She focused on that gash across his face, and her Clawed fingers came down over his ruined left cybereye. “We don’t have the time or power to spare for regeneration right now, so you’re going to have to make do.”

He sort of grunted as a sharper-than-razors finger came down, interrupted some nerves, and began to grip and grab. He winced, but didn’t stop her as she cluched the neural interfaces and optical circuits in her Vajra, severed them cleanly, and pulled the ruined cyberware out of his eye socket.

There was a jerk, and suddenly her field of vision seemed to be cut in half. -What.- he protested, wondering what she was doing, seeing her hand coming down towards his eye.

“Two points of Essence in your left eye,” she instructed him calmly, voice betraying nothing. He obeyed calmly, and her Vajra came smoothly into the gaping socket, reached back into his skull to his brain, made a connection, and Stillness hummed, fixing flesh and bone, drawing them back together... and his Essence poured into a new conduit there, and expanded in to fill it as the psychic healing did its thing. The muscles and skin of his eyelid came together, he could see the flesh drawing closed with incredible speed as she took her hand away.

There was a light, blinking suddenly into abrupt focus, and he could see her lovely calm face looking down at him with one glowing dark eye, the other eye socket yawning open and empty.

Emperor, she looks beautiful. That Nog Armor of hers was accentuated by the electrum of her Aura, it seemed to set off the highlights of her dark hair, and even the blue-black of her Brand looked more elegant, refined, the broken pattern exuding some ancient and primal power as he stared despite himself.

“Stay calm. I’ll regenerate. Grafting.” She reached up to her remaining eye with her free hand fearlessly. “Split the Essence between your eyes.”

Egil swallowed as her claws drove in, clenched, and pulled, and his view from her angle, looking down at the dark eye matching the one looking up at her, vanished for a moment.

It came down into his eye, the optic nerve snaked forwards, grafted onto his brain as Stillness did its work, and flesh and bone gathered around the eyeball, holding it firmly as his Essence flowed into it.

He looked up at her with two eyes as she closed the gash on his face, and heard the crumping as the weight on his leg was lifted away, although the nerves were crushed and he couldn’t feel anything there at the moment.

They glowed, all of them. Shades of gold, tinges of silver. There was a grim purpose to them that didn’t obviate the warmth of their auras, or the reason why they were doing it. The three huge young men were roiling like molten metal, throwing off a spiritual pressure at once weightless and powerful that seemed to be weighing down on everything and blowing it along at the same time. The women... were like metal, completely ignoring that weight, unmoved and uncaring of it.

Despite himself, he fed her what he was seeing, seeing flesh already twitching under her eyelids as her eyeballs began to regrow. “Is this how you see the world,” he asked softly, amazed at the detail and sharpness of this sight. It felt like he should be able to see so much more; the colors were intense and vivid, and he wasn’t sure he could actually process them all.

She was moving Stillness over to his leg, his Vajra telling him the meat was pulp and the bone all crushed shards. Healing it would shatter her leg as she did it... and she would simply put it back together automatically. Healing matrices were convenient that way.

She looked back at him and smiled. “Of course not. You look much more beautiful than we do,” she replied, as her free hand caressed his face.

Egil felt something give way inside him. It was a door inside his soul, a restraint upon his thoughts and beliefs, of holding himself back from something great and terrible.

A Rantha... found him beautiful...

He stepped through that door, into Scout/7.

He took another step, and his Human Racial Level Three drew up on him, and he felt his hard, unresponsive soul shudder and grow with ancient drives and beliefs that had driven him all his life, only he hadn’t known why.

They were at the heart of who and all he was.

A sigh seemed to ripple across everyone and anyone, gentle and subtle, touching the akasha and leaving those nearby who didn’t know what was going on confused.

There was an emptiness inside him. It seemed to draw in the light and the presence given off by the Sources that were the Briggs, and even traces dissipating off the steely, obdurate shells of the Nulls. It came into him, was filtered, purified, and came back out.

Rings, ghostly silver and white, began to rise from him, joining together into a living whorl of non-spectral light, something that wasn’t psionic or spirit, but transcended either.

“Oh, no shit!” one of the other Ranthas blurted out, seeing that, and turned her eyes on Serena. “Aren’t you the lucky one!”

The Briggs’, on the other hand, looked instantly respectful. “Oh, wow,” exclaimed the biggest and oldest-looking of them, and reached up to salute down at Egil Rosenblaum. “Clear silver. The Mind and the Ring...”

Egil just looked at them. “I have no idea what that means.” He eyed the whorls caressing the air, and especially Serena. The unique taste of her Aura was better than a genetic test at identifying her, as were those of each of the others.

“Nulls are the foundation of the Forsaken, the most common and the core of the strength of normal folk. Sources are the Kings and Queens among the Forsaken, those who lead us. The third and rarest of the Forsaken are the Brothers of the Void, the Servants of the Land, who guide the others to do what must be done.”

