Silence. Absolute stillness.
Within the dark curtain of the highest heavens, a burning black hole shrouded the entire Sea of Souls, casting the fractured brilliance of collapse upon the land below.
Amid the collision and merging of consciousnesses, Selene—bearing the form of the Chaos God Finality—radiated immeasurable light. Her divine brilliance illuminated the infinite domains of the Warp, sending out waves of silent pressure that spread across existence itself.
A whisper—simultaneously gentle and violent—reverberated through the Warp. Like a stone cast into the still depths of the Well of Eternity, it sent ripples cascading outward.
Though the whisper's target was not the lesser beings of the Warp, most of them never had time to react. They were caught in the echo, annihilated in an instant—erased utterly from existence.
All fell silent.
Selene's expression remained unchanged as she watched.
While fending off the furious onslaught of the Blood God—each blow tearing apart uncounted worlds that depended on the Warp for life—Selene observed the form of her divine avatar, this vessel of Finality.
The aura of Finality was divided into three parts by an unknown force.
The first—crimson as dried blood—radiated chaotic attraction and repulsion, pain, contradiction, the unspeakable and unnameable. The drifting starlight within it shimmered quietly, yet felt like a swarm of starving predators—hungry, bloodthirsty, craving destruction.
In short, its sanity coefficient was catastrophically abnormal.
The sight, the sensation, the aura, the chaos, the radiance—all of it formed a symphony of madness that made the soul tremble and reason crumble.
Though Selene herself was a foreign interloper—an outsider who had "joined the cast with capital"—the divine vessel she now occupied was undeniably a being born of this hyperdimensional world.
In a universe ruled by war, terror, and insanity, it was easy to imagine what kind of collective unconscious would give birth to such a god within the Warp.
Selene now bore within her the unclaimed fragments of emotion reflected upon the Sea of Souls—the countless disordered extremes left ungoverned by the Four Gods.
These included, but were not limited to: the longing for eternity, the thirst for order, the pursuit of authority, the yearning for civilization, and the desperate desire to ascend—to rise above all limits.
Undoubtedly, this was the divine seat originally meant for the Emperor of Mankind—to which he would have ascended after the death of the last human.
And yet... Selene had taken it instead.
Of course, there were also her partial encroachments upon the Four Gods—the overlapping domains and symbolic conquests of their essence within the Sea of Souls.
Take, for example, Nurgle, the Plague God—lord of despair, stagnation, death, decay, and entropy. In truth, he and Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, shared dominion over this domain—entropy being the thing both loathed and questioned.
With Finality's birth and awakening, a portion of Nurgle's authority—despair and the concept of endings—had naturally been siphoned away.
There was an order to these events, of course.
Otherwise, the Prince of Pleasure, Slaanesh, would have been the strongest of all Chaos Gods.
After all, the "concepts" Slaanesh embodies—pleasure, indulgence, joy, love—are vast beyond measure. Strictly speaking, even the exhilaration of a warrior triumphant in battle or a scholar discovering new knowledge would fall within Slaanesh's domain.
But do you think the Blood God would share such spoils so easily? Hardly.
Through sheer dominance, Khorne claimed all acts of killing and warfare—and all the emotions born from them. Even Tzeentch was not spared from this usurpation.
The Lady of Thirst could only draw sustenance from the more one-sided aspects of desire and ecstasy. Her potential was boundless—but to realize it, far more difficult.
Glug, glug—
From the edges of the divine halo, the rotting green ichor of the Plague God, the false blue flame of the Changer, the sulfurous blood of the Blood God, and the liquid lust of the Prince of Pleasure all seeped inward, mingling and merging upon the violet-red curtain of the heavens.
They slowly fused—permeating, blending, infecting—altering Finality herself.
This was the essence of the Chaos God Finality—a state of perfect interpenetration.
You in me, and I in you.
As for the second part... Selene didn't need to look. That was her "investment"—the power she brought when she joined this divine ensemble.
And the last—the faintest of all.
A flash of understanding crossed Selene's eyes.
She remembered that moment—
At that moment—after devouring the spark—outside the hyperdimensional barrier of the world Selene called the Warhammer Universe, her true self, carefully crouched beyond that cosmic wall, noticed something startling.
The world's rejection of her true form... was weakening.
No—weakening wasn't quite right.
Rather, within the Warp, an imaginary Honkai egg was beginning to gestate.
Born of the same origin as Selene, it no longer needed to reject her.
"Because of the spark...?"
The embryonic spark that maintained the balance between realspace and the Warp—stolen prematurely by that old Emperor before its birth—was inherently incomplete, lacking full conceptual development.
In a sense, the Gene Primarchs were merely a crude, shallow application of it. Perhaps the Emperor once had a far grander vision—but after the Great Heresy, all such plans were shelved, forgotten.
The Chaos Gods, when they corrupted the Primarchs, did so to turn them into anchors—conduits through which they could influence realspace. It was a game of possession, if not outright spite: if I cannot have it, then I will ruin it.
Selene, however, was different.
She was not a pure Chaos God. Her nature—born from both physical law and supernatural essence, from the collapse of matter and spirit—provided the lost spark a path forward.
Even fragmented—divided into twenty-one parts—the spark instinctively imitated what it encountered.
And since Selene had devoured it herself, the spark was now being assimilated by Honkai particles, incubating within the body of her Chaos God form, Finality.
This meant that Finality was evolving—becoming a cosmic avatar embodying both Star God and Chaos God traits. And for Selene's outer-dimensional true self, it meant the ability to more directly—and more powerfully—interfere with the operation and structure of the Warp.
The Warp now possessed the prerequisite conditions to transform into a Honkai Dimension.
It should be noted that though the Plague God was currently dormant—his conceptual essence and domain heavily disrupted by Selene's aggressive incursion and symbolic theft—the fundamental ideas that defined Nurgle could not be erased.
