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"They say mages are getting rarer."

The Star-witch stopped its work for a moment to look up at the ersatz expedition's technician, its hands pausing over the wards it was attempting to untangle, ghostly traceries of thaumic energy glowing like veins in its mage-sight.

"What? "

The witch asked, annoyed at the interruption, the gleaming black eyes of its symbiotic mutation blinking between the strands of its sand-colored fur in a pattern of irritation.

The Tech was a tall bovine cyborg with white fur, who had a Glittering Church cloak draped down to her metal hooves, and a bronzed bull’s skull for a face that stared back at it with sodium-yellow eyes, expression immovable.

Vizatha wondered for a fleeting moment if that was her skull.

"Just an idle thought, Vizatha. First time I've watched an actual mage work up close."

She replied after a moment, looking away towards the expedition's third member, the power-armored Warden of the Veil who'd hired them, standing silent in his dark indigo carapace, emblazoned with dark green protective sigils and marked on the right shoulder-plate with "XIX" in black.

He gave both of them a laconic nod, he just needed the door open.

Vizatha turned its attention back to said door, looking up at the construction, ancient and alien, predating even its Exodite ancestors. The door was a hexagonal slab of dull purple metal, seemingly wrought of the same material as the rest of the buried structure, perhaps the favored materials of whatever long dead race built it, covered entirely by webs of interwoven wards, magic encoded into physical space with Archon language and divine geometry.

Of the three present, Vizatha was the only one who could read such things, aided by the whispered knowledge of the starflesh co-inhabiting its body.

It could tell the wards were meant to keep something in far more than to keep them out, though they would still prove fatal if not deactivated properly.

Why did the Warden want this crypt open so badly as to hire something like It, against the codes and practices of his order?

It shakes the thought from its head-the pay was good, the job was simple-focus.

It took a deep breath of dry sepulchral air and raised its claws to the door, channeling the eldritch energies of its hybrid soul to reach out like tendrils and touch the wards of the door, physical eyes closed.

The wards spread out before its Inward Eyes, layers of them numbering dozens like a complex geometric puzzle interlacing through each other in four dimensions, a spiraling madness of protective and offensive encodings.

Its soul's tendrils reached for the outer edges, and traced along, finding the points where the patterns link into the symbols which energize them.

Each source of energy is driven through by a tendril, its enthropic touch draining them cold, taking down a layer of the pattern, weakening others in a measured disassembly.

Step by step, slowly, until there was only the physical-mechanical interlock holding the door shut.

All the while feeling an icy warmth in its body with every drained pattern, the Starflesh symbiont showing its own appreciation in drips of neurotransmitters into their entwined nervous systems, little shots of dopamine, tastes of serotonin, washes of cortisol antagonists to steady its host's nerves.

It heard a click from outside itself, and opened its outward eyes to the sound of a half-sarcastic clap from behind it.

Vizatha turned to see the Tech clapping slowly, chromium paws clasping against one another with a metallic ring.

The Warden ignored both of them, walking to the door and drawing his weapon from over the back of his towering power armor, an exodite-sized war pick with a thrumming gravitic driver grafted onto it.

He turned back to both of them as he raised it, offering only

“Back up"

in warning before slamming it down against the door with a thunderous impact, the metal screaming as it began to cave inwards under the blows, showers of sparks forming parabolic planes around the gravitic driver before burning away entirely.

Vizatha jumped back, instinctively raising a shield of rippling shadows over itself as the Tech laughed, unphased by the impact or its reaction.

The warpick struck again, and this time it ruptured through the door with a hiss of depressurization, the sharp acrid smell of machine oil gone off mingling with a bitter briny aroma in a familiar cocktail, associated with the Outside’s manifestations in realspace.

The Symbiont chittered in Vizatha's mind, seeming to respond with vague recognition; a trickle of incoherent sense-memories flashing through its head. The Tech's sodium-light eyes glowed a little brighter in the dim of the tunnel, scanning the trace gasses or perhaps the door itself.

The third impact cleaved downwards, tearing through the door-which must have been fifteen centimeters thick at least-and splitting the metal in twain from impact point to the floor, a wide enough gap for the Warden to force through in his power armor, leaving a comfortably broad passage for the other two.