An ocean of pride swept into him, through him at Serena’s words, and he dropped his eyes to Lepido, who was staring at the whorls of his Helix with great interest and a little trepidation. The fluttercat was as unique as anyone else to the touch of his Helix, he could sense the leaping of her thoughts and drives clearly and smoothly, soothing away the edges of raw emotions she was sensitive to without effort.

Serena’s leg split open, he heard bone crack and split, and saw it coming back together almost as fast as the abuse was inflicted upon it. At the same time, his own leg began to really, really hurt.

She really couldn’t expend psionic energy. Her psi was so hard and rigid it was impossible. He could feel traces in the air of active psionic efforts... and the pulsing interference of pstatic that was making telepathic efforts almost impossible. He could feel the single Mark upon his waist, and the singularly unique energy that empowered it, as well as the differences in all the energies that combined to form the complex Mark IV Diamond Vajras of the Hagbloods about him.

They were all brimming with magic inside, pure sorcerous power that the Warp would love to get their hands on, locked away and restrained by their Forsaken natures... and he knew that he could do the same thing, now.

He sighed, and clicked over the Wild Talent Feat.

He had pseen Serena do it so many times, what he had to do was now open and totally possible. He shifted his attention, held out his hand, clenched his fingers, and twisted.

The bluesilver steel glow, hard and visible as any Claw he’d ever seen, albeit missing all the lights of an advanced mindclaw, snapped into existence on his hand. There seemed to be sorts of silvery shadows trailing around it...

As promised, Forsaken psionics was now open to him, too...

“Brother Mindring,” the big Briggs asked calmly, “which way do we go?”

Egil looked at him, and his Helix tasted the air as his leg was remade, his flattened foot was reformed and made real, complete with lots of painful protest.

Despite the waves of pstatic, he could feel and hear. The thoughts, the pslavery, the spirits howling for revenge or in madness... and the dark, inhuman presences among them.

Serena’s first eye was already back, gleaming and lighting up with Essence, glowing with joy he could feel in his bones as she looked at him.

“Let me show you where to find them.” He held up his hand, and Serena pulled him to his restored foot effortlessly. He’d need a new shoe eventually, but there was no time to head back up to his apartment and get one. That was what lightfoot was for. “And when we’re done here, we’re going Down,” he stated, as his Helix spun and he felt the churning presence of the things far down below them, in Underspire.

The air around him hummed with a deadly resolve on many levels he hadn’t been able to sense before. He pulled out his Pistols, feeling the nascent spirits of the Weapons stirring in his hands, fed on Karma and nexals, ready to come to life and serve.

Serve exactly who and what, he wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the Emperor, anymore. Which was okay, because he still had the same work to do, the job never went away...

----------

-Our Markspace is going to be severed from primary Markspace for a period of roughly an hour. If you need to communicate with the other Marked outside our own, grab one and use them as a relay.

-As you know, Sama is currently behind a massive Throne Ward. I am going to use this moment to undergo my Karmic Regression with my sisters. Isolating in three... two... one...-

My Fyr self jerked as the telepathic bond of the Mark was severed completely. There was awareness there, that my main self was Out There doing something, as were my sisters, but for the first time, I was absolutely alone in Fyr’s head, not sharing seven of them.

Her Markspace was active, replete as it was with tank and vehicle drivers getting really busy about now, but Fyr was simply slaved to the system right now, in transit to a combat site. One of her sisters was operating her tank in tandem for the nonce, not a hard thing with a tight linkup and extra thoughtstream.

Going through a Regression to open up the previous life of your soul while in an active warzone was probably not the wisest course of action, but the forced, massive separation was an opportunity not to be missed.

Emma, Inigo, Azure, Aura, and Vivi were all doing the same thing. It was very strange not being all of them at the same time, and while I momentarily very much missed having six additional bodies, I was also firmly aware that our souls were different, and we should have been different people from the get-go, developing in our own ways. Sama had made a mistake, done her best to rectify it and cater to the individual Talents of each of us, but this was the chance to make the cut clean.

My Fyr-self sat back in her tank as she dove towards the point of light that was the start of her life and this incarnation, and pulled it open for a look.

Across the city, five other selves of Sama did the same. They were ready for new lives of their own, fulfilling dreams of their past selves, a foundation of time that would make them truly separate from Sama-main... and anticipating a flowering of rage that pretty much characterized all of the Ranthas, who were all born from those killed by horribly evil means and methods.

Rantha Hags did not react well to those things, and the almost universal nature of being reduced to enslaved puppets and expended like chaff was everything they fought against in the Hag Curse.

Fyr steeled herself, and began to Remember the life of the girl her soul used to be....

------------

Center of the Warp Zone...

I felt the erosion of the quiet links to my other Selves, and nodded to nobody as Briggs and I cleared the landing to the command deck. It was the right time to do something, and they’d done it. Perfect...