=== Obi-Wan - After his battle with the Chaos Sorcerer Ten Years Ago ===
At first, there was only darkness.
Then came the screaming.
Obi-Wan's eyes snapped open, but he saw nothing recognizable, no ceiling, no sky, no stars. Only a seething mass of crimson fog and shadow, thick as oil and choking with the weight of countless voices. It wasn't sound in the traditional sense, it clawed into his mind like needles, stabbing through his consciousness in guttural howls and hissing laughter.
He tried to breathe. But there was no air. Only the thick pressure of unreality.
He stood, or thought he did, on ground that rippled like flesh beneath his boots. Jagged spires erupted from the distance, twisted like broken bones. The horizon itself writhed, as if the laws of space and time had been stripped bare and mutilated.
"What… is this place?" he whispered, though his voice echoed wrong, as if another version of him spoke somewhere behind his ear, taunting him with each word.
He remembered the battle. A duel between the Lesser Chaos Sorcerer and himself.
And now, this.
He reached instinctively for the Force, but it wasn't there. His breath hitched, and he felt his knees buckle underneath him.
That's when he saw them.
Lurching from the fog came shapes. They were humanoid at first, but clearly wrong. Their limbs bent at impossible angles, their skin red as blood, and jagged horns on their heads. Their eyes burned with cruel intelligence, and mouths filled with jagged fangs opened in gleeful hunger. Dozens of them.
Obi-Wan ignited his lightsaber, or tried to. His hand moved, but there was no weapon, no familiar hum of blue plasma.
The first daemon lunged, its jagged blade dripping with black ichor. Obi-Wan stumbled backward in horror, barely dodging as the blade hissed through the space where his head had been a heartbeat before.
He fell hard, scrambling across the pulsing, flesh-like ground, his breathing ragged. The creature advanced slowly, savoring his fear, a cruel smile spreading across its malformed face. Its eyes glowed with a sickly yellow light, and its clawed feet cracked the ground with each step.
Obi-Wan's hand brushed against something solid — a large stone, jagged and slick with whatever passed for moisture in this nightmarish realm. With a shout of desperation, he rose to one knee and hurled it with all his strength.
The rock struck the daemon square in the face with a sickening crack. Its skull snapped back, a fountain of blood spraying from its misshapen nose and brow. It staggered, gave a guttural hiss… then collapsed to the ground in a heap of limbs and steaming ichor.
Obi-Wan didn't have time to catch his breath.
More of the things were closing in. Four, no, five of them now, their shapes slithering and shifting with every step, their bodies crawling with chains, hooks, and barbed brass armor. They hissed and muttered in languages not meant for mortal tongues, blades scraping against their twisted forms as they advanced.
He scrambled forward on hands and knees to the corpse of the fallen daemon, his fingers wrapping around the hilt of its weapon. It was heavy, unnaturally so, and looked to be forged of molten brass, glowing faintly with embers that pulsed like a heartbeat.
The weapon sang in his hands. Not in joy, but in hunger.
He rose, unsteady but resolute, his stance instinctively falling into the familiar guard of a warrior. The blade was massive, crudely balanced, but his training kicked in. He adjusted. He focused.
The first of the group charged, a beast with a serpentine tongue that flailed wildly.
Obi-Wan met it head-on.
He sidestepped at the last second, swinging the blade in a brutal arc that severed the creature's arm at the elbow. It shrieked, its blood spraying in steaming arcs. Obi-Wan pivoted, using the momentum to bring the blade back around, cleaving through its midsection with a wet crunch.
The others hissed in fury at the death of their kin, circling him with renewed hatred. Obi-Wan stood his ground, muscles trembling, the brass blade held tightly in his bloodied hands. He tried to slow his breathing, tried to remember his training, but nothing he had learned in the Temple or from his master had prepared him for this.
Then they rushed him all at once.
The first was fast, a wiry creature with limbs like whips and claws that shimmered with venom. Obi-Wan parried its strike, but the daemon's second arm lashed around and raked across his shoulder. The pain flared white-hot. He staggered, then brought the heavy blade down and cleaved the thing from collarbone to hip, spraying his chest with a torrent of burning blood.
