#explaining the plot continues!

“Guarded by what, exactly?” Bilaraat asked, curious. Surya turned his steely gaze to him, eyes flickering with light.

“Everything,” Surya said flatly. “The beings of the Warp no more want to be destroyed than we do, but the Necrontyr are no longer a threat to them. We are. We’re beings of flesh and blood, beings being infected by psychic power.”

“Aren’t… aren’t you psychic?” Marissa asked. “You don’t consider that to be hypocritical?”

“I’m more than prepared to give up my psychic power if I can destroy the Warp,” Surya said flatly. “Which isn’t true of most other psychics. They treat it like a gift instead of cracks in a reality that will crumble if the beings in the Warp gain true power. Right now, they’re firing their opening shot.”

“The storms?” Susanne said, glancing at Malcador. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” the robed man said. “The storm in question is, as Surya said, being born out of the folly of the Eldar. In the years since their victory, they have grown idle and decadent, and then, dangerously vulnerable to corruption.”

“Corruption from the Warp?” Harra asked. “How?”

Surya and Malcador exchanged long, measured looks. “We have a... disagreement as to exactly how they became corrupted and this event has been precipitated. I believe that, owing to the raw power of the entity that is being created by these storms. From my observations and research, the first devotees of this being existed before the storms began, and are the reason why their object of devotion exists in the first place. The Warp bends and changes all things, including the natural flow of time.”

“Whereas I believe in cause and effect, even within a realm as strange as the Empyrean, and I think that the Eldar are entirely responsible for their own downfall, because they’re all idiots,” Surya said. “Despite being immortal and incredibly powerful. It doesn’t really matter because the end result is the same, that tonight, She Who Thirsts be birthed into creation.”

“Which is why we’re hiding down here instead of being anywhere else,” Marissa observed, shivering. “Does this thing have a name?”

“It will, but we won’t speak it, not tonight,” Surya said. “Once She is born, there will be a wound on reality, a place where the Warp infects reality, allowing people to actually live there, though they’ll become infected too. No one can avoid being damaged somehow by it. That’s what the Warp does, it contaminates reality without truly wanting to kill it.”

“Then, why do it at all?” Hector asked, looking for all the world fascinated by it all.