A charge fills the air in the bunker. It’s no sorcery, no warp magic, no remnant of the Daemonic echoing back from some darker future - nothing so gauche as that. It’s all too human. Bad breath, hope, fear, sweat - all shot through with a mad vein of excitement, of thrilling rumour that<em>something</em>is about to be done, some mad, glorious, warp-blessed Charge of the Dark Brigade through the greenskin lines to the spaceport. The tension in the overcrowded hallways of Bulwark Taliwa is palpable, with the unsettling instability of contact explosive, but some lingering sense of solidarity, camaraderie, and social reserve is keeping it from boiling over. For now.<br/><br/>The thing calling itself Azhi Dahāka moves between them - around, under, through, and over this heaving, impenetrable matrix of scared trapped flesh - like a bead of quicksilver trapped under glass, darting through gaps far too narrow for other humans to slip through, zir physically - and ontologically ravaged form making it easy to move through them at angles only approximately describable in three dimensional space. Many of zir kind - those truly touched by the Pantheon, and by Chaos Unshattered - would see such a concentration of vulnerable humanity as a slaughterhouse, a bounty of skulls to be harvested and fear to drink in - but not zir. Zie only feels a kind of worried remorse for them - those seeking help from fickle gods and their fickler champions, those who don’t yet have the gifts and blessings zie possesses, who’ll never live to blossom as they should. Zie only feels remorse - well, remorse, and hunger.<br/><br/>They don’t have what zie’s looking for. Their bodies are given life by souls too warm and diffuse for zir to grasp properly, and if they’re desperate enough to come running here for aid, then the belongings they carry won’t provide adequate nutrition for zir, not enough to keep body and soul intertwined. Zie needs to move on.<br/><br/>There is something here, though. Something alive, some faint demigod-in-the-machine is flickering weakly down in the bowels of the Bulwark, and it draws Azhi towards it in lazily circling arcs. Down here - amongst rotting metal and stagnating water - the press of bodies isn’t quite as intense, and zie can’t rely on the anonymity of the crowd to divert attention any more. Ziie pulls up the hood of zir robe, hoping to pass as a low-level drudge or technomat - a red robe’s a red robe, right, and people hardly ever look under the hood? - and presses deeper into the bunker. There’s someone - more than one person, in fact - down there. Well-armed, by the spoor of the machine spirits of their gear - and touched by the warp. Good. This world was seeming a little lonely.<br/><br/>Azhi’s not precisely the most stealthy person. Zie’s got no commando training, and zir limbs have got a little too heavy, stiff, and, let’s face it, metallic, to creep upon anyone. But zie does have experience in looking innocuous, unthreatening, the sort of lowly labourer - little more than a servitor - that people tend not to bat an eye at zir. And so - not quietly, precisely, but certainly inconspicuously, zie begins to slowly limp towards the group of fellow devotees of Chaos meeting down in the depths of Bulwark Taliwa, hoping to get some sense of who they are before zie strikes.