The second daemon barreled into him before he could recover. It was heavier than the first, and heavily armored, with a brass hammer. It struck him across the ribs, and he felt something crack inside. His feet left the ground as he flew backward, tumbling hard onto the jagged terrain.
The blade skittered from his grasp.
Dazed, Obi-Wan crawled for it, teeth gritted against the pain. Clawed feet slammed down near his head, a daemon shrieked and dove toward him with a rusted dagger raised high.
Obi-Wan rolled, grabbing a sharp rock as he moved, and plunged it into the daemon's side. The creature howled in agony, giving him just enough time to grab the blade and rise again.
Another daemon leapt onto his back, its weight crushing him down. Its claws scraped for his eyes.
He twisted and slammed his back into a pillar of gnarled bone jutting from the ground, dislodging the creature with a crunch. As it hissed and flailed, Obi-Wan spun around and hacked downward, nearly severing it in two. The blade caught in the bone, and he had to plant a foot on the corpse to wrench it free.
But there was no time to rest.
A hook-tongued daemon struck from the side, its blade slashing open his thigh. He cried out, barely able to remain upright as he swung the blade low and caught its legs, toppling it with a shriek.
Pain flared in every limb.
He could feel warm blood running down his side, his leg, dripping from his fingers. The world was spinning now. His vision doubled. Every breath was agony.
Another came at him, all brass plates and iron chains. It slammed into him with a roar, and they both fell to the ground. The daemon's claws wrapped around his throat, squeezing.
Obi-Wan's hands flailed as he reached for something, for anything. His fingers found the hilt of the blade, and with one desperate cry, he rammed it upward into the daemon's gut. It roared in protest, but he didn't stop. He pushed harder, twisting the blade until the light in its eyes flickered and died.
Panting, trembling, Obi-Wan shoved the corpse aside and lay still.
Silence, finally.
Or was it only a pause?
He could hear them again, in the distance, howling and slithering in the dark, hungry for his soul. The brass blade pulsed in his hand, a dim heartbeat in the void.
Obi-Wan rose slowly, each movement a fresh wave of torment. Blood stained the brass blade and soaked his robes, but he refused to fall. Not here. Not in this place of madness.
=== One Week Later ===
Absolute hell.
That's what this had to be. A twisted mockery of existence, stitched together by madness and cruelty. And somehow… it was real.
Obi-Wan sat at the mouth of a jagged cave, his back pressed to the cold, razor-edged stone. The brass daemon-blade lay across his lap, now stained permanently by the ichor of monsters. His robes were rags, torn and stiff with blood, some his, some not.
A week, or at least what he thought was a week. Time didn't flow naturally here. It bent, twisted, and snapped under invisible pressure. The sky above him was never the same twice. Sometimes it blazed with a thousand dying stars. Other times it screamed with colorless lightning or rained molten bone. But through it all, the daemons hunted.
They always hunted.
He hadn't had a full night's rest since arriving. The cave, half-collapsed and filled with stinking mist, offered the barest reprieve from the onslaught. He'd tried to meditate, to reach the Force… but it was gone. Or no, not gone… but silent. Muted beneath layers of something darker, heavier. This place wasn't the absence of the Force. It was the rejection of it.
He gritted his teeth as he wrapped a crude cloth bandage around his shoulder, where a daemon's claw had torn into him the night before. The wound throbbed like fire, angry and red. But it hadn't festered… yet. He considered that a minor miracle.
Every day was the same. Wake up — if he even slept — scout the area for anything useful, kill anything that got too close, and return to the cave before the real monsters came out. And they did come. He had seen them.
Once, he watched a being the size of a gunship glide across the sky on black wings, its body stitched together from corpses. Its laughter had echoed through the landscape for hours. Another time, he had visions of a massive throne in the distance, and at its base, mountains of skulls that seemed to breathe.
He had no idea where he was.
No idea how he had survived this long.
