The universe was full of the Damned and the Dead.

Criopus had been a child when Grandmother Sama blew open the Mountain and in so doing Awakened the Helices of every Void within. The powers of the universe, the voices of reality, had opened up and echoed inside him... but like every Brother, his experience was different and unique.

He had felt the dead.

He later learned that his Path was one of the most undesired of the Voids, and his fate would have been to be ground up into Dead Shot ammunition for shooting psykers and Warp entities. The last thing the Mountain wanted was the dead telling their Voids things they didn’t want the boys to know.

That was not the case with the Marked. While reality was for the living, it was the right of the dead to find their place and their peace. Indeed, that was the whole motivation of the Bone and the Scythe, to get those souls released to their proper fate.

That fate in this closed universe was the Warp. Releasing them was to Damn them.

The Mindrings could stand on the edge of the Warp, look out and see the stars far beyond the crashing chaos of id and ego and the Damned. The Shadowknives could tell that reality itself had bounds that should not be there. The Fireswords could sense the innate corruption of the energies of Reality most keenly.

The Bonescythes could sense the paths to the afterlife had been cut and diverted. It was horrifying to sense, to feel, and to know that what awaited every soul born was Damnation in the Warp.

There should have been priests, clerics, shamans, white necromancers, psychopomps, and guardian angels around, ushering the dead onto their fates, leaving behind the mortal world for the hereafter and whatever life or conflicts happened there.

There was only the Warp, and its yawning maw of hunger, insatiable and gluttonous.

His earliest years had been spent dealing with wandering spirits, restless undead, and necromantic forces. Vivus was a grim necessity, completely closing the circle of life and afterlife and feeding the raw energy and potential of those spirits back to the Land, discorporated and added to the pool of new life at its most basic level. No reincarnation, no reward, no punishment; just oblivion.

It was not good, not bad... it was necessary.

The true undead were, of course, not souls or spirits at all, merely negative reflections of those things. Giving them to the Land was in effect a great gift, turning death to life, undoing some of the harm they had inflicted, and giving rise to new vigor for the Land, instead of undeath.

His career had slowly graduated to Dead Walking Events, and Necroic Zones left behind by tormented souls. The former were cases of mass slaughter, both before and after he dealt with the causes behind them, and the latter were places to put Vivic Beacons to ease the pain of the Dead... and to set up places where Ghost Knights could put their mindclaws into ghostly, misty flame, accept a quest, and help the dead deal with the shitty universe they were stuck in.

Sometimes the Dead still wanted to fight against fate, too...

From there, he had gone from world to world, drawn by the needs of the dead, sliding across the Veil and Gloom in pursuit of the flow of souls... or the stoppage of them. He had seen worlds reduced to mass graves, billions of dead bound there and tormented by their fates, forgotten in the stars. He had walked through the ruins of civilizations human and alien, listening to their cries and their histories, and written grim and dire things into the Map of the Galaxy.

He had specifically located one of the worlds that the Ruk used to trade with, a semi-humanoid race called the Shii. From what he could determine, the Yith had come in and time-swapped souls with the entire race, throwing them into the past to go extinct in the bodies of the previous race they had replaced. The Yith had taken their new bodies and headed out somewhere to evade whatever fate might have awaited the Shii, dooming the Shii to suffer the fate the Yith left behind.

Mass spiritual genocide and body-theft on a racial level. The Yith were one of the most ruthless species in existence when it came to their own survival.

The only way to catch them was to be immune to their temporal sight, basically Sources and Nulls coming in to render false all their future-jumping alternate world-dreams that had no relevance to what was going to happen to them.

They thought of themselves as great preservers of lore and history, intellectuals and philosophers who transcended time and so avoided the great disasters of history.

They were mass murderers that usurped and extinguished entire species at a go, giving them no chance whatsoever to fight back.

The Shadowknives loathed them as much as the Mindrings and Bonescythes. Having found the fate of the Shii, there were already scouts looking for where the new Yith had gone...

Ten years ago, he had gotten a quest... from the living. From Sensei Sama Rantha, who had freed all the Voids, given them their training, and their missions, and the Markspace to keep them all together, even scattered across the galaxy.

That quest had been... find the dead.

He had been given the data to look at, as had all the Bonescythes. It all concerned the Steiners.

The Vatter families in their many iterations were fairly ubiquitous in any developed megacity. They handled a lot of rote labor-related things, and could be churned out in sufficient numbers to meet any demand. With superior Stat-lines and Levels, they could easily take control of a normal non-Elite population of people, and rapidly adjust it to Imperial standards.

