D'Spayr was on his own, alone inside the Duskhelm Priory.
The Territorial Expanse SpecOps troopers had gone their own way after an attacking wave of over a dozen snarling Xsieh'Potheth had nearly overrun the damaged dune-crawler. They'd fought their way past the savage hoard with much more difficulty than they had expected. The Wenkrang had turned out to be a lot more durable than they'd expected, each wildling warrior able to withstand multiple strikes from the trio's particle and plasma beam-weaponry before succumbing to their wounds.
The appearance of the mountainous spherical alien ship had helped distract the swarming pack of bloodthirsty Wenkrang long enough for the armored trio to escape the vehicle and split up, venturing deeper into the necropolis along different paths.
D'Spayr had followed a trail down a half-enclosed passageway that had wound past a large statue of a pantherish feline battling an eagle-like avian raptor. He encountered very little resistance to his presence as he ran. It was obvious the soldiers of the Ashen Brood were single-mindedly occupied with the defense of the Priory from the brutal assault of the Wenkrang. The few Brood militiamen who did notice the Knight, instinctively avoided engaging him in direct conflict. They weren't in any hurry to split off from the relative safety of their troop-brethren to enter into battle with an unknown armored interloper as a monstrous giant alien rampaged within their ground's perimeter. D'Spayr kept running. The path had ended at a hexagonal concourse under a shattered stained glass rotunda. From that open lobby, a trio of passages tunneled on a downward slope deeper under the surface of the necropolis.
He executed a running leap over a jagged crevice opening in the subterranean floor, where a large bundle of electrical wiring had come free from its ceiling moorings and pored a hissing and spitting pool of white-hot sparks across the rocky floor and down into the chasm, and lunged around a darkened corner into a huge open chamber.
D'Spayr slowed to a stop, awed and bewildered at the advanced panorama of advanced machinery that cluttered the chamber.
The young Knight also saw a giant man wrapped in flexible, fabricated metal bands, an over-large human figure almost mummified with the encroachment of advanced age and the dust of years, crucified upon an X-shaped cross of metal girders.
And he saw a hooded man in robes whirl about and repeatedly fire some deadly variety of weapon at the mummified, cyclopean figure.
Black lightning, shiny and solid as a writhing whip made from crude oil, lashed out in an explosion from the wounded titan's convulsing form.
A bolt of blazing flame-colored brilliance streaked down from the chamber's ceiling bulkhead and struck the robed man, momentarily paralyzing him. The strike generated enough impact to lift him from off his feet and propel him against a floor-mounted, multi-shelved server rack with hurricane force. Several of the computer servers emitted a high-pitched grinding squeal from the abrupt collision and the rack's girders pealed like a bell.
The robed man fell, his clothing smoking and smoldering. He did not move again.
That was when D'Spayr noted the startling presence of a being he did not imagine he would ever again encounter in his life. His breath caught involuntarily in his suddenly constricted throat. His hands clenched and unclenched as an instinctual primal fury began to rise. Standing across the chamber, partially obscured by dim light and the bulky casing of a looming bank of interconnected computer cases, next to a translucent pylon containing a collection of metallic rods, was a being he could never forget. Floating, otherworldly grace and eerie ghostliness. The sculpted face of a soulless doll. The empty eyes of a predatory sadist.
Atu'ihma.
D'Spayr's memory played back words that re-opened old scars within his mind. It was like the replaying of a movie made from his past life, a searing recollection of old evils, that had been filmed on running lava: "Now is the moment of your baptismal, blood and horror, flesh and lightning. This is not personal. This is simply how things must be. It is the Order of Things."
As the crucified giant's wounds erupted into a cascading spray of inky liquid and crackling bolts of ebony energy, Atu'ihma floated ghost-like out from hiding and across the grated metal floor, coming into full view under the glare of the aerial lights illuminating the subterranean computer nerve center. The grace and beauty of the Celestial Empyrean's ethereal movements was undeniable, but equally irrefutable was the overwhelming and primal feeling of repugnance its presence engendered.
The Rimworld alien, this synthetic humanoid, was a wretched, soulless, and repellant being.
The sound of a man screaming in pain and in frightened dismay caused the Knight to look up at an opening in the ceiling above the chamber. There he saw a cloak-adorned , armored warrior, a solemn and sinister figure, standing with his powerful legs wide in an emotionally charged posture of fury. That the screaming man physically resembled the crucified giant was a detail not lost on D'Spayr. A drama of betrayal and vengeance was playing out amid the jungle of electronic hardware surrounding them.
"Forynnuhr! How does it feel?" Atu'ihma said, shouting to be heard above the din of the computerized machinery and the echoing sounds of battle from beyond the chamber's walls. "How does it feel to have control, to have dominance, to have victory, ripped from within your grasp? I promised you that I would be there when your schemes came to fruition, that I would see an end to your ambitions. And here I am, Forynnuhr, here I am, here to witness your end."
D'Spayr regarded the synthetic hybrid-man's triumph with contempt and cool disdain. The gloating Celestial Empyrean had not yet noticed the brooding Knight's presence.
D'Spayr, now standing beside a towering rack of machinery, drew his dual-bladed shatter-sword. He paused a contemplative moment before slowly tapping the ridge of its blades against the rack once, twice, three times. The sound resounded flatly, like hammer strikes on wet stone.
Atu'ihma turned, startled, his normally bland and expressionless doll's face wrinkled into a frown as he regarded the armored figure standing before him.
"Hello. It has been quite some time since we've been together. And I can't tell you how much I've missed our little talks," the Knight said.
Atu'ihma's confusion deepened.
" 'Now is the moment of your baptismal, blood and horror, flesh and lightning' ," D'Spayr quoted, his gritty baritone stripped of emotion. "Don't you remember?"
Atu'ihma blinked slowly a half-dozen times and then his eyes widened as recollection began to dawn.
"The soldier. But you were little more than a child then. This cannot be," Atu'ihma said. "This is not possible. You died. You are human and you died. Humans cannot come back from the dead."
"I died," D'Spayr agreed. "But this is the Withered Land. Nothing is as it seems. Things, the old rules, don't always work the way they used to work. I died. But apparently Death suits me."
"But you died," the Celestial Empyrean repeated, emphasizing that last word in a sibilant hiss.
"Yes, but I didn't stay dead. I couldn't. We weren't yet done with one another."
The Knight waited for a reaction. None came. Atu'ihma simply stared. He did not speak.
"I wonder how Death will suit you," D'Spayr said, briefly stopping before he at last quoted, "This is not personal. This is simply how things must be. It is the Order of Things."
Atru'ihma sighed, allowing himself to show his anger past his normal show of repressive emotional control, and he reached behind his back, under his flowing cloak, and retrieved a coiled length of flexible tubing. It was his favored weapon of choice, a throwback to his tenure as an Inquisitor at the prison containment camp during the Mutagenesis Campaigns. It was a neural lash. The Empyrean wrapped his fist around the handle containing the power pack and control box, unfolding the full length of the lash's segmented metal cable.
The whip began to writhe and crackle with searing, agony-inducing electrical energy.
They then charged at one another, superhuman reflexes and musculature attaining a dynamic peak, with fury in their eyes and murder in their hearts.
* * *