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The original was posted on /r/40klore by /u/incapableincome on 2023-10-06 02:58:56.

Context: After the failure of the Second Rubric, Ahriman searches for alternative ways to restore his Legion. As sorcerous ritual failed him, he turns instead to technological means. He seeks the Key of Infinity, a Necron artifact of the Hyksos Dynasty which allows the wielder to rewrite time and space at whim. Relying on the guidance of a cryptek named Setekh, who has obvious ulterior motives, he seeks to traverse the webway to find the Tomb World in question.

The sphere of the world broke. Splits opened its surface. Rock and remaining water tumbled down into the chasms. No fire or molten stone poured from them. On they ran, broadening and linking in straight lines until they stretched across the planet entire. Green lights glowed on the surface and arced into the air. The warp was weeping as Silvanus looked at it. Multicoloured light peeled back from the growing presence of the gate. He could hear the machine-wrights and tech-devotees howling in their code dirge as systems on the ships overloaded. Half-etheric systems and the warp-infused engines that powered their workings were failing.

Silvanus felt sick. Sweat sheened the folds and frills of his skin. There was blood and fluid oozing from the breathing pores on his back. He wanted very much to look away from what he was seeing, to be anywhere else but here watching reality and the warp disassembling. Disassembling… Yes, that was it… Matter manipulated beyond its normal laws and limits, the warp, the great and forever ocean of the warp, pushed away and negated. He was seeing something that should not be, not in reality or in dreams, and he could not help but observe.

The planet came apart. Blocks of matter the size of mountains shunted out, realigned, spun like the moving parts of a vast engine. Blackness filled the spaces within and between. It hung against the curdled light of the Eye, a puzzle toy discarded by a god before it was solved. Then it turned inside out. Space and geometry folded in to where the planet’s core had been. Where there had been a sphere, now there was a funnel opening into a darkness beyond that of the void.

Silvanus stared at it. He realised that he was weeping. Around him, his progeny churned their fluid tanks – some to get away, some to press their eyes against the glass and look. This was like nothing Silvanus had seen before. Navigators existed to behold the impossibility of the warp and chart a course through it. That alone made many of them numb to the new or novel. What was the new or the mundanely shocking when you could see the bubbling cauldron of living thought and nightmare under the skin that most souls believed was the dominant reality? The longer you looked into the warp, the more it showed you all the truths it hid. Echoes of the tortured dead, palaces of lost dreams, futures and pasts, gilded wonder and bloody terror. Silvanus had gone further even than the oldest of his kind. Much further. He had charted courses through the riptides of gods and seen worlds where the immaterial and the physical were fused, and the living changed what was real by whim, will and accidental dream. He had seen the daemon heralds of the gods and spoken to them. All these things had changed him and taught him, so that now he knew that the physical was not the prime reality, but the lesser sibling of the warp – a grey shadow to the Great Ocean’s majesty.

That realisation had given him so much, had stolen some of the terror from what had become of his life, had lent it meaning. It did not help him as he looked at the gate. It stole the softness and comfort of his beliefs and left his throat dry and his mind screaming with the hollow instinct to run. It was like nothing he had seen. No, it was a negation of all that he had seen. This hole bored in warp and reality meant that everything he had come to accept might be wrong, just another layer of lies and incomplete lies piled on top of the others.