Dark Eldar: Allomorphosys - A1

Only the eerie rhythmical swing of the blades of a prehistoric air-duct fan, and a distant humming sound filled the extremely dry air of that deep place. Nowhere near the buzzing surface or the terrible spires kilometres above, "The Grove" as it was called, wasn't even technically a part of Commorragh. It was more of an extension of the webway in a direction that could have been defined "south" only metaphorically-speaking, given the non-euclidean geometry of the webway. If the portion of the web that included vast Comorragh had something like deep serpentine viscera, "The Grove" would be close to the ending sphincter.
Few kilometers farther, and the webway stretched into another realm, a forsaken place said to have been completely flooded by some kind of liquid, a manifestation of the warp. Killing everyone there in a single instant, an untold "accident". As long as one could believe in accidents when Dark Eldars are involved. There lurked swimming horrors beyond even his vast and dark imagination.

Young Taphter wasn't being chased, but he felt as such. He had finally decided to leave that remote Haemonculi pain-vault, to start a new life alone and without taking orders. He thought about that every single moment of the last five web-years, but escaping the eyes of the Haemonculi wasn't easy, even for a talented apprentice such as him. Little did he know that the great masters didn't mean to chase any eventual "fugitive" apprentice such as him. But he found a way to depart unnoticed anyway. An incredible lucky strike and he managed to capture alive a renegade Mandrake that haunted a deep well. Then an unbelievable stroke of genius had him discover how to "distil" part of the shadowy essence that filled that dark half-demon.
He constructed a device that borrowed dangerously deep inside his neck, where he had found the atrophic equivalent of the gland that the mandrakes used for cloaking. With the help of his optronic calculator and an attached med-scan probe, he "cracked" the code of that crypto-biologic mechanism and managed to "borrow" the abilities of the mandrake. He thought he was going to die when he first activated it: the pain he suffered wasn't even classifiable as pain. It was an entirely new sensation, the negativity of which went beyond corporeal or psychic boundaries. But he disappeared in the shadows. He thought the effect wasn't going to last, or at least wasn't going to be repeatable, so even in the dazed, nauseated state he was in, he decided to pull off his escape without waiting any more.

Far from the vault, he discovered the device to be fully working and the effect repeatable. He didn't know how much of the mandrake essence he had stored inside that capsule, but he made the whole device modular so that he could eventually recharge it. Should he had been so lucky as to capture or kill another one. It was far more probable that one or two or five of them killed him, as a retortion or just to satisfy their dark needs, or so he thought. And just as the idea flashed before his inner eyes, he noticed that the thought was a bit clearer than normal in his mind. He quickly tried to asses if he was still affected by the mind-deforming sensation of the shadow-walking of before, but no, this was another well known sensation. Precognition, something he had always had, and that helped him in more ways than he could ever possibly recognize. Accordingly, he couldn't see how it could help him now.

In that eerie hall, he felt he was going to be ambushed in a matter of seconds. Reactivating the shadow-injector wasn't going to save him from the very shadow-beings he had robbed that ability from. He quickly touched the collar of his haemo-suit and conjured an emergency mask, then took a crane-gas bomb he had smuggled and smoked it without hesitation. In that very moment, five mandrakes appeared just a few feet from him in every direction and swung their decapitators right at him. The serrated blades were nearly caressing his flesh when the beings inhaled the gas. It instantly acted on their nervous system in a very specific way: their limbs and backs becoming rigid so fast that many bones cracked at the unison, especially vertebrae. Their arms curled in a strange fashion and one of their legs even worse, leaving the poor devils standing on one leg, with a strangely heightened sense of balance sustaining them unnaturally in that position that gave name to the terrible crane-gas. The effects were going to end soon, and Taphter knew it. He tipped its way through the suffering mandrakes and their raised, immobilized blades. He quickly covered the cuts that had managed to appear on his shoulders when the two mandrakes flanking him connected their blades before inhaling the gas (mandrakes had a scent for blood), and then injected himself with a drug of his own manufacture. His vision blurred but he felt a sudden surge of energy. He speeded through corridors that could have well been sewage pipes, for what he could see. He ran at a speed that he knew was unnatural. He had to find a hideout fast, he would have had to recover from that feat for at least two days. He found something that he recognized as a safe place even with his impaired vision. A few minutes later he passed out.

His subconscious mind felt his brain liquefy, on the verge of percolating through his cranial orifices. He was just starting to dream, but that was such a rare event and his mind was so attuned to being awake on multiple levels, that he felt every moment of the process as a painful virtual movement inside his brain: tiny invisible flames that licked the organ here and there, melting the pieces they touched. So he continued to feel his grey matter drip away from the inside out, until he finally managed to shut down another level of sub-consciousness.

He dreamt of colors. Something very, very alien to his mind. He felt his inner eyes burn when confronted to that acid-drenched spike that was instead the color named yellow. He felt his insides dry out when an unmistakeably desiccating force engulfed him. It was a blue. He finally began to distinguish shapes behind those venomous substances. It was a suit, of a texture he had never witnessed. Or so he thought. But after all, something felt familiar about it. Something strange came out from the neck of that suit. When he started to recognize what it was, a sense of sorrow caught him and seemed to suffocate him. Was it really a... Husk? An empty skin-husk of a face that... He knew? It lied there, skin devoid of any color, contrasting with that chromatically over-saturated suit it once occupied shapefully. It looked like it had been bathed in something caustic, after being devoided of the flesh inside. And then in some way turned to dust, but still retaining coherence, still displaying its abhorrent form. What once was a mouth was now a gap that opened vertically, irregularly. Inside the opening there was only black, the only soothing color of that scene. It was the comfortable black metal of the bed on which that thing was lying, but seen from that obscene gap, it looked like it was a terrible black hole able to suck everything, from light to souls. And the eyes... He couldn't manage to look there, where they should have been... He felt his sweat becoming ice-cold while he was painfully forcing his neck to turn up. He was feeling immobilized as if under the effect of that crane-gas, and time seemed to slow itself just to torture him. But when he did manage to turn his head up enough to focus where the empty eye-sockets should have been, he instead saw vivid eyes. Not inside: they were outside of the husk, protruding as if suspended by something. And they looked at him.
His heart seemed to explode and he woke up.
Two days had passed and he had a new, or better yet old but rediscovered thought, clear in his mind. He had a father. That husk was that of his father.