A Light Not Extinguished

Chapter 36: PRINCIPALIS///DEUS///HAERESIS

Molech.

A world supposed to be wholly insignificant. So insignificant, that it was not on any of the Federation's star maps. There was no great deposit of minerals or fauna, nor iswasit a Maiden World. Theoretically, there should be nothing of value to any star-faring empire.

The protections on it say otherwise. To the living, the moment they enter the system there would be a strong compulsion to leave— and failing that, the cloaked orbital cannons drifting in the system would automatically lock on and begin firing. And that was only the first line of defenses. The planet itself was hidden by sorcery of the Warp; a vast opaque mirror stretching around the world that blended in with the void, while befuddling any sort of sensor equipment that Mankind had invented. The unremarkable forests below hid scores of anti-ship batteries, enough to blow anything out of orbit or at least stall for time, because the moment anyone advanced towards the planet its creator would be alerted. It was never a good thing when its creator visited, and today was one of those occasions.

All of it, from the Titans spirited away from Federation military depots, their disappearances covered up and cores reprogrammed, the silent fleets of patrolling ships controlled by bastardized Iron Minds all served to protect a singular facility on the northern pole: A massive white dome, the size of ten cities put together. Within are the many mechanisms that enable the great blasphemy of this unholy place; Aetheric regulators, modified Tesseract Labyrinth technology, hundredfolded hexagrammatic wards, shattered pieces of the Pylons reshaped to fit the grand design of this structure. A pale shadow of the technology used by the precursor races, only capable of being put together by a genius— or a madman.

An entire legion of mechanical repair drones slowly toiled away within the fortress-city, the same way they had done so for more than ten thousand years. None of them stopped to acknowledge Adam as he proceeded deeper into the place; they did not have the sentience to do such a thing.

The innermost sanctum was a vast monitoring complex filled with observation equipment, dedicated to observing any anomaly that arose within the thing that everything around it was designed to protect. What they displayed was not encouraging. Directly in the center of it all was a temple, built of wood and marble. There were no emblems or statues or iconography that shed light on which divinity this was dedicated to. Its construction did not match any major styles of religious sanctums. But all the same, if any child of Terra were to stand in front of it, they would know with absolute certainty that it was a temple all the same. The temple itself was covered in a void shield, and in front of it there was a man.

He had seen Adam coming the very second he had entered the system.

"Adam." The Perpetual with vaguely Oriental features said, guandao strapped to his back.

"Shinji." Adam answered back.

The temporary guardian of Molech gestured to the temple behind him. "The realm is stable. It's waiting for you. You know the protocol— no more than twenty minutes."

Adam silently clapped his shoulder. Shinji pressed a device on his forearm, and the void shield deactivated. Adam approached the place slowly, and gently pushed open the doors.

It smelled of incense and dried blood and burnt offerings. Braziers of blue flame hung from the ceiling; faceless statues that should have meant something, but represented nothing at all as if the beings they were depicting were just slightly out of focus. There was a large reliquary in the center of the room. It was black stone that dripped blood. It was white marble crusted with gold leaf. It was maple wood shiny with blessed oil. It was silver encrusted in gems. All of these things, it was. And it was not.

Without hesitation, Adam opened the lid of the reliquary, revealing nothing in it except a bottomless, disquieting darkness. Behind him the faceless statues turned their heads to stare at him without eyes; the Anathema did not need to look behind him to feel the accusation in their gazes.

He clambered into the reliquary and descended into the darkness below.

He dropped down onto a platform of rough stone, suspended by chains of silver. There was only a single plinth on the platform, on which there was a lever. Pull it down and you went down. Pull it up and you went up. Move the lever at the middle and it stopped. Adam pulled the lever down.

The platform creaked as the chains began to unwind, and it descended. All around was pitch darkness, or at least to the mortal eye. To those that were psychically aware, however, their surroundings told another story entirely. The place was a vast cylindrical tube in the style of a panopticon, and Adam was at its center. In the walls were massive cells that contained what was revered amongst humanity.

The first few levels were the central figures of religions in the 24th millennium. The Omnissiah peered out from its cage with fractal eyes and irises of cold steel, silent in its cold logic as it unerringly watched Adam, its hyperdimensional carapace dotted with patches of green and silver. The Catheric God was still here, surviving even after all this time through the ages in a myriad of different forms. And others too; the Platonic Value, Avensuna the Many-Fingered, and all the hosts of gods that humanity was currently worshipping.

Adam met all of their silent, enraged gazes quietly, his hand on the pommel of his sword. The prison should be safe— but even he on some level recognized the great sacrilege that had been done here. Further down he went, and the contents of the cells began to change. Now these were the gods whose religions had either faded into the archives of history, or were so obscure that only a handful were devoted to them now. Lords of lightning and flame, Saints of the harvest and fertility, Keepers of the balance and the underworld. The demons and monsters of yesterday, the Hydras and Oni and Wendigoes. Unlike those above them, these particular gods seemed to have rotted halfway through, their consciousness faded to the point where they were in that half-dreaming state such that they were not even aware of Adam's arrival.

And now Adam descended even further, and the cells no longer held anything that could be recognizable. Dark, forgotten gods conceived in the earliest days of mankind when man could only huddle in his caves to hide from the predators in the dark, animals gods that spoke of sacrifices and blood. passed through word of mouth in the time when man had not even invented writing or the wheel, so far back that even the vast records of the Federation had no mention of them. They were not rotting; there were only faint shadows of them, half-impressions and blurry afterimages that simply lay prone in their cells.