Lore:Empress: Difference between revisions

Gold silks and purple velvets hung above the gilded chair where Ahztja settled in to tell the princess Caiatl her nightly story.

Ahztja was the emperor's mythkeeper; a talented storyteller and Psion who held all the legends and histories of the conquered worlds in her mind. Caiatl's father often said, "Ahztja is an athenaeum world in and of herself." He often retreated, either into his pleasures or his unpredictable melancholy, leaving Ahztja to fill Caiatl's mind with fantasy.  

"Among the chaos stands Irkyn La, the First Host, who blinks herself into existence with the First Thought: chaos must come to order."

"That is how the Tiiarn would say the universe began," Ahztja said.  

Umun'arath's voice rumbled in her ear like a surfacing landwhale.

"Imagine all of Torobatl as the putrid grave swamps of Aark," she said. "Centuries sunk in muck. A testament to someone else's conquest."

She calmly turned. The intruder was not Cabal. They wore a strange, sleek armored suit—some off-world species unaccustomed to the atmosphere, no doubt. But her father's influence on it was obvious; he did so favor white, purple, and gold.

Caiatl lunged, crashing her shoulder into the assassin. They fired their weapon, and Void energy seared through Caiatl's bicep. Undeterred, she slammed the assassin to the ground, clutching their throat in one hand and making a fist with the other. She cocked her arm back. Her reflection in the assassin's helmet stared back at her. Furious. Unblinking. Curious.

The assassin struggled. "You are a child in a general's costume," they spat. "None of the vision of your father. None of the drive or strength of the one they call Dominus." Something sharp penetrated Caiatl's pressure suit and slipped up against her ribs. "You will not be remembered."

In the far corner of the room, with the restraints they used for captives aboard their prison ships, a living Hive Thrall was held in suspension, drooling and chattering.  

It was Taurun, one of Caiatl's advisors, that alerted her to the spectacle.  

"Here comes the Princess-Imperial," she said. "To kneel before our new god."[I am Savathûn, whispering.]

[Xivu Arath, hear me.]  

Smoke rose from the city of Torobatl. The sky was dark with Tombships and Threshers. Strange, spindly towers had sprouted from the ground, infecting the streets and alleyways Caiatl had known so well, rendering the landscape alien.  

At the long table of her council room on the fleeing warship Eligos Lex V, Caiatl sat with her advisors. An ugly panic gripped them.  

"They are not deterred by casualties," rumbled Ca'aurg. "All loss is acceptable loss to the Hive."  

There were murmurs of assent across the table. "Ghaul diverted some of our best generals," lamented Tha'arec. "All to the damnable Sol system, for his idiotic crusade…"

"My father was infatuated with the myth of his own benevolence," Caiatl said. "He gorged himself and his people on stories of what the empire could be and took half-measures to make it so. But he never succeeded. He never wished to succeed. I am not my father.  

"Dominus Ghaul was obsessed with his own redemption. He imagined debts owed to him and sought their fulfilment. He used the Legion as a tool to secure himself and his legacy. He saw the empire as one more thing he was owed. I am not Dominus Ghaul.  

"The Guardians killed Ghaul," Caiatl said.  

"Other deities of the Hive. One of the great worms."  

"And a sibling of Xivu Arath," Caiatl added.