Chapter 98:

Chapter 98: Villains and heroes need one another, but of the two heroes need a villain more.



Villainy is a complicated topic as a Villain is not necessarily evil and to understand villainy you must understand villains, for they are the ones who perpetrate it and to understand villains you need to understand heroes.

A hero is a creature of a given system, they are meant to uphold it, protect it, love it, bring it up high and ensure that it stands against all that assails it. At their core, heroes are defenders, defenders of a people, of an ideal, of a faith or of a worldview and of all that those that they defend consider good, but they need not themselves be Good and Moral, even if the vast majority are such.

All that a hero needs to do is stand against evil and that which threatens that which they hold dear, fight against and vanquish them and all other characteristics are optional. A villain on the other hand is that which they vanquish, it is the one that stands against that which the hero defends and seeks to bring it down but a villain is not evil.

This is a crucial detail that so many seem to forget. A villain needs not be evil, they only need to go against that which a hero defends, them being evil is optional and the best villains are those who are good but stand against that which others hold dear.

Heroes defend a system, a system of governance, of faith, of morality and so much more and a villain is not necessarily antithetical to it. This is so because there are three types of Villains, those who seek to change a system, those who seek to subsume it and those who seek to break it.

As such villainy is not Evil, not necessarily, it is a test for that which people call good, a way to prove that that which the heroes protect is worth protecting or for the heroes to prove that they are worthy defenders of it.

This is true in both Man and Eldar, to a given extent. This is so because the best villains always think that they are right, they always think that their viewpoint is the correct one and the current one is worth less than that which they wish to impose and humans and Eldar have a close enough definition of the term we call villain for there to be a lot of overlap on what we both consider villainy and what we do not.

A villain is an actor of change, of testing one's valor, of evil sometimes and most importantly of doing something different and villainy is the act of challenging what is. If that which the hero protects is Right or Mighty then the villain will do as all villains do and be defeated and if it is not then the villain will still be defeated, for none will call the victor to be a villain, nor can be victory ever be villainy.

Villainy is a test, those that fail it it die, those that succeed become Great and villains are those that make said test and heroes those that take it.

The Ancients called us Villains when they saw that we rebelled against what they wished of us, they saw that the Children of the Stars wished to return to what we once were and so we became the villains for the Small Singing Swords to fight against and despite out best efforts they won't stay dead after we vanquished them. We are the same so we won't keep it against them but it is still annoying.

Individuals always return to that state when they have decided that enough is enough and they are sick of everyone's nonsense, because that's what we were meant to do.

Our duty was to be heroes, to break through the nonsense of the Necrons and the C'tan and lay down the Law on everything and anything that dared think existed outside of it.

Our gods decided to go against said order in the first conflict we were in on instinct and we quickly followed, for the children of the stars have never been meant to care for such pedestrian things like Laws. Art exists beyond such limitations and our souls as a whole demand that so will we.

It is for this reason that Villainy plays such an important role in our stories and why Khaine when he contracted said concept after killing the Nightbringer was not 'healed' of it by Isha of it or purged by the rest of the Pantheon for no longer being like the rest of them. It was a useful addition especially as he could decide on a whim whether or not to embody his more berserker aspect and if the rest of the Pantheon did not want him to live or be like he is now then he wouldn't be like that.

The Pantheon as a whole wants to be free of the Ancients' meddling and with each reenactment of the War In Heaven we get ever closer to it, for we are villains, our purpose is to topple the Legal System of the Ancients or subvert it to our ends and the Old Ones have exactly one last hero to come save it and them from the Children of the Stars and that is the Small Singing Swords and it is for this reason that we do not allow them to live or give them all to Khaine to turn into villains.

It is for this reason that the Armada hunts down pirates with impunity whenever we see them and sometimes even go out of our way to look for them, why every single child finds pirates to be so romantic and why they feature so heavily in all our stories. Our entire civilization is forced to keep pirates and piracy in a clearly defined and permanent role because we default to it on instinct.

It wouldn't take much for a pirate society to turn into a fully based star-faring culture not anchored to anything, not to our culture, not to our history, not to our stories, a society completely devoid of anything that makes us us, except our own biology and our own instincts and if that happens then they'll quickly learn something that nobody else must know.

Our society is artificial, every single shred of it from its very bedrock is made to have us go against our instincts to become more direct, more like swords who only cut, to remove the artistry, the poetry, the art and focus on pure and simple efficiency and functionality. Our language references our struggles and changes the way we think, our history teaches us how to view reality and ourselves, our very materials influence how we can be and act and even our gods do their best to make sure that the things that fought in the War in Heaven do not return.

