Chapter 34: This Is Your Inevitable Destiny. Do Not Try to Escape It.
Hearing her true name called out by a human, Yvraine's perpetual composure and elegance broke for one brief and involuntary moment. The next instant, the shock collapsed into a fury that showed clearly on her face.
"You lowly bald monkey. How do you know my true name?!"
She struck like a viper that has been prodded into motion, and the two of them collided in the narrow compartment, sparks from clashing metal throwing hard light across the dim lowest deck.
But within a few exchanges, Duvette was completely outmatched.
At this point in her life, Yvraine was in the depths of her rebellion. She had discarded the rigid doctrines of Biel-Tan Craftworld, stepped onto the corsair's path, and fought her way through a brutal Eldar pirate crew to the position of its leader. The close-quarters skill she had forged in that crucible of repeated life-and-death encounters could toy with a fully armoured Astartes and take his head before the Space Marine had time to form a response.
Even with [Flesh Engine] running and the aura of the Star of Terra behind him, Duvette could only barely hold his ground against the storm of her twin blades. The void blades moved like fangs, pressing his defence hard with every exchange.
He gritted his teeth, forced a lethal horizontal slash aside, and roared at her: "What's the matter? Does hiding behind a false identity make it any easier to run from the rigid doctrines of the Biel-Tan Craftworld?!"
"Shut your mouth!"
The words cut straight to the nerve. Yvraine's fury detonated. She stopped holding back the long-suppressed psychic power within her, no longer caring about drawing the gaze of She Who Thirsts.
An invisible and extremely powerful psychic shockwave slammed into Duvette's chest and hurled him back hard.
Psychic ability?
Duvette stabilised himself. Rather than fear, a savage expression crossed his face. Using psychic power against me?
He activated [Silence].
In an instant, an absolute dead silence that belonged to nothing in the physical universe crashed down across the space.
Every Eldar present felt, in that same second, as though an invisible hand had seized their souls in a crushing grip. A void-like emptiness and a sensation like suffocation swallowed them all at once.
As a race bound to the Warp at both the biological and soul level, every Eldar in the space carried innate psychic potential, and right now they had been plunged without warning into something their souls registered as caustic poison.
Not far away, the Shadowseer who had maintained her mystery throughout the encounter let out a suppressed, agonised cry and fell back in rapid, frantic retreat.
Yvraine took the worst of it. An indescribable nausea hit her. Terror arose from somewhere beneath conscious thought. Physical agony came with it. She stared at Duvette with wide eyes and an expression of pure horror.
To her perception, Duvette had become a silent black hole, devouring all psychic energy, in absolute violation of natural law.
"You... what have you done?!" Blood appeared at the corner of her mouth.
Duvette gave no answer. He gathered the savage force building within him, veins standing out visibly under the skin, heart pounding like a war drum. He had thirty seconds before the skill ended, and he needed Yvraine critically wounded before they ran out.
He launched himself forward. The fight resumed.
This time everything was reversed. Under the brutal suppression of [Silence], Yvraine's speed and reaction time were forcibly blunted. Her movements went sluggish. She had completely lost the advantage.
"What is your objective?!" Duvette drove hard with the power sword, each step pressing her further. "Why attack us?!"
A sword strike knocked her back. Through the physical agony, Yvraine managed a mocking cold smile and said nothing.
Duvette beat her twin blades aside and his peripheral vision caught the Shadowseer at a distance, who had pulled back her hood under the extreme pain, revealing a pale, stricken face. A name surfaced in his mind, the one who had called herself a weaver of fate.
"Sylandri!" Duvette shouted.
The Shadowseer's body jerked. The expression that appeared on her face was shock she could not conceal even if she had tried.
Her reaction confirmed what he had guessed. He connected it to the earlier moment: the Shadowseer's sharp cry when she had first seen him. The pieces locked together. He turned back to Yvraine and drove the accusation home.
"You want to change your destiny. You didn't come to raid us. You came looking for me!"
"And what of it?" Yvraine was bleeding from every orifice under [Silence]'s pressure, but she was not retreating. "If you changed their destinies, you can change mine too."
Both of them abandoned defence completely.
Yvraine left deep cuts along Duvette's body and arms with her void blades. Duvette's power sword tore savagely through her pirate mesh armour in return, and blood flew from both of them in the exchange.
"You cannot escape your destiny, Yvraine!" Duvette drove into her blades rather than giving ground, his voice cold and without any room in it. "You are destined to become the chosen of Ynnead, the Death God!"
"What?!"
The forbidden name of Ynnead rang through the lowest deck. Both Yvraine and Sylandri, in the instant they heard what Duvette had just said, had their minds stop completely.
How did this human know of Ynnead? What did he mean that she was destined to become the Death God's chosen? Yvraine's thoughts went somewhere blank for a moment.
Duvette exploited that 0.1-second opening without mercy.
The power sword swept upward in a single diagonal arc and took Yvraine's arm off at the shoulder. Severed limb and blood flew together through the air.
Only by bringing Ynnead's chosen to the edge of death, or killing her outright, would the awakening happen ahead of its time. Guilliman's return could not occur without her and the Cronesword she would carry. She was one of the necessary conditions. That was what his transmigrator knowledge told him, and he had acted on it.
At the instant she lost the ability to fight back, Duvette's thumb pressed the activation rune on the sword's grip. He deactivated the power field with precision.
The now-physical blade drove forward. With the controlled sound of steel entering flesh, it ran through Yvraine's abdomen. Had the disintegration field still been active, it would have completely shredded her organs. Without it, the physical penetration alone would critically wound her and bring her to the edge of death without crossing it.
The critically wounded Yvraine trembled. She looked down, unable to fully process what she was seeing, at the cold blade in her abdomen.
The Eldar pirates around them saw their leader struck down and threw themselves forward with screaming fury, heedless of the suppression still in effect, driving toward Duvette to pull her back.
He pulled the blade out, bringing a spray of alien blood with it.
He reactivated the disintegration field. The pale blue arc crackled and snarled. A single horizontal sweep drove the leading pirates back.
But he did not press the kill. He stepped back half a pace, deliberately, and let the remaining pirates seize the critically wounded Yvraine and drag her stumbling and falling toward the passage's depths.
Duvette raised one hand and stopped the 112th soldiers at his back before they could begin the pursuit.
He watched the Eldar retreat like something driven from cover, and leaned on the blood-soaked power sword. His voice came out hard as cold iron and it carried through the lowest deck for a long time after he had stopped speaking.
"Accept your destiny. This is a responsibility you can never escape."