Time twisted.
Time shifted. Time was, and was not. An eerie silver power flowed through Jaq, as though he had invoked it by those words. The power used his mind as its conductor. He sensed how the time stream itself was being negated and annulled. Some psykers of the highest level could distort time thus. Not Jaq, hitherto.
Never Jaq. Yet now...
Was he possessed?
By no daemon, certainly. But by the shining path itself. To his senses that path now appeared to be the track of a phosphorescent arrow through twisted geometries. The arrow had accumulated a charge at its point until that point could transfix the fabric of time itself, pinning time temporarily like a moth with a needle through its spine... 'Run, now!' cried Jaq. Did he and his abnormal family flit like hummingbirds which seem to flicker directly from one point in space to another, passing in and out of existence? Afterwards Jaq believed they must have darted thus ― across the static, time-stopped Chamber of Glory, past the frozen Companions, and through the Titan Archway between the motionless menacing colossi. And still the lustrous arrow impaled the tissue of time.
THROBBING PIPES RIBBED the walls of the vast throne room beyond. The muscles of the room were thick power cables feeding stegosaurian engines. The air was spiked with crisp ozone and bitter myrrh, and ointmented with balmy, somewhat greasy fragrances. The holiest battle banners, icons and golden fetishes flanked the arena of dedication where psykers were soul-bound. Squads of Emperor's Companions who guarded that vast hall, a mob of tech-priests ministering to the machinery, a gaudy Cardinal Palatinate and his entourage, a red-robed High Lord of Terra and his staff ― not to mention great clusters of astropaths, chirurgeons, scholastics, battlemasters: all were motionless.
The immense, soaring, tube-ridged throne resembled some fossilised, metastasised sloth crafted by some mad master of the Adeptus Titanicus. And it seemed to Jaq, though he did not know whether what he saw was true, or mere delusion instilled by that same psyker-dream, that this enormous, sacred prosthetic device, more precious by far than any gold, framed the wizened, mummified face of the God-Emperor. Who looked not; though he saw through eyes of the mind, saw far beyond his throne room and his palace and the solar system. Who breathed not; yet he lived more fiercely than any mortal, enduring a psychically supercharged life-in-death.
'WE ARE CURIOUS,' came a mighty, anguished thought which itself transcended time.
'WE HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR INTRUSION INTO OUR SANCTUARY, OUR ANTRUM AND ADYTUM.'
'My lord.' Jaq sank to his knees. 'I beg to report to you before I am destroyed. I may have uncovered a major conspiracy—'
'THEN WE WILL STRIP YOUR SOUL BARE. RELAX, MORTAL MAN, OR YOU WILL SURELY DIE IN SUCH PAIN AS WE ALWAYS ENDURE.' Jaq breathed deeply, slowly, stilling the panic that fluttered under his ribs like a trapped bird. He surrendered himself. A hurricane roared through his mind.
If the story that he had thought to relate were a tangled forest ― and if each event in that story were a tree ― then within moments all the leaves were stripped away from all of the trees, denuding them to bare wintry twigs, to a raw basic life without the foliage of memories. He was drained of his story; that was sucked from him in a trice, all of those leaves whirling into the mind-maw of the Master.
Jaq gagged. Jaq drooled.
He was an imbecile, less than an imbecile. He was less than a new-born baby.
He neither knew where he was, nor who he was ― nor what it even meant to be a someone.
The inquisitor sprawled. All that was known to his body was distress, the gurglings of the guts, breath and light. Light from afar.
ABRUPTLY, ALL MEMORY flooded back. On that instant, each leaf sprouted anew to recloak the forest of his life. 'WE HAVE PUT BACK WHAT WE TOOK AND TASTED, INQUISITOR'
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(Also that sweet sweet type 8 immortality) Golden boy striken back.
