Warhammer: Echoes of Divinity
Chapter 107: Not Just Banishment

"It's… in the next room…"

The sorcerer rasped through blood-flecked lips, his trembling, ruined hand lifting weakly to point at the heavy, iron-wrought door beyond, its frame etched with sigils that pulsed faintly in the dim light.

"No, it isn't."

Qin Mo circled the bound heretic like a predator, his gaze narrowing in suspicion.

Then, with a sudden, brutal motion, he plunged his gauntleted hand into the sorcerer's torso.

With a wet, sickening squelch, he ripped out a small black box.

Then another.

And another.

More and more he extracted, his arm vanishing deep beyond anatomical possibility into the heretic's chest cavity each time, only to withdraw yet another obsidian, rune-carved container. Their surfaces shimmered with residual Warp-energy, humming with the echoes of some malign, lingering presence.

That was why he hadn't been able to sense the summoning artifacts.

They were inside the sorcerer himself.

His innate hatred for the heretic had been so intense, it had overwhelmed his ability to detect the Warp-tainted relics, masking the stench of the artifacts nestled within the meat of the sorcerer's own body.

And now, with the boxes extracted, that hatred intensified, burning with renewed fury.

The sorcerer twisted in agony, his face contorted in despair.

Not from pain, but from the frustration of failing to deceive Qin Mo.

"What's in them?"

Qin Mo flicked one of the latches open.

"Take a look, Yoan."

He turned the box toward him.

Yoan leaned in, cautious but intrigued.

"Summoning artifacts usually take the form of relics, books, or strange sigils," he said. "Anchors through which daemons are drawn into realspace. They must be powerful enough to survive the transition between realms."

He lifted the lid.

Inside was only ash.

"Of course," Qin Mo muttered, unfazed. "This happens sometimes."

His voice was absent, as though his mind was already piecing together a puzzle only he could see.

"Could be the remains of the last daemonhost."

Another box was opened. More dust.

Then another.

And another.

Every box contained nothing but dust.

Except for one.

The final box held a book.

It was bound in what at first appeared to be leather, but the texture was too uneven, too veined. Its twisted cover was stretched into the grotesque image of a sleeping face, its lips barely parted, as if caught whispering forgotten blasphemies into the silence.

Yoan grimaced.

"What kind of leather is that?"

Qin Mo smirked.

"Take a guess."

He flipped open the tome.

The pages slithered under his touch, shifting as though alive, inscribed with runes from a dialect tens of thousands of years old, its every word a wound against reality itself.

It was a ritual guide, filled with horrific, eldritch diagrams. But something was missing.

Entire passages were scorched away, their meanings not erased by fire, but unmade, as though some force had stripped them from existence.

The final page depicted a ritual's completion, but the daemon's image had vanished, only empty space remained. Its sigils floated aimlessly, divorced from the entity they once bound.

Qin Mo's brow furrowed.

"That's… strange."

"Impossible!"

Before Qin Mo could question the sorcerer, the heretic himself spoke first, his voice a seething mixture of shock and barely contained fury.

"Did you land the final blow on the daemon?!"

The sorcerer thrashed violently in his chains, glaring at Yoan.

He had felt it. A void in the Sea of Souls, a blight upon the warp, anathema to all that drew breath within it.

This man was a Blank. An Untouchable.

But Yoan simply shook his head.

"No."

"It was me," Qin Mo answered flatly.

The sorcerer's breath hitched. His eyes went wide with horror.

Qin Mo's mind raced.

The moment the daemon perished, the summoning artifacts must have disintegrated into dust.

That meant, the daemon had not merely been banished.

It had suffered a true death.

Gone, not merely cast back into the Immaterium, not forced to endure the torment of the warp's tides until it could manifest again.

It was destroyed. Annihilated.

And the only thing that could achieve such an act, something that could harm the soul itself, one of the few true mysteries in the universe.

And there were few forces in the galaxy capable of such a thing.

Like the flames of the C'tan.

To destroy a daemon's soul was an act so rare, so terrible, that even the Ruinous Powers themselves recoiled from it.

For the denizens of the warp, existence was pain, madness, and power in equal measure. But it was still existence. Even the most wretched daemon could cling to the raw matter of the Immaterium, awaiting the moment it could be reborn.

But this daemon? It would never return.

Qin Mo's thoughts flashed back to an ancient war, a war that had shaped the very fabric of the galaxy itself:

The War in Heaven.

Before mankind had even begun to crawl upon Terra, before the Eldar had sung the first notes of their tragic symphony, there had been theOld Ones.

A race of hyper-advanced psykers, master artificers of life and lords of the Immaterium, the Old Ones had ruled the stars when the galaxy was young.

They had created the Webway, threading pathways through the immaterial void that neither time nor space could constrain.

They had engineered theEldarand theKrork(precursors to modern Orks).

They mastered the Empyrean itself like no other.

But then came theNecrontyr.

A race cursed with fleeting lives and weak, mortal flesh, their lifespans were short, filled with suffering under a cruel and merciless sun, their very biology a torment.

They gazed upon the Old Ones, their lifespans stretching across eternity, and they seethed with envy and hatred. They sought the secrets of immortality, but the Old Ones, for all their wisdom, refused them.