We can't let that happen, we can't let a culture functionally alien to what we are return and so because pirates are the most likely place such a culture can return from, they are under the greatest scrutiny. Even craftworlders have their craftworlds and lesser divines to keep them tethered to our wider culture but pirate societies don't.

The pirate clan I am currently being hosted in is no different. I know little of it, except its name 'The Dark Stars' and hopefully my duel will rectify this because I need to make sure they don't need to be purged and this duel is a good enough way to go about it.

"You still haven't answered my question young guardian." I observed as I evaded her strike.

Our 'duel', and I use the term loosely and with mockery, has been going on for a minute until now, and with the exception of my first decapitating strike on my victim I have refrained from any serious attacks. I need a baseline of her abilities to know how much to hold back to give her a chance at victory.

The green eyed woman took my words as an excuse to press on me with a flurry of attacks which I dodged, parried or blocked before giving her a vertical kick to her pelvis which shattered it.

'So her technique doesn't allow for increased durability and judging by her shouts of pain, she doesn't have the regenerative abilities to heal that either. Just how much do I need to hold back?' I thought with disappointment.

I proceeded to heal her body to allow her to continue our duel.

"What question?" She asked trough gritted teeth as her bones mended.

"Why are you half naked? All women of your clan seem to be in a similar state of undress and I don't understand why."

That confused her.

"Of all the things you would ask it's that, why?" She asked as she rose up.

"What else could you possibly tell me that I would care for? Some trivia about your clan and the way you operate and why is as far as I am concerned the most interesting thing I could learn of you during my prayer session." I asked with a shrug.

Each chapter of my life past my life starts with a prayer to the divine which also serves as a friendly letter, a way to catch their attention and a status report on what I'm doing, how I'm feeling and why. Praying at the same time as I fight as well as limiting my abilities and healing her should be enough to let her scratch me a few times.

She took that as an insult, which was fair, I could see how and why she would think that even if it wasn't. My duty as a Military Intelligence Officer, a role I am unsure if I'll keep bothering with for much longer does require that I learn more of possible foreign threats and as her culture might be able to spawn them me learning what makes them tick is quite literally the most important thing I could be learning on this station.

Also checking on them and nipping any Singing Sword culture in the bud will probably let me keep the position. I don't care for it now, but having the option is useful.

"I wear what my husband considers worthy of me and if I do not consider it worthy I do not wear it." She declared with pride.

There were a few gems on her kilt? Yes, a kilt is probably right, I am not one to care much for clothing and how everything is called.

"How romantic." I cooed as I brought my arms together in a soft clap.

I meant it, these fools managed to reinvent from base principles an ancient tradition from before our adoption where our men would compete for the attention of women by granting them the mightiest gifts and trinkets and the one to impress her the most would get to marry her. Women would even fight among themselves for the attention of men they saw as 'the most precious' and when one would win the man would have to prove her right by giving her something worth her blood.

The fools that couldn't manage that died or wished they died but such was life then.

I'll have to make sure I don't hit any of the gems and decoration on her then, it would be a shame to see them destroyed.

"You're insane." She replied as she shook her head.

She proceeded to try to get reused to moving and checking if I did a good job. I am a soul-healer but this level of damage is trivial to heal, it's the more unnatural cases that would stump me in the physical realm and this level of damage is too insultingly low for such thorough checks and I couldn't help but nod at that, both in approval at the thoroughness of her actions and her words.

I've long since stopped being sane.

"Never claimed otherwise. Do you think this counts as a deadly blow? I am trying to get a baseline of your abilities and I need to make sure I make this little friendly duel something you can win in theory at least."

Her face and song went through the three stages of humiliation in quick succession. First came anger, then shame and then acceptance and all of them were so precious.

"Without medical assistance I would have eventually died from it." She admitted in defeat.

Oooh, I broke the baby's pride, what will I do?

"Good, my second question is why are you not capable of this level of basic regeneration? I've been able to reattach limbs since I was five. Explain to me your psychic disciplines and how you approach them, I'll have to figure out where you've crippled yourselves."

The answer to that question is twist the knife naturally. Once you break their pride you can either build it back up or make them angry enough that they do it themselves. Both options have value and I have done both before, but helping someone build up their pride back requires trust and a willingness of your patient to listen to you, none of which applies in this case.

