Vulkan Lives

‘What is this place?’ My voice echoed as I asked the question of the figure standing opposite me.
Its face was hooded, and the rest of its body draped in robes, but I could tell immediately that it wasn’t human. Too tall, too slight. I knew an eldar when I saw one. This one was a farseer.
‘Nowhere of consequence, a meeting place is all,’ he said in a low, mellifluous voice.
‘You speak Gothic?’ I asked, though he had just given me the answer to that question.
The eldar nodded.
He wore black, with strange sigils and eldritch runes stitched into the slightly iridescent cloth. A weeping eye, a pyramid, a pair of bisected squares rendered into an angular figure of eight – I could not read them but suspected they were symbols of the farseer’s power and even origin. Though his face was concealed by the hood, and perhaps an even more effective and unnatural concealment, the edges of his aquiline features were suggested where the shadows lessened.
In his right hand, which was hidden beneath a black glove, he clutched a staff. Like the runes described on his robes, the figure’s staff was fashioned from the same strange bone-like material forming the chamber. Its peak was a simple eye and teardrop design.
I believed that this too was a glamour, in the same way that the eldar had masked his true appearance from me.
‘You are dreaming, Vulkan,’ he said, not stepping towards me, not moving at all, not even breathing.
‘That isn’t air you are taking into your lungs. That isn’t light making your pupils retract. You are not really here.’
‘Who are you?’ I demand, angry at being manipulated by this psychic passenger.
‘It doesn’t matter. None of this is real, but what is very real is what I am about to impart to you. The very fact you have not chosen to attack me suggests I chose wisely.’
‘You make it sound like you’ve tried this before,’ I said.
‘Not I, one of my kindred. Despite my warning not to, he proceeded anyway.’ There was resignation in the eldar’s voice, changing its melodic tone into something approaching regret. ‘It went poorly, I’m afraid, and so we are here. You and I.’
My eyes narrowed, the words of the alien coiling in my mind, unfathomable and deliberately obscure.
‘Are you a spirit, a wraith followed me from Kharaatan?’
I sensed the ghost of a smile in my strange companion’s reply.
‘Something like that, but not from Kharaatan. Ulthwé.’