The searching, razor-tipped coils lit him up inside with a sensation Trazyn had not felt since an age when stars fell and gods walked. It confused him, made him question what kind of malfunction this C’tan had wrought. But then the tendrils gored deeper into his systems and the sensation overwhelmed him so thoroughly that the term came unbidden to his neural matrix.
Pain, said the Deceiver, its full lips twisting upward. And while the master shard’s teeth were pointed, Trazyn saw that this one had stubby, short teeth the color of promethium crude. This is pain. Did you not hope Nephreth could put you in bodies of flesh, my child? So you could once again experience sensation?
Trazyn struggled, tried to look towards his fallen obliterator, but a tendril snaked into his metal hood and around his throat, immobilizing his damaged neck actuators.
Don’t you dare look away, the Deceiver snarled. There was no hint of the mock roguishness; all cleverness had fled. All that remained was a depthless malice. A need to cause suffering that, were it to occur in a mortal creature, would’ve been labelled as pathological.
But there was nothing abnormal about this Deceiver shard. Cruelty was the natural state of the C’tan, and Trazyn could only imagine it was drinking whatever negative emotion that could be lapped off a necron.

The Infinite and the Divine