The raw energy of the Warp still clung to Aang like static, a sickening inversion of the elements he knew. He had escaped Vader's crushing aura and the suffocating void of starless space, only to tumble through the seething, abstract madness of the Immaterium for what felt like an eternity. Landing was less a controlled descent and more a violation of gravity, his battered form slamming into ground that felt unnaturally hard and silent.
Pain flared through every nerve, but it was the spiritual ache that truly crippled him. The Warp was anathema to balance, to the pure flow of energy he channelled. It had coiled around his inner light, leaving behind a residue that pulsed with discordant frequencies, muddling his elemental senses. The air should feel breathable, the earth like solid certainty, the water like mutable flow, the fire like vibrant energy. But here, the air tasted of ash and absence, the earth hummed with a low, wrong vibration, water felt distant and alien, and fire... fire felt like a scream.
He pushed himself up, muscles screaming in protest. The sky above was a bruised grey, thick with perpetual twilight. The landscape stretched out in ashen plains, punctuated by jagged volcanic ridges that looked less like geological formations and more like the skeletal remains of something vast and long dead. There were no trees, no plants, no signs of life. It was a world bleached of colour, silent save for the rasp of his own breathing and a faint, almost imperceptible hum that seemed to originate from everywhere and nowhere at once.
This place felt wrong. Not actively malevolent, not steeped in the overt corruption of Chaos, but wrong in a way that preyed on his deepest instincts. It was a stillness that felt less like peace and more like stasis, a moment frozen in time, waiting.
Aang tried to ground himself, reaching for the earth beneath his bare feet. He found purchase, but the connection was frayed. The earth here didn't feel like rock and soil; it felt dense, unwilling, as if it held a secret tightly clenched. And there it was again – a subtle shift in gravity. One moment his steps felt heavy, the next he felt an unsettling lightness, his balance thrown askew. It wasn't a rapid fluctuation, more a slow, nauseating tilt in the fabric of reality itself.
The Warp residue was likely amplifying or interacting with whatever anomalies haunted this place. He saw fleeting distortions at the edge of his vision – a rock momentarily shimmering, a distant ridge seeming to ripple like water, the grey sky briefly fracturing into impossible colours before snapping back. Time felt... rubbery. A moment could stretch into an age, or compress into an instant. He walked for what felt like days, though he could not be sure if the sky had ever changed, or if there was even a sun at all.
And the pressure. There was a constant, subtle weight in the air, not like wind or atmosphere, but like an immense, unseen force pressing down. It felt like a presence, vast and ancient, observing him, or perhaps simply existing with such magnitude that it warped reality around it.
This wasn't a world in any star chart. Perhaps it never was. Perhaps it existed only because the Emperor willed it so — a cradle of stasis woven into the margins of the Immaterium.
He needed to find shelter, to recover, to understand where he was. Driven by instinct and the faint hope of finding something, anything, that wasn't this oppressive void, Aang started walking. His disorientation made navigation difficult; the fractured light and shifting landscape offered no reliable points of reference. He moved toward the tallest of the ridges, hoping for a vantage point or at least a cave to shield him from the elements – though there seemed to be no weather in this stagnant place.
His supplies dwindled rapidly, his weakened state demanding more sustenance than he had. He subsisted on the meagre air and the sheer force of will that had seen him survive the Warp. The strange pressure intensified as he neared the ridges, and the gravity shifts became more frequent, causing him to stumble and fall.
It was nestled in a deep ravine, partially buried by landslides of grey rock, that he found them. Ruins. They weren't like anything he had ever seen. Monolithic structures made of a dark, incredibly hard material — adamantium, his battered spiritual senses vaguely registered the sheer permanence of it — intertwined with something else, something that pulsed with a faint, ethereal light and felt strangely alive, like petrified bone given form. It reminded him of the bone-like constructs he'd once glimpsed in the ruins of fallen xenos worlds – the Eldar, perhaps. Yet this was not their work. This was older. Or worse – borrowed.
