Chapter 496 - Far Future Ch. 206 – Dark Observations (1/2)

It was plain to the drow matron that this song was about fear, and it was infectious, sinking into the minds of the goblins and spreading along their racial psyche... and it was being fed into their com system, too, helping perpetuate it further, faster.

It was meant to intimidate... and it was succeeding in that task very, very well.

It never mentioned her name, but did it need to? The endless strafing of violet lasfire girt up in those green flames of goblin-slaying, the whiteness that wiped away even the soul, and had perma-killed those who thought themselves beyond death...

The drow had thought the four breshkt women in Bloodheart possessed of a great secret, which could allow them to threaten even their longest-lived, cleverest, and most threatening foes with death. The hunt for the secret had been ferocious once those slain and cooked in the shadowfire had not come back.

And then, this white fire was all over the galaxy.

How they had not paid attention to it when it was released to the severed sectors of the Human Empire, she didn't know. Perhaps they just had not considered it important, a psychic trick they wouldn't bother to use, something not worth investigating, coming from the humans as it did.

But now everyone, everywhere seemed to have it. It was being leaked at an impressive rate to anyone who wanted to know about it, and was sending underquakes throughout the galaxy.

It Fed those who thought themselves undying to the Land, and the more unnatural they were, the faster it fed them.

It had already been over a year since the Bloodheart Grand Ritual, and the drow had plenty of time to learn of the vivic procedures for making weapons, even making a few themselves.

Unfortunately, the unwhite fire was lethal to the most powerful among them!

Those infected by Warp energies, or who had cheated death, were devoured by the unwhite fire as readily as the undead or demons. The only way to stop the flames from devouring them if they were struck was to sever the flesh. If they were killed, their corpses were devoured with unreal speed, reduced to ash and mist, and their souls, which should have been whisked away by necrotech, were burned into nothing with them.

It suddenly made trips into the Prime even more dangerous for the drow, especially the leaders who had once had no fear of death here, even were the humans capable of harming them.

That had all changed now.

Madame Lolith had a secret that even the most cunning of her rivals did not know: it was the fact that she had never died.

Without that one fact hanging over her, she did not have to fear the vivic fire so much, and although her skin was midnight black, she had denied the powers of the Warp for thousands of years, and would continue to do so in the future. Her will was her own, and she would not be swept up in Klaw's mindless slaughter, Amourae's unrestrained excesses, jRaztl's endless arrogance and superiority, or Riggibuhl's mindless enduring of the inevitable.

She was Lolith, the Grand Mistress of the Bloodheart, who had no equals among the drow in blades or beauty. There had been countless challengers over the millennia, men and women, and countless others vying for her attention, her caress, her smile, a stroke of her hand, or even a kiss from her lips. The price some were willing to pay for her attention was quite shocking, and amusing, yet only further affirmation of how unique and powerful she was.

She had never been treated as casually by anyone as she was being treated now.

This young woman was obviously no breshkt, nor were her erstwhile daughters. ”Matron Glayia” didn't exist in any records of the drow, whose records held truly frightening amounts of information to be plumbed by cybermancers and akashic raiders.

What she was... was insanely dangerous.

She wasn't showing off for Madame Lolith, however it might look. Lolith wouldn't have tolerated anyone looking down at her like that... but this was different.

She was being casually ignored... as irrelevant.

Just keeping up with her, she had killed over a thousand goblins by now. Alchemicals kept fatigue at bay, as well as the life energy siphoned off by her knives from the low creatures she was slaughtering in passing, dealing deaths with flickers and ghosts of her hand.

She was being outrun, outkilled, outmaneuvered, and out-thought.

It was a novel experience. She could not remember such a thing happening in combat for over six thousand years.

Oh, she had been outmaneuvered politically before, information manipulated, ending up doing the bidding of foes and rivals that she thought she was working against... but such petty schemes were not her strength, and those that used her inevitably ended up dead, a perfect record of fates of those who angered her that led back for thousands of years. Certainly, they thought they could capture her, trap her, evade her hungry blades when she came for them... but while there were better schemers, none were better killers, and all of them had fallen in the end.

This woman was not using gravity manipulation, and was moving as weightlessly as a null-g acrobat. Her precision and agility were no less than Lolith's own, and her casual strength was considerably greater, equal to a fully cyberized agent, or someone operating under mass alchemical boosting.

Or, perhaps, a Warp Demon. Except Warp Demons were like fuel to vivus, and certainly wouldn't be using it on every Weapon they wielded.