Poison, plague, disease—these were foundational concepts of existence. Unless the Sea of Souls itself evaporated and the infinite dimensions of the multiverse collapsed together, they could not be destroyed.
Alternatively, Selene could choose to inherit those concepts—becoming the new Nurgle—and thus annihilate the old one.
But in doing so, she would have to accept the consequences: rot, pus, stench, and every conceivable disease manifesting upon her body.
The gestation of the spark's imaginary egg offered a better path.
It meant she could redefine Nurgle's concept—not as decay, but as a manifestation of Honkai cataclysm, a purified embodiment of collapse.
And that sounded far preferable to turning herself into... that thing.
It wasn't a matter of life or death—no need to humiliate herself like that.
"Not enough..."
Her voice grew heated. The primary consciousness took control as the secondary withdrew. Reaching out, she touched the luminous filaments connecting the Warp and realspace—their interwoven threads of light—and smiled with renewed brilliance.
Her gaze met the Chaos Gods, who had now fully understood.
"If I am to interfere with the material universe as a Chaos God incarnate, how could one twenty-first fragment be enough?"
"Come!"
Buzz-buzz-buzz!
Crack-crack-crack—!
Under a tide of energy so immense it shattered dimensions and crushed entire galaxies, the reverberations grew wilder—until they erupted into a tsunami powerful enough to pierce the veil of reality itself.
...
Plague Planet.
When the lightning struck, space and time themselves quivered.
"Do you hear it? Our Sovereign calls to you—Mortarion of Barbarus, leaf upon the far shore of the Endless Sea."
Hearing the echo that pierced the barrier between realspace and the Warp, Selene's Fourteenth Legion commander understood.
He grasped his great scythe, stepped across the bloated corpse of a slain Great Unclean One, and drove the blade—now gleaming with a violet-red aura—into the chest of the fallen Daemon Primarch.
Szzzz!
With the Plague Prince's muffled, agonized scream, a spray of intertwined red and yellow-green fluids burst from the swollen, mutated chest of the Plague Daemon Primarch. His massive, desiccated insectoid wings twitched weakly—like a dying scavenger left to dry beneath a merciless sun.
Hissss...
His bloated body split and cracked open, his bones felt submerged in ice, and his organs burned as though aflame. The purple-red marks of corruption crawled across his flesh, pulsing and spreading, swelling with every heartbeat.
The Daemon Primarch screamed voicelessly, clawing at his own body in desperate futility, searching for a fragment of himself untouched by the pain.
But he could not. His unseen twin held him fast.
Mortarion could feel his body unraveling at an impossible pace. Bathed in searing radiance and fury—light that burned through bone, light that scorched the soul—his thoughts fractured, plummeting into endless darkness. His clouded eyes stared at the mirror image before him, uncomprehending and unwilling.
Vaguely, his consciousness split—into two selves.
One, the Daemon Prince who had thrown himself into Nurgle's festering embrace.
The other, the son of the Emperor—the Lord of Barbarus, the warrior who once fought for Mankind's unity.
At that moment, every oath sworn to the Great Unclean One, every promise of a galactic plague, every declaration of devotion to the so-called Kind Father—all the hatred for the Imperium, the resentment toward his father, the confusion before his mirror image—converged into a single question:
"Why?"
In his final moment, he whispered the word softly.
"Why? Pathetic, wretched Mortarion. You followed the wrong master. I will never be you."
And just before his consciousness sank forever into darkness, Mortarion thought he saw them—bright emerald eyes meeting his decayed, lifeless ones.
"You are the curse the heretic gods have cast upon me... the dark mirror's mockery of my fate... and my eternal reminder."
A reminder?
If I had not been misled by Typhon... if my resolve had not faltered... would I have become this?
Mortarion wondered.
No answer came.
Bound by a force beyond comprehension, an invisible hand dragged him into the dark curtain.
"Not enough. I still need more... continue."
The sound of chewing—wet, ghastly, resonated in the void.
...
Harmony.
Red sands. Scorching winds. The dying sun bled across the horizon.
Blood burned in midair. Waves of heat surged skyward.
The intoxicating scent of narcotic incense had long been overpowered by the stench of fire and gore. Jewel-studded flesh lay torn and flayed, slender demonic claws severed, and once-radiant skin charred black.
The walls of the adamantine monastery melted like wax, the molten flow searing across the scorched ground.
Fulgrim—the serpentine Emperor's son—lay amid the ruinous sands. His brilliant scales shattered, like a child's broken toy. The twisted state of his arms, spine, and neck hinted at unspeakable torment.
"Your end has come."
No grand ritual. No sentiment. No reflection upon the dark mirror of the self.
The Devourer Legion's commander of the Sacred Selene Empire simply raised his power axe.
"Snake bastard. You and your degenerate spawn will share one fate—annihilation. Hah. If General Leiva ever saw what the Third Legion's counterpart had become... I'd pay to see his face."
"With that—farewell."
Crimson light burst forth. Scarlet flame coalesced as Angron, power incarnate, brought down his axe with a blow that could split planets.
BOOOOOOM—!!
Like an Exterminatus storm torpedo, the strike's shockwave tore through the atmosphere, vaporizing the burning haze across thousands of kilometers. From orbit, the Devourer Fleet beheld the cataclysm—the northern hemisphere of Harmony fracturing apart.
The planet's crust shattered like brittle glass. Within seconds, violet-red energy engulfed the core, blazing brighter than a sun. The Honkai eruption consumed everything, burning at absolute intensity.
The whispers of Chaos rose once more—low, hollow, echoing like the cry of a nocturnal beast—spreading until it cloaked the entire world.
"Continue... not enough! Still not enough!"
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