The architecture was stark, functional, yet possessed a brutal, archaic grandeur. It spoke of an age long vanished, a design pre-dating the vast, gothic spires of the Imperium he had glimpsed before his flight. Pre-Heresy. The word echoed faintly in the fringes of his mind, a concept he barely understood, tied to ancient, terrible history.
He traced the lines of a massive, broken archway. The mixture of Imperial and xenos materials was deeply unsettling. Who had built this? Why? And why here, on this forgotten world?
As he stood among the ruins, the omnipresent hum intensified, resolving into something more complex. It was a spiritual resonance, like a distant bell tolling in his soul. Not the clear, vital energy of the elements, but something vast, contained, and deeply lonely. It resonated within the wraithbone, but also seemed to emanate from deep beneath the earth.
Then the visions began. Not coherent dreams, but flashes of light and shadow behind his eyes, even when awake. Fragmented images: a golden figure of immense power standing against encroaching darkness; a silent, white-clad figure weeping; circuits sparking; screams echoing in empty halls. Voices, too, whispers that were both pleading and warning.
Release... Do not disturb... It sleeps... The hour is not... Let it out... Never.
They were contradictory, layered upon each other like fractured mirrors. Were they guardians? Or jailers? Warnings left behind, or whispers trying to break free?
The resonance pulled him further into the ravine, toward the base of the highest peak. The visions grew more frequent, more intense, painting a confusing narrative of power, containment, and desperate urgency. His spiritual wounds throbbed, the Warp energy in him reacting violently to the ancient power radiating from the source of the resonance. The power within the mountain repelled the Warp clinging to him like flame repelled shadow — yet in that rejection, it seared deeper. The resonance was order, the Warp was madness, and he was caught in the middle.
He followed the pull, scrambling over fallen adamantium blocks and shattered wraithbone pillars. The air grew heavier, the pressure almost unbearable. The gravity shifts were violent now, making each step treacherous. He focused, trying to filter the distorted elemental frequencies, trying to feel the earth beneath the Warp's static. The resonance was strongest here, vibrating through the rock itself.
It led him to a sheer rock face, devoid of visible entrances. But the feeling was overwhelming – the source was here, buried deep within the mountain. He reached out with what little earthbending energy he could muster, augmented by his raw spiritual sense. The rock felt alien, reinforced with unseen layers of the dark, hard material and laced with veins of the psychic bone-like substance.
His touch sent ripples through the mountain, and the psychic concealment shimmering around the area like heat haze momentarily flickered. For an instant, the rock face seemed to melt away, revealing not solid stone, but a vast, seamless surface of dark metal, humming with contained energy.
It was a vault. Buried, hidden, sealed with incredible power.
He retracted his touch, the concealment snapping back into place, making the rock face look deceptively natural again. But he knew what was there now. He could feel the seals – layers upon layers of psychic force, intricately woven and impossibly strong. They felt like the signature of the golden figure from his fragmented visions, a power so immense it warped the very air around it. And intertwined with the psychic locks were other seals, temporal in nature, trapping this place and whatever was within outside the normal flow of time.
A stasis vault, buried and forgotten, keyed to the power of the Emperor himself and locked away from the ravages of history.
The visions flared one last time, the pleading and warning voices battling for dominance in his mind. He stood before a seal of unimaginable power, containing something the Emperor of Mankind himself had deemed too dangerous, too vital, or too potent for its own age, meant only for a future war that had seemingly never arrived, or was yet to come.
Aang, battered and broken, the chaotic static of the Warp still clinging to his soul, felt the immense weight of what he had stumbled upon. The planet's weird stillness, the echoing ruins, the unbearable pressure – it all coalesced into the silent, imposing presence of the vault. He had found a secret buried deeper than stone, locked away by the hand of a god-like figure. And he was alone with it, the only flicker of life on a world held in a state of perpetual, expectant pause. The silence that followed the visions was broken only by the distorted hum of the ancient seals and the faint, erratic beat of his own weary heart.