‘By the warp, cease your sniveling you worthless toad.’ A voice laced with silver and venom whipped smoothly across the ship’s command deck. There was a cultist, his horribly malformed body hunched over an auspex, pattering away in the most loathsome fashion. He squealed at the rebuke and redoubled his agitated drivel as a great section of the command bridge’s shadowed rear wall seemed to come to life and approach him.

‘Heed the Sibylite’s words, wretch! Silence yourself!’ The harshly-filtered voice of a giant cased in twisted plates of black and green bellowed, a bolter raised in armored hands for emphasis. It was a hopeless cause, for with every admonishment the creature’s piteous mewling only grew worse. He attempted to curl himself around the auspex console, burying his face against it as the traitor marine glowered over him.

The woman had risen from her seat and began to approach the anxious cultist, her sinuous form all but naked. A belt around her hips draped plates of armor down her thighs and there was a translucent shroud of black which clung upon her limbs. The meager garb flowed about her body like a gentle breeze, breathing libidinous whispers into the air as it gilded across the grotesque tapestry of her flesh. Wicked scars wove incomprehensible patterns across nearly every inch of her pale skin save for half a head of black hair which hung down limply across one shoulder.

With an almost imperceptible touch, she raised a hand to the massive chest of the damned Astartes accosting the frightened whelp. The black slits of fierce violet eyes contracted sharply as they turned upon the marine and the giant warrior lowered his weapon and silently drew back to his shadowed post as if he’d never been there at all. Free from the threat of an eminent and painful death, the cultist looked up though still cringed visibly as the woman’s hand settled down upon the crook of his neck,

‘M-Mistress Veshna. There is Sssomething… there is…’ The frightened creature lisped raggedly with lips that were little more than flayed flaps of skin. He stammered, unable to find the presence of mind to explain and simply jabbed a crooked finger at the auspex screen.

‘Something, you say. What sort of “something”?’ Veshna’s voice was sultry croon and she felt another quake ripple through the seated heretic as her hands cradled his head back against her stomach. Putrescent eyes glazed over and rolled back as she tilted the cultist’s tattered face up to look at her, ‘Survivors?’ She queried gently, tracing the point of an elongated black fingernail along the side of the man’s neck.’ The attention sparked the return of his accursed sniveling mewls,

‘N-No, my mistress. A machine, perhapsss… s-surely no one could have sssurvived.’ He trailed off with a pitiful whimper.

‘Surely not.’ The witch purred as she curled her hand around the man’s upturned jaw, holding his head back to her. The cultist’s body began to tremble fiercely as dark, sickly blood gushed down over his bare chest. His eyes hung wide and enraptured with Vashne’s black nails embeded deep within the side of his throat. The time had finally come, she thought, feeling the delicious warmth seeping freely across the backs of her fingers, ‘Unless the great power deemed it so.’

With an abrupt, moist sundering Veshna’s claws tore across the man’s neck, dashing nearby consoles with flecks of gore and bathing his torso in a rush of his own putrid ichor. As she stepped back, the cultist’s head flopped limply over the back of his chair, his mangled face wrought in a rapturous expression while his limbs continued to quiver uncontrollably.

She turned away from the twitching body, slitted pupils struck wide with some sublime sense of arousal which brought a delicate laughter to her lips. The Sybilite’s bloodied hand lifted up to her face and one black nail, like a scriptor’s quill, began composing in bloody ink. The scar patterns across her cheek siphoned away the sanguine etchings like a networks of parched roots, leaving radiant likenesses of profane symbols burning upon her skin. With a pleasant sigh the witch’s eyes fell closed and she placed one bloodied nail across her lips thoughtfully,

‘Arashi, my sweet, it has been far too long.’ The lurid whisper roiled out upon air and empyrean alike