Tzeentch: Lay'Thuruk - White Scars

“You were dead long before I came to this planet, child. I am here simply to attest it, to see that you sink to the depths, where your existence will finally have a meaning.”

Lay’Thuruk, The Tide, moments before killing Captain Lauraf of the Sons of Dorn.

Even in a fiercely independent group like the White Scars, the loss of a Primarch, their link to a higher being such as the Emperor, the embodiment of all the martial and cultural values that brought them pride, the one model such aloof warriors aspired to impress and even emulate, was a tremendous blow. Yet a few felt them more than most: to those Scars for whom the genetic link between Primarch and Astartes was especially powerful, the loss was both of a lord and a father, the pillar of their family. While many tried to search for Jaghatai – all of them failing, most of them broken in spirit upon their return – others simply buried their grief as swiftly as only one with the dubious privilege of defying death daily can. None, though, went as far as Lay’Thuruk, Stormseer of the 4^th Company.

He raided every single and archive he came across in the worlds visited by the Chapter’s battles, taking entire libraries with him to Chogoris, and read every single tome in search of a way to find the Khagan. At last, he learned of the Aqueous Mirror. The term and the first lines he read from the old tome reminded him of the tricks some charlatans played, pretending to divine the fates from spilled liquids. Yet such was Lay’Thuruk’s despair that he forced himself to fight past his skepticism and even his sense of ridicule…and he found what he had sought after so fervently. That fateful night, he attuned himself to the Warp while he spoke the words the book indicated, setting his Astral Form free upon the Warp, and felt himself plunge into the dark depths of fate. Lay’Thuruk would never return to the White Scars, save as a scourge under the command of a twisted god.

For hours he roamed the dark waters, seeing nothing but distant glimpses of fire, energy releases and blood; hearing nothing but faint screams, promises of eternal vengeance and the sounds of blades, bullets and energy bolts rending flesh. Then the guide appeared, as large as a Thunderhawk, but as graceful as a fish underwater. It was a fish, actually, a many-eyed one, speaking with a benevolent, almost motherly feminine voice. Though his training and experience cried in the back of his mind against trusting such a creature, Lay’Thuruk’s despair spoke louder, and he followed it down, surrounded by the guide’s offspring, perfect depictions of the decorative fish that the fishing villages of Chogoris carved on their building’s walls. Again the lucid part of him cried…again he ignored it, the hope of seeing his father again growing more real as he swam down, the sounds and images now closer.

Strangely, the true depths of this sea were well illuminated. That was putting it mildly, in fact. The network of caverns and crevasses the creature took him through was more alight than the bridge of a battle barge during battle. At the end of each were the images and sounds, there for him to see and hear plainly. In what seemed like a few meters, Lay’Thuruk saw the last living seconds of hundreds of humans, eldar and beings he’d never seen. Babies dying in their mothers’ arms, the same women whose death he’d seen just a second before. A Salamander hero breathing his last gasp as his dismembered corpse was paraded through the streets of an heretical city.

Panic took hold of him…did this mean that he’d witness the Khan’s death? That his father had truly died? And what if that vision was already behind, one of the thousands of crevasses he’d already swam past?

Then, as his eyes turned, he saw what he had searched for every day for the last decade, and more. And though his mind and memories shattered at that moment, the realization those images brought never left Lay’Thuruk. The next morning, the Stormseer has already left Chogoris, taking with him the last of the Chapter’s jetbike, his vast library soaked, all the books turned to unrecoverable mulch.

Lay’Thuruk has witnessed the futility of the Galaxy’s mortal struggle and the cruel joke of a fate that awaits all that insist in carrying it with fervor. He travels through battlefields to see the last moments of the most important individuals in the galaxy. Whether he’s aware that he is the one that ends their lives will likely never be answered, certainly not by a mind as broken as Lay’Thuruk’s. Those who’ve seen him fight and lived tell of a warrior-sorcerer fighting as ferociously as any Khornate berserker, yet one that speaks in an almost fatherly tone, inviting his victims to accept the very fate he brings. Like a tide he recedes to divine currents and destinies to which only the Great Deceiver can give sense, and returns to the Materium like a crashing wave to reap the next harvest of heroes.

‘Xoal’

The ‘guide’ that led Lay’Thuruk to his doom, Xoalraskthis’sol’nogh, or ‘Xoal’ in its material, vehicular form, is the guardian of the oceanic form of the Maze of Fates (for there as many forms to it as the eyes of those of visit). While in the Warp the daemon merely patrolled the maze with its progeny of Ribes, it has abandoned its role after Lay’Thuruk’s presence in its realm. Possessing the former Scar’s jetbike, it shares both its rider’s mission and its own old functions, charging all those whose death while spawning the almost childish replicae of itself to deal with all those who would die that day.

Embrace of Plocephalos

Even for one as scheming and all-seeing as Tzeentch, there are those who defy the Deceiver’s plans through their unpredictability. In the Warp, Khorne and Slaanesh’s daemonic servants, their minds fuelled by the most primal of emotions, often prove uncontrollable, a fact aggravated when they invade Tzeentch’s realm. To deal with what he felt were blunt instruments, a measure of bluntness was required, and so Plocephalos was created, a gargantuan, cephalopod-like daemon whose mission was simple: to kill any and all outsiders who dared invade the Sea of Fates. But, as all things touched by Tzeentch, Plocephalos twisted its original purpose. In times of peace in the Warp, the guardian reached to any and all daemons marked for death, in their realm or the material one, its tentacles reaching across all of the Gods’ domains. Its last act was to wrap a tentacle around one of Tzeentch’s fingers. Though barely felt, the touch interrupted a particularly lengthy meditation of the Deceiver, who repaid his behemoth by turning him into a hammer and creating a substitute, known to the mortals as ‘Xoal’. The few who miraculously survive a blow from the daemonic maul are never the same again, their demeanor dour, their words of gloom for evermore, their fates truly marked. Whether the hammer is to blame for their soon-to-be deaths or merely prepared them for the end is unknown.