User blog:Baluar/Codex Entry: War of Devouring, chapter 1

The Librarian pulled the records on the War of Devouring from one of the Battle Barge’s numerous libraries. It was a curious war, indeed. The Blood Raven was curious as to how a backwater planet, with no connection to the empire, could have survived after being the target of both a Tyranid invasion and a Chaos Warband. Indeed, any such world was a prime candidate to becoming either a lifeless rock or a cursed piece of insanity forever destined to roam through the madness that was the Warp.

And yet, the little planet, which housed nothing but a handful of humans locked in combat with a species of beings he was unfamiliar with, was neither of those. He had personally disembarked and recovered some of the records himself, and was eager to have a deeper look at how had the planet survived. Perhaps it hadn’t, really, and all what they saw was a planet left untouched as part of some nefarious plan of Ruinous Powers.

And so he picked up the record. It had been translated by one of his Battle Brothers, and thus was ready for his interpretation. It was a second hand tale of what happened during those times, coming from some memories recovered by other Librarians. They were dumbfounded that they could find something as palpable as they did, memories imprinted in the place as though they had been left there written in large, bold letters. It was astounding. Even in the most ancient of records they couldn’t find more than a few words on the technique of recovering memories from untrained minds, yet those were so obvious even the less Warp-attuned Battle Brothers could feel something off there. Since the Battle Barge was currently in the Warp, he knew that he wouldn’t soon be bothered by anyone. Only a Daemonic breach could trouble him, but having had thousands of these travels in the past and only remembering a few of those uninvited welcomings, he was confident he could read undisturbed.

The record was not limited to the invasions themselves. The mind that had created it, though probably exceptional, was untrained, and probably did not intend to leave its memories in place, so the memories had a lot of the fighter’s personal life.

It hasn’t been long since I was introduced to the God Eaters, but I’ve been told my overall progress is admirable. Sure enough, in a span of no more than three months I’ve been ascended to a Private First Class. Nothing stellar, that’s for certain, but above average? For sure.

I’ve been out on quite a few missions already, and I can handle myself against pretty much everything by now. Rare Aragami subspecies are still a trouble to me, but hey, that’s why they are rare, right? Besides, we almost never go out alone, unless we’re feeling especially suicidal when taking it or it’s someone with a crazy level of skill you’re talking about.

The librarian skipped ahead a few pages, without any particular interest in the personal life of the woman who had lived that. It was something born not only out of interest, or lack thereof, but also of a certain respect. He indeed felt he was not entitled to know every detail of her life, only those that pertained to what he had to know. Disregarding all other thoughts, he skipped a few pages and kept reading.

I’ve been on a fair amount of missions by now. It’s nothing particularly pleasant, but I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this job. Only a few close encounters with death, but when fighting things that were originally first thought to be gods, we should be thankful we even have a chance at killing these things. Aragami… they sure don’t give up, though. We’re no closer to getting them out of the game than we were when they were nothing but maggots, and now the largest of their kin could very well be mistaken for a mountain. Heh. At least we have a chance in hell to drive them back, if not to defeat them once and for all. That’d be real nice, though.

A few entries ahead and nothing seemed to be unusual in the eyes of the Librarian. Sure, there were mentions of these… “Aragami”, the gods she spoke of, beings who apparently were immune to anything that wasn’t made up of the same cells they were, and that took on the characteristics of whatever they devoured. Thus the name of the War of Devouring, for the Aragami played an important, if secondary, role in the events.

It raised the Librarian’s interest not only that the woman described those creatures with so much knowledge while every now and then cursing her lack of knowledge on them, but also that she spoke of them like they were something so normal. During their visit to the planet, the Space Marines found nothing worth of mention. And the Librarian was pretty sure that if Aragami were as frequent as they were in the woman’s memories, they would have surely happened upon at least a few of them. Yet the surface was clean of anything resembling intelligent life.

He read on for a while about Aragami and their particularities. His interest was raised to heights he could never have imagined as he read vivid descriptions of the Aragami the mysterious woman faced: beings large as mountains that could wave their tentacles in all directions, causing nothing but chaos and mayhem in their wake; creatures that flew up in the air, resembling strange crosses of women and eggs, spraying weakening poisons on their enemies…

It was an interesting read, to be honest. One that, unlike many others, managed to keep the Librarian thrilled. He wondered how the events he read about would eventually unfold in the invasions, his mind already imagining a thousand different possibilities, but he couldn’t be sure. All that he knew was that, whenever he had time to spare, he’d visit the library, take a seat and continue reading the mysterious and fascinating book and find out more about the intriguing woman who had unwillingly created it.