Orikan deflects an attack from five Deceiver shards which obliterate six planets casually

"Orikan expected transcendence to feel powerful, thought the energy of the cosmos would throng through his system like floodwater through a dry canyon. He’d wanted to be mighty, shot through with the overspilling pride and vigour of the gods.

It did not feel like that.

Instead, all the other beings seemed so small. Petty. Knotted into the inconsequential entanglements of their finite existence. Pain, pride, fear, excitement, love. All of them meant nothing to the wheeling, colliding systems of the galaxy that he could now see in his mind’s eye. Even his own petty obsession with the path of things to come – so all-consuming – was but the dream of an insect. What purpose, being a diviner, when one saw that there was no such thing as past and future? To a cosmic being, one that saw the curves in the very skin of reality, it was clear that time was but a delusion, a perverted twisting of the eternal present meant to order the lives of those that needed to plant and sow, to guess at how much of their meagre lifespans remained. It no more resembled reality than a paper map did a continent.

Melancholy overtook him, thinking of all the time he’d wasted quarrelling with his rival about past and future. He could not recall the being’s name or face, but an echo of the sly voice remained. No matter, even the most formidable beings from his mortal days would be dust long before Orikan thought to dwell upon them again.

He gazed down at the dim soul-flames, guttering and going out in the battle below. Tried to feel pity for them, and instead could only summon contempt.

Pathetic. All of them struggling, and for what? To save their pitiful civilisations. To spread their influence. To defeat foes. Necron. Aeldari. Human. Ork. Tyranid. Bathing in blood in the misapprehension that the universe belonged to them.

None of them saw the truth. The great universal zodiac, the turning wheel of fortune that brought each race around and around. Sometimes rising, sometimes falling. The aeldari’s time at the top was long over, and yet they fought as if they could reverse the great turning. The humans were following them, their period of apex nearly over. Tyranids and orks, when they had their time at the crest, would likely not appreciate it.

And the necrons. Orikan felt such scorn for them with their impoverished shadow-souls, so dead and stagnant. It embarrassed him how he’d struggled to secure their future – that they had survived the wheel’s descent and were rising again.

In truth, he suddenly understood why the C’tan had burned the necrontyr in the biotransference forges and gorged themselves on the souls. Felt glad for it. Only wished he had been there to sate himself.

For the only thing he felt more than contempt was hunger. Hunger for life-energy that these sapped metal bodies could not provide.

Yet in the centre of the candle-flame battle line, he could see one that had energy to spare. A blazing figure. A C’tan.

The transcendent energy being that was Orikan swept low, ethereal body – prismatic and shifting in hue – sweeping through arks and Tomb Blades, gathering strength by skimming the top of the necron ranks, lapping whatever small energies he could from their dull lights.

They fell in his wake, lifeless and depowered.

A large thing startled and snapped at him, teeth closing on part of his drifting energy-shroud. He kicked out and pulverised the dumb beast, crushing every bone in its thick body and sending it flying like a toy. A rider – brighter than the rest – tumbled from its back and snuffed out.

The transcendent being cared not, for the blazing one stood in front of him. Its face, twisted into a look that a vestigial memory interpreted as amusement, could not hide the way its aura quailed as he approached.

The blazing one leapt backward and swept a hand through the air, and in the transcendent being’s new vision, he saw that the enemy passed its forearm through the fabric of space-time and gathered a black hole around its wrist like a vambrace. A shining fist, radiating so much power that the transcendent being nearly doubled over in a craving, blasted a stream of compressed matter that contained the whirl of galaxies long swallowed.

Yet millions of years of study had taught the being to manipulate the aether. Only a lack of sufficient energy had constrained him. The transcendent being once known as Orikan tore a hole in the universal skin, a portal through which could be seen a star field and a collection of planets, and wielded it as a shield.

Compressed matter tore through the rent in space, wiping six planets out of existence.

Inhabited worlds? It did not matter.

The transcendent being released the wormhole and dived at the blazing one, tearing at it with hands he’d fashioned into long grasping claws.

The two beings rose into the vaults. Locked together. Biting and clawing, burning the energy output of several industrial worlds for each second of combat. Each wound bled the furnace of creation into the physical plane, each shot of star-stuff gobbled by the famished vampire that had once been Orikan the Diviner."

-The Infinite and The Divine