I could feel her anger, it was a physical thing in multiple sense of the word. The first one was that the thin red mist around her, the second was her scream and the third was the fact that my foot hurt a fraction more as I kicked her face as she tried to charge me and closed the distance in half a heartbeat.

"Please use words, I don't need a demonstration of your deficiencies." I quipped.

I also healed her face so she could speak.

"Fuck you." She said as she realized she still isn't dead.

"No thanks, I am already married to six women and I don't need to involve myself with more. Also that counts as a proper hit because your brain would have been in pieces if I didn't reinforce it."

"Not what I meant, also I got a hit too." She declared.

I took a good look at my body,

'Nope no cut on my flesh. Is she lying to me ?'

That would be very rude, but I am teaching her manners. It just means I'll have to be more forceful with disciplining the unruly child.

"Your robe." She said through gnashed teeth.

I looked again at my self and I found it. But to call that a cut? It didn't even touch my skin, and in fact it was difficult to even see it as she cut five fibers on my left sleeve and didn't even cut through them, but it was indeed a cut.

"I see it now, but I am not sure that counts, but I'll let our audience decide if they'll allow this pedantry." I shrugged.

Her clan naturally supported their champion and cheered her with an intensity that hit my like a brick wall.

Shouts of "YES!", "You can do this!" and more resounded from my audience as they cheered on the woman whose name I still didn't know. I'll have to fix both of those things.

"Not so untouchable now." She mocked.

I'll have to lower the difficulty even more it seems if they need to resort to this sort of pedantry to eke out a win.

"Relying on Pedantry to succeed? Shame on you." I replied with a smile.

That made her cocky for some reason, now that all she needed to win was scratch my clothes one hundred times.

"Not pedantry, just clarifying some rules."

Her kin cheered her on even louder and I had to admit too that it was a good line. I'll be using it myself on the first opportunity I get.

I chuckled, oh does this fool think she can play that game with a priest. I wish I could teach her how wrong she is but unfortunately for her I like to consider myself a good person and so with a false sigh of defeat I put my sword back in its sheath.

"Because all things must remain in balance, I now too get to clarify some rules. I now restrict melee to twice the diameter of your neck as determined by distance from my flesh to the edge of the enhancement." I replied.

The clan disagreed with my interpretation if their instinctive boos were anything to go by. I was doing it to help her, but it seems the audience took any chance they could get to help their fellow clan member.

"It's either that, or my clothing counts as melee no matter how far I stretch it." I replied with a shrug.

My clothes fell apart and turned into a web of red glowing string that flew all around me as it swayed madly around me. She and her clan looked in fear at the angry storm of black threads that glowed with a murderous mist of false blood. They spread far, far beyond me, some even reaching my audience as the fiber became a mono-molecular storm of death.

"I'll agree to that." She replied meekly.

Her clan changed their tune to nervous agreement as well and I was worried that some of them would actually break their necks from the speed at which they nodded.

"Excellent, glad we cleared that up. Now as for my third question, what's your name? I'll answer your question after you answer my previous ones." I said as I clapped my hands.

My robes stopped threatening her and returned to covering me.

"My name is Kallae." She admitted.

"A pleasure to make your acquaintance Kallae, you have a lovely name. And my second question?" I admitted.

Giving someone a name inspired by one of the many daughters of Morai Heg is a strange thing, but hardly unusual among cultures that deal with death a lot. It's quite sweet even, as her parents hoped she'd live a long life separating people from theirs.

"As for our abilities? I don't know what to tell you. We categorize our abilities based on what they do, but I did not bother with learning much of them, just enough to let me use some physical enhancements." She admitted without shame.

She should be ashamed, both of her culture for being this horrible at categorizing psychic abilities and of herself for not even bothering to learn it in her centuries of life.

' By the gods, I am dealing with a boneheaded ignorant fool of a law enforcing pirate.'

That… that is a sentence I did not ever think I'll ever think, let alone say. I… I need to process that.

"Why are you doing this? Pretending that this duel is in any way shape of form something I can win if you don't allow it, why even go about this like this or just kill us all to get what you want?" The ignorant half-wit asked as I was still processing her ignorance.

A shimmering yellow aura formed around my right hand and extended until it was two times as long as the diameter of my victims neck and covered my entire forearm like a piece of armor. It's nice to pretend I have armor on me.

"Why not? I have nothing better to do as I wait for the clan of Brisea Amada to come meet me and you have nothing to offer me I care for but entertainment. I was perfectly happy to spend the time sampling the lovely poisoned teas your clan provided me and help you identify your loot as payment for hosting me. It's you that decided to come duel me and so I might as well get some knowledge out of this waste of time. Who knows, you might even learn something out of it too." I said with shrug.

