This was what it meant to be a lord of the necrons. He rejoiced in the feeling of control, the very atoms of existence to be pulled apart and reshaped by his will. Simut paused for the tiniest instant, overcome with the sensation of omnipotence. Once his people had worshipped the star gods, but they had enslaved the deceitful C’tan and stolen that power. Thanks to Szarekh and his dynasty, now it was theirs to command. They had become the gods!

+RELEASE ME NOW. LET THE PURGE OF THE LIVING BEGIN.+

Even through banks of defensive rubrics the demand of Zozar was a flash of heat coursing into Simut’s cortical field. Made suddenly aware of his momentary delusional lapse into megalomania, the lord was overcome with horror. Such was the route to the mind-death that stalked many of the greatest of the necrons. It was potentially the last abandonment of the search for the flesh-gift they all sought to regain. Embarrassed, though no others had witnessed his moment of weakness for he’d disengaged from direct contact with Phetos, Simut activated the translocational array.

Zozar and his legion became a cloud of particulate matter and information. Carrier waves that ran along the fault lines between dimensions flashed down to the surface of the world to reassemble their datastreams into cogent artefacts, the translocation near-instantaneous.

Nearly instant, but not quite. As beings that now regularly part-existed in the quantum world, even the tiniest fraction of time could be spun out to feel like an eternity. Simut despised translocation and chose to descend physically to his conquered worlds rather than suffer the ignominy – and risk – of atomic dispersal and rebonding. He did not fully understand the process and could never shake the suspicion that the entity that was created at the other end of the carrier wave would not really be him. How could everything that made him Simut, Stormhawk Commander of the Winter Stars, Grand Ruler of Anthothekis and Akapris, survive the translocational journey?

‘Translocation is complete, Eagle of the Void, Master of the Unending Stars,’ intoned Phetos. He approached the screenwall, head tilting to one side. ‘The slaughter has begun.’

There was a slight undercurrent of protest in the words and cortical demeanour of the royal warden. Though his personality protocols ensured he was absolutely loyal to Szarekh, and through that loyalty connected to Simut, there were sub-protocols that gave him leave to critique and advise where needed. Simut had suppressed those reasoning loops as much as he could but it was impossible to eradicate them entirely. Why anyone would want a minion second-guessing their commands was a mystery to him, but apparently some of his fellow nobles did not have his infallible intellect to rely upon.

‘There is a problem, Phetos?’