'Who did I upset to deserve this?' he thought, not for the first time.
And then, something caught his attention. Movement in the distance.
He tensed, hand going to the blade.
Three figures, bounding through the crimson haze… daemons. Smaller ones this time, doglike with long limbs and snapping jaws.
They'd found his scent again.
Obi-Wan stood slowly, grimacing as his wounds protested. His knuckles whitened on the blade hilt. He stepped from the mouth of the cave, breath shallow, eyes locked forward.
The creatures shrieked and charged.
He didn't wait. He met them halfway.
The first leapt, and he ducked low bringing the blade in a tight upward arc, cleaving through its belly and flinging it aside in a gush of steaming gore.
The second circled, smarter than the first. It snapped at his legs, forcing him to pivot. The third came in from behind, its claws raking across his back. Obi-Wan shouted in pain but whirled around, slicing wide, and caught it across the face. Its howl turned to gurgling silence.
The second pounced, but this time he caught it with both hands on the blade, driving it into the daemon's chest and pinning it to the ground. Its body convulsed and went still.
He pulled the blade free, panting.
Another day, another fight. He staggered back toward the cave, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
Tomorrow would be worse.
He could feel it.
And somewhere in this nightmare… something was watching him.
Something bigger.
And it was getting closer.
=== Unknown ===
The Warp burned.
It burned like a furnace of rage and madness. But he did not feel it. Not anymore.
He walked through a world of screaming skies and bleeding horizons, where nothing made sense except violence. Around him, daemons shrieked and swarmed, some charging mindlessly, others slinking in the shadows like predators uncertain of their prey.
It did not matter.
He killed them all.
His massive warhammer, Urdrakule, swung with the weight of gods behind it. Bone shattered. Ichor splashed. Creatures screamed and died.
And yet, he did not roar in triumph. He did not cry out in rage. He was silent.
The giant trudged across the broken terrain like a thunderstorm made flesh, a walking cataclysm of burnt ceramite and warsteel, his armor scorched and seared from centuries adrift in the immaterium. Cracks ran through his mastercraft armor, glowing with faint embers, and a heavy cloak of scorched scales dragged behind him like a comet's tail.
He was not a daemon. Nor was he mortal.
He was something else.
Something broken.
And yet, even in madness, something stirred in him. Something ancient, buried deep. A flicker of curiosity.
Because ahead… he sensed something strange. Not a daemon. Not a soul claimed by Chaos, but a man.
A human. Still alive. Still fighting.
What madness was this?
He approached with slow, ponderous steps, the weight of his form cracking the stones beneath him. A small cave sat nestled between two jagged hills, the mouth barely large enough for him to squeeze through. And inside, he saw him.
A man, bloodied, half-starved, clutching a daemon blade like a dying warrior was hunched over a crude fire of Warp-wood.
'How has this one survived?' the giant wondered, looming at the cave's edge.
The man didn't react at first — until the giant exhaled, a heavy, volcanic breath that made the fire flicker.
Then the human turned.
His eyes widened at the towering silhouette now standing at the entrance, smoke trailing from cracked pauldrons, the red glow of furnace-like eyes burning through the haze.
The man didn't speak. He merely gripped his blade tighter, ready to fight, though every inch of his body protested.
The giant stared at him.
Then, slowly, he ducked into the cave with a grunt, moving with a grace that belied his size. He sat down opposite the Jedi, setting his massive warhammer beside him with a heavy clang.
Silence fell.
The fire popped.
The daemons howled in the distance, but none dared approach.
The mans chest rose and fell with heavy breaths. "You're… not one of them," he managed to say after a long pause.
The giant didn't answer.
He simply reached into a pouch at his side and pulled out a chunk of blackened, daemon-scorched meat — and tossed it into the fire.
For a moment, they simply sat there — two survivors in a hell not meant for men.
And though Obi-Wan didn't know it yet, his salvation had arrived in the form of a being far older and mightier than he could imagine.
For Vulkan, Primarch of the Salamanders, had found him.
===
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