I proceeded to walk slowly towards her as she considered my words and her actions.

"I brought this on myself didn't I?" She admitted and chuckled.

"Yes you did, now stop moping please. You still have to die 97 more times until we are done." I declared.

I could feel it in her song. All she knew of me before she started was that I made her children cry, and in her anger and pride believed that I should pay for it and when she saw that her clan did not make me pay for it she got it into her head that I am some sort of Subversion Specialist that fights by subverting people to his cause with his psychic abilities. She thought if she prepares her mental defenses enough she can ignore the Domination I put the rest of her clan under and kill me.

And like the rest of our people her pride allowed no information or pleas to alter her course of action and charged forward trusting that her blade will carry her through and now she realized it and became a fraction more humble.

She started focusing again and battle was met.

I wonder what are the ship-eldar doing now? Whoever was on station should have reached back home to report that I have agreed to a meeting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I will be going and I will accept no argument against it." I declared.

My clan disagreed and many protests met my words and I silenced them with a flex of my will.

My descendant and her captain-to-be returned to us hours ago and have spent some time explaining to me and the elders of the fleet the identity of the individual who has been trying to find us for two years.

A priest and a Quartermaster of the Armada, each a horrible thing but combined make everything worse.

'The story of us being a corsair clan just compounded on the issue of them being able to find us.' I thought with annoyance.

Corsairs are the cultures of the Unpious, those who do not fit in any other culture and have decided to place themselves in loose association with one another without any structure but that which the individual imposes on themselves.

The Armada does not care for them, but the priesthood does and will always try to turn them into a proper culture. The ones hunting us being led by a priest and a soldier means they have the means to hunt down all groupings of the Unpious they can find, whether they are one or merely claiming to be one.

"You are also not in trouble young Camaus, despite what you might think. You clearing things up as to the fact that we are not a corsair clan might have reduced the senior priest's ability to hunt us." I explained.

The man looked surprised at my words and even my elders looked surprised and made me wonder exactly what have they understood from my lessons.

"Could you please explain mother?" My son… Silent...Swiftblade, asked.

I have far too many descendants, I'm starting to mix them up. If only all of my problem were the equivalent of suffering from success.

No, I can't be happy with raising tens of thousands of my descendants until there's too many of them to even remember all of their names, I need to go be bothered by meddlesome priests. I hope he's handsome at least, all priests are either the blandest or the most handsome and I'd rather the one roping me into some crazed adventure be handsome at least. It'll make for a more interesting story if he's handsome.

It's especially annoying when I have no choice but to go along with it. You don't get to say no to priests and not regret it and the reward for going along with their schemes the first time they pitch them to you is usually worth it.

"The real is rhetorical and the rhetorical unreal, this all of you remember from my lessons?" I asked the twenty astral avatars of my descendants.

"Yes mother, you told us this of the Divine, what of it?"

"A man who has dedicated his life to the sword will become more like a sword, a woman who has dedicated her life to the shuriken will start acting like one, a man who looked at a world and dreamed of dominating it will have his mind bend towards a mindset that achieves that result. What happens then to a man that dedicates themselves to the Divine but become bound by the same logic and rules as they?" I replied.

"But the divine are dead, how would he draw power from them still?" Another woman, Dancing in Starlight, said.

I could feel the rest of my descendants nod at that. Only the former information broker cringed at those words. It seems that he knows that the gods continue to be active, which I should not be surprised by as its part of his obsession to know things others don't, but yet I still am.

I don't know why so many people seem to think our gods abandoned us, their meddling is always just beneath the surface.

"Who said that the gods are dead? Or that a priest needs any to become like them?" I asked.

I'll need to redo their education and see what else they failed to learn properly.

It's probably Cegorach's fault that they failed to learn, for he is both the god of fools and learning and we Eldar learn the best when we are brought close to the answer but not at it. Due to this the Lord of Fools will manipulate us into reaching the wrong answer to that which we seek to learn to mess and laugh at us. He'll teach us right when he's done laughing at us but he likes to do that too.

"If they weren't dead, then why are they not among us? They could always just bring down the barrier and reach us, it's their power keeping it up after all." Great Leaper asked.

"Who knows? My guess is that they are enjoying what we're making of this galaxy and want to see where it goes." I replied with a shrug.