The Tech looked down at Vizatha and shrugged, striding through the gap on the Warden’s heels, her storm-grey cloak billowing behind her as her hooves clicked against the metallic floor.

Vizatha shivered and followed on all fours, the weasel-thing’s mutated paws feeling the cool, dry metal beneath turn wet and frigid as it entered the chamber beyond the door, senses soaking it all in.

The chamber was cavernous, edges not visible in the half-light emitted by the only luminous object in the room, a geometric crystal vault containing an amorphous shadow suspended in cloudy, faintly phosphorescent pink liquid.

Vizatha's starflesh seemed to push away from the vault, a primal revulsion it couldn't help but share.

The smell here was overwhelming, salt and oil, both somehow turned rancid and bitter, its animal hind-brain and eldritch symbiont both begging it to turn away and flee.

Instead it watched as the Tech and the Warden approached the vault together.

"Open it."

The warden commanded sternly, looking at the shadow within.

The Tech made a clicking noise, walking a slow circle around the Vault, taking her time in replying.

"Shouldn't we try to figure out what exactly is inside first?"

The Warden's grip tightens on his weapon.

"I didn't pay you to second-guess me. This is an extermination."

“Yes, yes, of course. And whatever this thing is, you intend to destroy it?”

“Yes.”

“Far be it from me to impede you, then”

She replied, tapping a metallic claw of the geometric crystal of the vault, shimmering threads of psionic energy linking between her clawtips and the crystal.

"But..if I just open it we could well be facing down a Truthbearer or worse. There must be a protocol for-ah, here we are."

The Warden tapped his foot, impatient.

"Yes?"

"Found a sequence that should leave the subject temporarily sedated-long enough for you to do whatever your order does to banish such things."

She replied, tapping a rhythmic sequence on the surface of the crystal, which began to dissolve, letting the pink fluid, which Vizatha’s symbiont suggested was some kind of amniotic broth, spill out as the creature within was exposed to the open air, a mass of darkly glistening flesh the color of an old bruise, seeming to shudder as the noxious air hit it.

The tech cursed and teleported backwards in a flash of cyan psionic light, to put more space between herself and whatever was about to happen next.

The Warden raised his weapon, but didn’t get a chance to swing, as the Thing inside the melting vault howled like a dying star and plunged into him, warding sigils and metallic armor both dissolving like wet paper in rain as the Outsider awakened and burrowed into the Warden's chest like a revenant made of acid and hate.

The starflesh intertwined with Vizatha’s tissues screamed, surging the Witch’s nervous system full of adrenaline and a cocktail of alien chemistry, sharpening its instincts to a razor's edge as the moment slowed down in its perception.

That Thing had to be put down, before it consumed them.

The tech threw a psionic shield over herself as the flesh-fluid tendrils of the Outsider begun to extricate themselves from the consumed Warden, all happening with glacial slowness to the Witch as it called its magic to itself, shivering as the familiar cold shock runs through its body, probing tendrils of its blackened soul reaching out for the horror from beyond the Veil, met by the horror's own eldritch presence, forcing the two mages into a duel.

The second split into a fractal eternity as the two mages locked each other's attention, an ancient, newly awakened Outsider disoriented from eons of forced sleep and a terrified mortal witch with its own bound Native Outsider feeding it power and knowledge, both of them setting storms of magic into motion around themselves in that eternal second-layers of protective workings, deflections and shields and negations mingling with offensive workings; disintegrations, banishments, enthropic blasts, visible only to their inward eyes, hanging fragile and glasslike in ever-expanding halos of glyphic traceries around both for just that moment.

And then, with a screech and a whispered prayer, the magic unleashed itself in a hellstorm of arcane violence that filled the chamber with screaming frigid unlight.

And then it's over.

Vizatha could smell ash, felt a lingering cold seeping into its trembling body, and could taste smoke, but all that confirms it won.

Its eyes opened to see where the Outsider had been, where the vault had been, the Warden had been, where now there was only a flurry of ash trapped in black ice, with no trace of any of the prior three remaining, but Vizatha hardly cared, hardly noticed as it turned to begin its long walk to the surface, shaken but alive.