Into the fire

Mara certainly gets to you. It is the most unnerving, outright murderous and most hostile place I have ever been. I fell assailed every minute I spend here, even asleep. But this is not the way Mara gets you; the weird part is the effect the utter certainty of death and defeat has. As I fight tooth and nail, every minute, I am detached. I watch my own furious determination. I am, in the middle of the most important and most difficult task I have ever undertaken, looking at myself from the outside.

I assume it is a way of coping. I have always known that I eventually would give my life in service to the emperor, but now I know almost exactly when it will happen. We might stop Haarlocks return, but I do believe that we will die fairly shortly, on Mara. Even if we by some utterly implausible event leave here somewhat alive, I think there will be nothing of the old Lazerus that leaves.

Enough metaphysics for a while. What have we been doing lately? Wandering around, endlessly, and fighting, endlessly. I prefer the fighting. The tunnels change, we search for something, milling around like mice, and time just passes. And nothing gets to you like nothing happening in these tunnels. When we fight at least we do something.

We go back to the surface, to sleep. We camp in a large reactor-room. After a few hours we are assaulted by some ugly beings, who look like they have been dead for ages. We kill them fairly easy, they close in quickly and we shred them. When we ride the elevator down again, Kort says he recognizes the surroundings, and thinks that he can find the way to where Beloved and the Pilgrims have camped.

We walk along, for once with some direction. We start finding 'traces' of the Pilgrims: symbols, blood, human remains, altars, chaos symbols, in staggering amounts. Full human skins, tattooed all over, stretched out in frames. They have obviously been warding something off, probably Mara herself.

We find a huge hall, some 200 meters high, platforms suspended out in front of us. Several reactor cores. We see a few pilgrims. Alpha sneaks into the hall and sees a few pilgrims. One salvo from her bolter and they die. The last one falls long before the echo from the rockets stops reverberating around the hall.

There are more pilgrims, and a demon, but with a combination of tactical withdrawals, Potters healing skills and fire support from Alpha no one dies. We proceed inwards, and discover Beloved staring at us from one of the reactor towers. An enormous flying beast appears. It breaks the platform we are standing on, and one of the Janissaries falls to his death. It is capable of attacking us all in one go as well, so we have to retreat unto different gangways. The monster looks like some kind of serpent, it is horrifying, you feel like you want to soil yourself watching it, and it attacks with bite and tail. Dar collapses from fear, and I drag him away. And we shoot and shoot and shoot. Reload. Repeat. And we kill it. We kill this monster too.

Beloved moves onto a nearby platform, and gates in 4 demons. We all shoot at him, but he seems to be very difficult to harm. We also remember what went on at Xinophia, so we assume he has multiple lives with him. Potter flies onto the tower, finds Beloveds lair, chock full of horrible symbols, and the mask of the Widower. He takes the mask and jumps, Beloved runs after, and jumps after him.

Potter just manages to get of a flying spell, while Beloved crashes to the ground. We heal up, and Potter flies down again, just in time to see Beloved about to, probably, gate in another huge flying serpent.

We all leave, and find a place to take a break. We try to read the book, but noone understands it until Holder-Smith puts the mask on. Then he can read the book, and it really gives directions; we now move with purpose. What gives the creeps is seeing Holder-Smith with the mask on. Radical does not even start to describe this... We could have gone to look for another guide, but I guess this is the only way that is feasible right now. Mara, it gets to you, in every way, not the least those you did not think of... The Janissaries look like they are about to flip seeing the mask on Holder-Smith, but they contain themselves. They have very rigid minds, that is one reason they are useful here.

Holder-Smith manages to get some proper information out of the widower, in between the masks mad ranting. He says that we are doing exactly what Haarlock set in motion ages ago: we are looking for the Blind Tesseract, aiming to change either the future or the past. I hope the chance to foil him will arise.

The Widower tells us that the Tesseract contains doors to different times and different places, we will have to deal with all of them in order.

We get to another large hall, with a reactor. Ice on the floor, with a bluish glow. As we go into the hall, beings start to rise from the ice. Many beings. The Janissaries propose to distract them while the rest of us escape. After brief consideration I accept their offer, thank them for their service, and we head out, barring the door behind us. We hear them on vox for a short while, then there is silence. I note that the only qualms I have are of the tactical kind: does this improve or reduce our chances of accomplishing our mission. But we will make it count.

We find a large mining elevator, which we ride down another 200m, into the 'Deep Mines'. The tunnels are rough hewn, and we see demonic faces moving inside the rock. What the living fuck is actually Mara? How did it get to be like this? The worst part is that we might find out.

We get to a room with some weird machinery, with the remnants of a fight. 18 of Korts co-mercs, and Inquisitor Herrod and his retinue. And the chartist captain leading the mercenaries. We scrounge some choice gear. I find myself utterly indifferent to finding Herrod. I don't care that I think they would have attacked us if given the chance, or mourn a fellow member of the inquisition, I just don't care.

The Widower says that what has been here is a Slaught Destroyer. Much worse than the overlord Master Nonsuch we met in the House of Ash and Dust. He also says that Miss Book now has the navigator and so has all she needs, and that the reason the Slaught are here is probably because they have infiltrated the sector so well that they don't want time turned backward.

Holder-Smith investigates the machinery. He suddenly sees a face on a screen; Kalium Samriel. He shouts warnings at us. Then we see a black body-gloved hand over his mouth, and a pair of white eyes staring out at us: Erasmus Haarlock himself.

And then we proceed, further and further into the fire.