that.Almost. “Well, consequence is about to have several tons of rock dropped on its head. Extraction’s got a quota.” She stood, offering a gloved hand. “Welcome to the Morning Star. Try not to bleed on the upholstery.”
He took her hand. She pulled him up. The Valkyrie banked sharply, pushing him against a bulkhead. Through a nearby viewport, he saw the last of the necron tombworld, a flickering bruise of violet light, swallowed by millions of tons of collapsing rock. They were flying into a solid ceiling of mountain. He braced.
A missile shot ahead of them from the Valkyrie’s wing. The world ahead erupted in fire and shattered stone. The gunship shot into the newly-made tunnel, chased by the final, collapsing roar of a dead world burying its nightmares.
The woman leaned against the wall next to him, watching the flying rock through the port. “Cozy, huh?”
Rut’Aba slid down the bulkhead, sitting heavily on the deck. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a hollow, shaking void. He stared at the dead metal pike in his hands.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Cozy.”