Chapter 1: The Fall of an Aeldari
Blood. The scent of it hung thick in the air, a metallic tang clinging to her tongue as she leapt across the battlefield. The wails of dying kin echoed through the ruined cityscape, their voices drowned beneath the deafening roar of bolter fire and chainswords. The Blood Angels had descended upon them like an unrelenting storm, their ceramite-clad forms wading through the carnage, lost to the Black Rage.
She was a Worldcrafter Aeldari, a shaper of her people's future. Unlike the Aspect Warriors, who honed themselves for war, or the Warlocks, who wielded their psychic might, her path had been one of creation. Her hands had sculpted the great domes of her Craftworld, woven the wraithbone structures that housed generations. She was an architect of life, not a reaper of it.
Yet here she was, wielding a power sword that felt alien in her grip, forced into battle as their world burned.
She danced between the Blood Angels, her every movement a blend of precision and instinct. The grace of her lineage guided her, her power sword severing limbs, carving through their armor like an artist etching a final masterpiece. Yet, even as she fought, she knew it was futile. They were Aeldari—few, scattered, and dying. Against the wrath of the Emperor's angels, they could only delay the inevitable.
A bolter round caught her side, pain exploding through her body as she tumbled. She landed hard, gasping as her vision blurred. The world tilted, and in that moment of weakness, she saw him—one of the Blood Angels, his eyes wild with madness, his mouth twisted in a snarl. He was already moving, his chainsword raised high.
She reached for her blade, but she was too slow.
Then the world dissolved into the Warp.
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She awoke to agony.
Her body was different. Heavy. Clumsy. The overwhelming stench of decay filled her lungs, making her gag. She struggled to rise, limbs alien and uncooperative. Her vision swam, revealing a landscape of rotting flesh and twisted ruin. The Warp pulsed around her, a sickening heartbeat of insanity and hunger.
And then, she felt it.
A presence.
"Ah, little one," a voice rumbled, thick with amusement. "So fragile. So lost."
She turned her gaze upward and beheld him—a bloated, festering mass of putrescence, a deity of rot and renewal. Nurgle.
But he was not alone.
At his side, bound in vines of decay and held within a twisted garden, was Isha.
Her eyes, filled with sorrow, locked onto the Aeldari-turned-something. A silent plea lingered in her gaze, a desperation that defied her captivity. She had begged, pleaded with her captor, weeping for one of her lost children.
And Nurgle, in his twisted benevolence, had answered.
Revulsion clawed at her, bile rising in her throat. Her hands clenched—no, his hands. They were wrong. Thicker. Stronger. Human.
The realization hit like a thunderbolt. She looked down, horror seizing her as she beheld the coarse skin, the brutish musculature. Gone was her Aeldari grace. Gone was her soul's familiar form. She was not herself.
She was human.
The weight of it crushed her. Rage flared, a visceral hatred for the thing she had become. Humanity—barbaric, ignorant, doomed. To be bound to this form, this limitation—it was worse than death. She would have rather been unmade than become this.
Nurgle chuckled, the sound warm and cruel. "Ah, child. You burn with such hatred. But tell me—does it feel different?"
She wanted to scream. To tear at her own skin. Yet, as her fingers twitched, as her body reacted—not with the sharp, honed instincts of an Aeldari but with the raw, brutal power of a human—a terrible truth began to settle in her mind.
It was not just hatred. It was human hatred. A visceral, irrational loathing, untempered by the clarity of the Aeldari mind. It gnawed at her, twisting her very essence.
And in that moment, she realized the trap she was in.
She was no longer an Aeldari with human flesh.
She was becoming human.
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