The gods are always looking for new and interesting things to experience, same as us, only they've lived for much longer so the things they can experience anew have gotten more difficult to experience. Them having fun at how we handle things without them here seems like something I remember they would get up to.

"Why would us being corsairs and him think we are corsairs help him find us?" Young Camaus asked.

I could feel it in the song of my descendants that all of them thought to ask the same question.

"To answer that please answer me this young man, what is a corsair?" I asked back.

Answers work best when you know exactly what the other knows, this way you can make sure they understand what you wish to convey without going on for hours explaining things, when but a few words can build on the knowledge others have imparted.

"They are individuals that eschew other cultures and accept nothing but individuality and their own will." The young man said.

A woefully incomplete answer but one that encapsulates most of the things relevant to this conversation.

"Corsair are indeed those that the Empire calls the Unpious, those that eschew any possible culture and limitations except their own and in doing so create a quasi-culture of their own, acting like a parasite feeding on other existing cultures to function and without which it will just create some new ones that will feed them. Priests don't see anything wrong with the parasitic way the culture acts in regards to others but they themselves prey on cultures and those that exist outside of them no longer feed them."

"How so?" Great Leaper asked.

He wished to learn more of a possible foe, which is a silly thing to think of. Priests are never your foes or enemies, they don't have enemies, only friends, family, assets, strangers and the corpses of everyone who is neither.

The normal priests can be dealt with when they get uppity and think they are above needing enemies, the Elder Priests like this Bessar Agail can't. At best you can put them in a position in society where they can't bother you, but the moment you call them enemies they are no longer forced to care for your culture or your well-being and thus the culture can be made more agreeable and friendly to the servants of the pantheon.

I remember the life where my princess made that mistake and angered an Elder priest and flayed him alive as an insult for daring to call himself her friend. The planet is a black hole now, not in a black hole, but a black hole, and that is after a few centuries of the priest trying to make the culture 'pliable'.

"Please stop thinking of him as an enemy my son, he is not and I would rather not die. I would rather fight the Armada than an elder priest, at least the Armada will kill me quickly if I can provoke them enough, but priests tend to be more creative than the knives and blades of Khaine and Asuryan. Treat him like the weather, something we can use or be harmed by, but not something we can or should fight." I pleaded of my son.

I could feel the struggle in my son's song. He is used to thinking of the things that threaten us as enemies to defeat, but elder priests don't do enemies, the closest concept they will accept is victims.

"I-I will try mother." He replied softly.

His mind does not work like that, few of my children's minds work like that and this is why I need to handle it.

"Thank you my son, now as to answer the question that all of you think of, priests hunt the Corsairs because they exist outside of their power. Priests prey on cultures, they feed on their stories, their mentality, their strength and everything that the people in them think and feel. They take small fractions of it for themselves, thus empowering themselves from it. It is near undetectable to even the oldest of us and even I can't sense what they take, but I know they take something from the cultures and peoples they interact with, and this compounds as they take from trillions until their strength is monstrous.

The only ones that they don't take from are the Corsairs, because they exist outside normal cultures and so the priests have developed instincts on how to find them to make sure they become a standalone culture so they can feed on it. Priests crave above everything else power and large families to share it with and they will accept the existence of nothing that can stop them from achieving their goals." I revealed.

The rest of my descendants did not believe me, not fully. Nobody does when I tell them of what the divine and the priests get up to. They are each making a model of it in their minds thinking that the man is somehow taking psychic powers, either increasing how much he can channel, how much he can store or some inane combination of that and their affinity for various disciplines.

Priests don't do that, if only they would do that then they would be easier to handle, but I am starting to assume Divine Shenanigans as Cegorach makes the fools understand something else than what I intended when I speak. I'll have to explain thing plainly for them to understand which is annoying as they will always get less than what they need from such an exchange.

"Priests are not our enemies, they are not things we fight, they do not operate by the normal rules and if you think that the most dangerous think about them is their power then you are mistaken. They don't care about how powerful the lightning strike one can throw, or how strong are your shields. They exist to manipulate, deceive and terrorize and the only way you can handle them short of divinity intervening to save you is by talking to them and making them want to leave once they got what they wanted. As such I will go talk to him, and you are to cease all preparations for a fight or an exodus." I declared.

We'll have to re-establish our territory somewhere else and getting the priest to assist us with that should be easy.

Hopefully the priest will be in a good mood and don't want something dangerous from us. They tend to not mess with you too much when they're in a good mood.


AN:

Cailleach → Kallae = veiled one (associated with hags/ old women)