They were, in essence, pre-programmed biological population control agents. Perhaps it was ironic that the Ranthas and Briggs were infiltrating and replacing the Themis and Skraelings across the galaxy...

The Steiners had an overriding directive to maintain control over the Soylent feeds, and there was very, very little desire on the part of the other Underfamilies to take it from them.

It had taken years of monitoring and finally breaking into the source code of all the Underfamilies to really start bringing out some of their secrets. It quickly became apparent that, all the corruption that eventually invaded them aside, the TL16 programming core at that breadth was not something most organizations could have handled even at the height of human tech... and their genetics were specifically tweaked to be very good, and have no chance at going higher, even if they bred out into the general population.

In short, anyone with dominant Underfamily genetics simply couldn’t break Six, even if they were normal-born.

Yet another control factor...

The Steiners... were shipping out bodies.

It wasn’t very many, maybe 1/10,000 at most. They had to be mostly intact, and excellent physical specimens. That right there raised all sorts of alarm bells, as those were exactly the criteria that necromancers liked to use for animating undead.

These regular, small shipments of prime corpses were delivered to ships on a regular schedule, just labelled as raw Soylent material, beneath notice, shuttled on typical mass cargo haulers, and sent off into the maze of interplanetary shipping to who knew where.

The practice had continued even when Duke Briggs took over, just part of their duties, never questioned, just done... until his Brother in Order Francis, nicknamed the Zombiesleuth for his dogged skill at tracking down the undead, had followed the words of the dead and stumbled upon the shipments.

The Steiners had no defense or justification, it was just something they did. Following corpses through the maze of commerce was beyond his remit... but there were Ghost Knights among the Goldilocks, too, who liked nothing more than righting wrongs of people who thought they’d gotten away with something vile... and when the auto-purging records of those shipments were made obvious, it had been very clear something quietly ominous was going on.

These shipments all had TL 16 or higher code woven into the primary software networks that coordinated such things, it didn’t matter which megacorp or government was involved. As all such coding had to have a degree of universality to communicate with itself, and nothing active out there was above TL 15, this TL 16 code had infiltrated the programs of any and all of the Imperial systems. It quietly and smoothly erased all records of such shipments after periods of time, and without hardcopy backups, there was essentially no way whatsoever to bring the things back.

The theory now was that the TL 15 technology cap for the Empire and the Mechanists had been set in place by the Emperor himself, enforced so just this kind of thing could be done.

It was entirely possible, and at least 90% probable, that any human technology at a higher TL than 15 had not ‘worn out’, but been gradually sabotaged and made inoperable, for just that reason, while knowledge related to it had been expunged or locked away.

With the Mechanists gate-keeping the tech, and technologists not being allowed to advance TL’s without the cyborgs coming in and shutting them down or co-opting them, human technology had naturally stagnated.

Why keep humanity’s TL at 15 and below? Especially when the Emperor definitely had at least some Tech advanced to 17+?

Those were some very disquieting questions. And he was going to find an answer.

There were quiet Ranthas following those shipments, sitting on the hulls of great cargo carriers as split-photon trackers followed those shipments. There was both a living and mechanical component to the tracking, because TL16 or higher meant some very good tech was on the job, and if the tracker could be found, it would raise alarms... so there had to be a Forsaken with high Stealth on location to take over if needed.

In the meantime, he had been directly ordered to skip all of that long slogfest of discovery, and make a stab at something else.

Find the dead. Go to Tellus, and see what could be found here.

---

A phantom skull butterfly fluttered up to him, trying to fixate him and distract him. The Tats on his hand briefly glowed, and the remnant spirit puffed into misting vivus. He came to an immediate halt.

(Picture courtesy of Talespinner)

---

The six spirits he allowed to stay with him were murmuring at something ominous. He could feel it ahead of him.

Ghost butterfly skulls were formed from the spirits of zwilniks who died during a massive hallucinogenic high. They were only found around physical undead, who would kill the hapless living people they hypnotized into motionlessness.

Ahead of him was the Yorker Waste, an irradiated stretch of the ecumenopolis suffused with enough lingering radiation of multiple types to kill any normal human in days. It was completely true; he could feel it on his Vajra the moment he stepped off the Veil into the abandoned streets, long sealed off by airtight bubbles and left to rot. Above them, durasteel girders had risen over the domes, burying them beneath new land, and this massive hotspot had been slowly turned into a lost place buried in the depths where even the morlocks didn’t dare to go.

He knew, because he’d seen the tunnels they’d clawed through the Seals. Those tunnels had been resealed up, and not touched again for centuries.

They had been sealed from inside...