M39.998
The air within the Golden Throne's chamber was not air at all—it was a suffocating current of power, agony, and time, condensed into shimmering haze. The Emperor, once a man and now a corpse of pure will, did not breathe. He radiated. His attention no longer lingered on the encroaching physical threats to his shattered Imperium, nor even the tides of heresy. His vigilance had turned inward—focused on the narrative threads of the galaxy itself.
And they were unraveling.
Through eyes that no longer blinked, he saw it: the Joker, unbound by reality. No longer a man, but a metaphysical infection—a jester-king of cosmic entropy, an avatar of meaningless comedy, crowned by Tzeentch and Slaanesh. Insight into past and future had been gifted to him, yes, but worse—he could now see the story. And not just see it—twist it.
The Great Game faltered under his influence. The gods warred over tragedy, ambition, betrayal. Joker mocked them all, reducing grand narrative arcs into absurd farce. He didn't conquer planets—he defiled meaning. He turned primarchs into punchlines. Even the Warp, drunk on emotion and myth, began to choke on his laughter.
And so, the Emperor reached out—not with armies, not with sermons, but with story. Across the bleeding Warp, deep within the spirals of the Webway, another laughed—a god not of madness, but of defiant mockery. Cegorach, the Laughing God, whose plays had always been jests against fate itself.
Their alliance was silent but absolute.
This war could not be won with bolters or daemons. It was a battle for narrative sovereignty. And so, together, they cracked the veil—not to send forth champions of their own, but to invite foreign wildcards. Archetypes untethered from grimdark inertia. Symbols.
One such breach tore open across the membrane of realities—not in the void, but in the cold, rain-drenched skies of Gotham.
---
The rain clung to gargoyles like dying penitents, sluicing down stained concrete to pool in alleyways soaked in old blood and older sin. Neon signs blurred into halos. High above the city, atop the asylum that had defined so much of his war, stood Bruce Wayne. The Batman.
He was older now. Not weaker, but heavier. His victories had added scars, not peace.
Arkham Asylum was silent for the first time in memory. The Joker—the real Joker—was gone. No tricks. No return. Gotham had sighed in exhausted relief. But Batman had not.
His war was over. And yet the soldier remained.
Then the world cracked.
It wasn't a physical rupture, but something deeper. The reflection of himself—dark knight, brooding savior, traumatized child—shattered. Color bled into the sky in hues that had no name. Geometry buckled. Sound collapsed into silence and then back into laughter—deep, echoing, eternal.
He stood no longer on stone, but in a place that defied dimension. A theatre of sorrow and motley light. A mask floated before him—half-joy, half-weep—framed in a cloak of falling stars.
Cegorach.
The name pressed into his mind like a dream too vivid to be imagined. The voice came not as sound, but as meaning.
> "The tale collapses. The trickster—your trickster—has ascended. He devours narrative like a child tearing pages from a book. This galaxy was never written for your kind. And yet, it needs you."
Batman saw it.
A galaxy choked with churches of violence, factories of war, monuments to pain. Angels in armor culling heresy with fire. And among them, laughing through the Warp, a shape he knew too well—Joker, grown vast, unshackled, spreading theatrical death as comedy across ten thousand worlds.
> "They do not understand him," Cegorach murmured. "They play tragedy. He plays mockery. Only one of your kind has ever stopped him. You are not a god. You are not a daemon. You are a man who told the abyss: not tonight."
Bruce's hands clenched. The fatigue fell away. Not forgotten, but irrelevant.
> "Then send me."
The world exploded into golden white.
---
He awoke on metal grating slick with grime. The air tasted of rust, blood, oil. No rain. No sky.
He was not in Gotham.
Above him loomed a vaulted ceiling of gothic steel, festooned with brass skulls and tarnished saints. Vox-units whispered litanies. Lumen-globes flickered like dying stars. He was in a void station, orbiting some forgotten world, deep in the heart of an empire too massive to be sane.
His armor was different. Jet black, matte and shifting. Lighter than his old suit, but stronger. Blackstone. He felt it humming against his skin, pushing back the pressure of unseen voices.
The people… were not people as he knew them.
Lobotomized servitors shuffled on rails. Tech-priests, barely human, chanted binaric prayers. Fear ruled their lives. Faith replaced thought. This was no civilization—this was a machine cult, stitched from suffering and duty.
He moved silently into the shadows, adapting instantly. Some instincts never faded.
He saw it almost immediately—the signs. Blood on walls. Corpses arranged in poses. One body propped up with a sign in a child's scrawl: "HAVING A LAUGH?"
Faces twisted into mockery. Voices cackled with forced glee. It wasn't just murder. It was performance. Ritualized absurdity. Joker's mark. Not just death—narrative vandalism.
The Blackstone hummed louder as whispers crawled at the edge of his consciousness: jokes without punchlines, screams turned into laugh tracks, sanity folded into irony. He stood alone—but not lost.
This wasn't his city.
But it was his war.
The Dark Knight slipped into the corridor shadows, vanishing like myth. The galaxy had no word for him yet. But soon, it would.
And when the Joker—twisted, empowered, laughing across stars—next looked into the mirror of himself?
He would see a bat-shaped shadow falling across the cosmic stage.