The moment you jack your dataspike into the starship’s bridge interface, reality fractures. The vessel’s command throne, already warped by profane sorcery, becomes an extension of your flesh. Cables burrow into your augmetics, veins entwining with fiber-optic conduits. The binary-chants of the Machine God distort into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and reversed scripture.
Your ocular augments flicker, shifting between perception of reality and something… other. The bridge is gone. In its place, a vast and endless space unfolds, filled with floating datarunes—each a shifting, liquid sigil of impossible geometry. They spiral and dance like a flock of carrion birds, forming temporary shapes before dissolving and reforming anew. Every rune pulses with knowledge, but the moment your mind grasps at meaning, the symbols twist and mock you, morphing into flashes of scenes too vivid to be false, too real to be trusted.
A datarune spirals into your vision, searing your mind with a new truth: the past.
You see Mars, ancient and fertile, the red sands tamed by the Omnissiah’s will. You see yourself— or someone like you—walking through a temple with a data-stave of bone, speaking words of power that taste like iron and oil.
A figure appears—tall, radiant, and draped in flowing ceramite robes of gold and crimson. It is not human. It is the Avatar of the Machine God, taking the form of a towering female presence, its face a shifting cascade of divine logic and flame-wreathed steel. Its eyes burn with the cold brilliance of awaking stars, and its voice is the hum of quantum states in perfect harmony. It raises a hand, offering something—a fragment of knowledge you were never meant to have—before its form shatters into writhing serpentine code.
Another datarune spirals into your vision, searing your mind with a new truth: the present.
You are part of this very starship, and the bridge is wrong. The walls pulse like muscle, the cogitator banks weep molten brass, and the servitors chant in a hundred inhuman tongues. At the center, a shape looms—a figure wreathed in radiant, shifting light. Its face is a mask of infinite reflections, each showing a different version of you: young, old, robed in Mechanicus finery, or stripped of all humanity, reduced to wires and screaming data.
You see a star system, its heart a raging blue giant, its brilliance illuminating the planets caught in its gravitational grip. The void churns with crystal debris, wreckage from civilizations long reduced to dust. From the event horizon of a collapsing star, a colossus is rising —its form almost familiar, built of whirling dark runes and fragments of forbidden blueprints. It turns, and for a fleeting moment, it meets your gaze.
Another datarune spirals into your vision, searing your mind with a new truth: the future.
You are still aboard this starship, but you are no longer a man, no longer a Tech-Priest. You are the ship now, your mind stretched thin across the daemon-infested hull, your thoughts fragmented into a thousand screaming subroutines. You feel yourself locked in place, not as a consciousness but as a extension to something vast and unspeakable. Your pain is endless, your will overridden, your identity a whisper drowned beneath the roars of the Immaterium.
Through corrupted auspex arrays, you witness the galaxy burning. Imperial worlds blacken and wither under a spreading, oily stain, a churning warp storm that devours light, devours matter, devours galaxy itself. Space weeps, the stars collapsing one by one into infinite tempest. There is no hope. No salvation.
And in the end of it all, you see yourself—a part of the monstrous intelligence, no longer human, no longer even machine, but a tormented spark in the vast, cackling mind of something beyond comprehension. You are eternal. You are suffering. You are part of it now.
The datarunes swirl into a final formation—a spiraling vortex of code programming your doom—before everything snaps back to the present.
You are seated in the command throne. Its cables are inside you, fused with your augmetics, burrowing deeper, searching. You feel them slithering through your neural pathways, threading through your spinal column, coiling around your thoughts like cyber-serpents. The connection is no longer a mere interface—it is an intrusion, an invasion of something other, something that does not belong in the pure logic of the Omnissiah’s design.
The bridge is now aware of your existence.
Ignis Aeternus WH 40K campaign notes 