Desperate for power, the Necrontyr turned to beings even older than the Old Ones.

TheC'tan, the Star Gods.

Vast, unknowable entities of pure energy, the C'tan hungered for more than flesh.

They desired worship, adoration, and above all, sustenance.

And so Mephet'ran, the Deceiver, whispered promises of vengeance and eternity to the Necrontyr.

A pact was forged in arrogance and desperation.

The Necrontyr, blind to the cost, forged necrodermis vessels to grant these cosmic entities physical form.

And in return, the C'tan feasted upon their souls, consuming them like light is devoured by a black hole.

The once-proud species, the Necrontyr were no more.

In their place rose the Necrons: undying, soulless machines.

And with their newfound power, they waged war.

The War in Heaven was not merely a war of flesh and steel, it was a war that shattered the very fabric of the universe.

The Necrons, guided by their C'tan masters, unleashed annihilation upon the Old Ones and their children. Star systems were extinguished, whole races wiped from existence. The fabric of the galaxy trembled as the slaughter escalated beyond comprehension.

And in the end, the Necrons won.

The Old Ones fell, their empires shattered, their creations scattered to the winds. But victory was hollow, for the Necrons had no souls. They did not dream, they did not feel, they did not weep or hate or love.

And so the Immaterium, already unstable, latched onto the suffering of those who did.

Even as the Immaterium churned in agony, the daemons did not yet roam freely. Chaos was still a whisper, not yet the endless tide of madness it would become.

But when the Necrons, turned against their own gods, the balance shifted. The C'tan were shattered, their unfathomable essences broken into shards, and yet, even in their destruction, their influence remained. The raw, unchecked suffering of the galaxy swelled into the Immaterium like a rising storm.

The Old Ones had been more than just rulers, they had been the shepherds of the Immaterium itself. Their mastery of the Warp kept the raw, roiling energies of Chaos in check.

With their fall, the Immaterium began to shift, no longer shaped by "benevolent" hands, but left to the primal emotions of a galaxy in turmoil.

The psychic races engineered by the Old Ones, meant to be their ultimate weapons, became vulnerable.

The Eldar, the Krork, theRashan, all their powers fed the Warp in ways even their creators had not foreseen.

And as the galaxy drowned in one more war, agony, and slaughter, the Immaterium fed upon it all. Emotions burned like fires in the Sea of Souls, and from the depths of that madness, the first true daemons were born.

The Immaterium, once a tool of creation, became a crucible of madness.

The War in Heaven was not just a physical conflict; it was a war of existence itself.

The Age of the Old Ones ended, and the Age of Chaos began.

Qin Mo had never known how the C'tan truly affected the daemons.

But now,he did.

The power of the C'tan was not of the Warp. It was pure, untainted by the madness of the Immaterium.

It was anathema to daemons.

Pure material force that could obliterate even the most nightmarish horrors of the Warp.

Qin Mo looked down at his hands.

A question, long buried, clawed its way to the surface of his mind.

What had he become?

"You've given me quite a discovery."

Qin Mo's lips curled into a smile devoid of warmth.

The air around him crackled with power, lightning coiled about his outstretched fingers, the energies writhing with a predator's hunger.

"As a reward, I'll grant you a merciful death. Your soul will be erased."

The sorcerer's eyes widened in fear.

Before he could scream, Qin Mo's fingertips brushed his forehead, and the universe screamed.

The sorcerer's flesh peeled away in an instant, his bones turning to vapor before they could even fall to the ground.

His very essence was shredded, his soul was torn apart, burned away by the power of the C'tan.

A true death.

"That's what you deserve, filth!"

Yoan spat, his voice carrying the steel of absolute conviction as he watched the last remnants of the heretic vanish from existence. There was no body left to burn, no ashes to scatter. Only absence, a hollow reminder of annihilation.

"It's done. Let's go."

Qin Mo turned without another word.

As they walked the halls, the fortress behind them erupted into flames.

Every room, every corridor consumed by fire.

Then, Qin Mo paused.

"Yoan. Never speak of daemons. To anyone."

Yoan nodded immediately.

"I understand. Because most people can be corrupted, right?"

"No."

Qin Mo's gaze locked onto him.

"If someone falls to corruption, we can still kill them. The real danger is the Inquisition. If they find out you know about daemons… They will kill you. They will kill your wife. They will kill your daughter. They will erase every trace of your existence."

Yoan's stomach twisted.

He knew the Imperium's ways.

He knew they would do exactly that.

"I won't tell a soul."

He meant it.

"You've had a rough life, haven't you?"

Qin Mo sighed, his tone bearing no pity, only acknowledgment.

"Shunned as a Blank. Used by bounty hunters. Cast aside by society."

Yoan said nothing.

"At least you had her."

His wife. The one who never abandoned him. The one who stood by his side.

And their daughter. A miracle.

A Blank born from a Blank.

"You're uniquely suited to this role. A daemon hunter."

A long silence stretched between them.

Then, "Someday, I might give you a title."

Qin Mo smirked.

"Slayer of Kairos."

Yoan frowned.

"Who's Kairos?"

Qin Mo laughed.

"You'll find out."