Cooking for Cato while only wearing an apron with the ultima symbol on it? Yay? Nay?
Anon.... my friend... Do you intend to end me?!!!! Because I may or may not have written a small snippet inspired by this!!
(throws smutty fic your way and runs)
Taglist: @beckyninja, @solareias, @owltxt, @incrediblethirst, @mehiwilldoitlater, @passionofthesith, @gh0st-nebulae, @twentyplusinterestsinatrenchcoat, @blukitty40k, @w-40k-2 @vspin, @godzo @gravedwe11er @bunny-fair @myresin
(Honestly... this is so silly! And I am so sorry if this is ASS! Also, this was written in like two hours of caffeinated hyperfocus! Please forgive me if there are typos!)
Cato Sicarius x f!serf Reader
Cato chances upon his serf cooking a nice dinner for him, clad only in an apron!! (~4.2K words... SHOOT ME!!!!!)
Rating: EXPLICIT
Trigger Warning: NSFW, 18+ only! P-in-V action, oral sex, slight teasing etc. etc.
The battle barge had no business smelling like cardamom.
That was Cato Sicarius’s first thought when the doors to the private galley slid open before him.
It was not an officer’s galley, nor the vast furnace-roaring kitchens that fed mortal crew by the thousand. This was a small chamber tucked away in the reserved decks of the vessel, close enough to his quarters to be convenient, far enough from the arterial corridors that few ever passed by unless they had reason. Stainless counters gleamed beneath lumen strips. Brass pipes hummed softly in the bulkheads. A pot simmered over a controlled heat plate, releasing fragrant curls of steam into air more accustomed to recycled oxygen, sacred unguents, machine oil, and the metallic ghost of blood.
Cato stopped on the threshold.
You were there… at the counter…. wearing nothing except an apron.
Not just any apron, mind you… The fabric was deep blue, tied at your neck and waist, falling just low enough to cover the front of your body and scandalously little else. When you turned to fetch something from the counter next to you, he saw that the apron had, across the chest, stitched in gold thread, the Ultima symbol.
His Chapter’s symbol.
The proud mark of Ultramar displayed over bare skin, with your shoulders naked, your thighs bare, and the curve of your backside visible every time you shifted your weight.
Cato stared.
For a second, the Commander of the Victrix Guard, Grand Duke of Talassar, hero of countless campaigns and scourge of Xenos horrors, stood completely silent.
Then his jaw tightened.
“You are aware,” he said, voice dangerously low, “that this is a battle barge.”
You glanced back over your shoulder, stirring something fragrant in the pan. Your eyes were bright with mischief.
“I had noticed, my lord.”
“You are aware that this vessel contains warriors of the Adeptus Astartes.”
“Yes.”
“And Serfs.”
“Naturally.”
“And Administratum officials.”
“Unfortunately.” Your voice had taken on a slight lilt of amusement, making him close his eyes, as though he prayed for patience.
“Then perhaps you can explain why you are standing in a galley half-dressed in the heraldry of Macragge.”
You turned then, and the apron shifted with you, the fabric dragging over your breasts in a way that made his gaze drop before he could stop himself. You saw that subtle movement and a smile bloomed on your lips as you watched what felt like fortress gate crack open.
“I am dressed, my lord,” you said sweetly. “I am wearing an apron.”
His eyes narrowed.
“That is not clothing.”
“It is if one is cooking.” You blinked, almost sincere in your demeanour.
“It is if one is cooking while wearing other garments beneath it.”
You tilted your head. “Well… there’s hardly a rule that states it absolutely must be so, my lord.”
A faint muscle in his cheek moved.
“You test me.” His voice was gravely as he took a step closed.
“Constantly.” You smiled sweetly as you took in the sight of the demigod of a man in front of you.
“You delight in it.”
“Shamelessly so!”
“You will be the death of my discipline.” His eyes bore into your very soul as he said it.
You turned back to the pan, humming as though that were a compliment. “I made you something from Talassar. Well, close enough. The ship stores did not have everything, because apparently battle barges are stocked for war and not romance, which feels like a tragic administrative oversight.”
He stepped fully inside. The doors sealed behind him with a soft hydraulic sigh.
The sound seemed to change the room.
You felt it in your skin before he touched you. The way the air grew heavier. The way his presence filled the galley. He was still in the dark bodyglove beneath his armor, the black fabric clinging to the immense architecture of him, his shoulders wide enough to make the chamber feel suddenly smaller. His beard shadowed the severe line of his jaw. The three scars across his face caught the lumen glow, pale marks against stern features that should have frightened you.
Yet, they never did.
You had tended those scars with cloth and salve. You had fastened seals on his armor. You had carried trays to his quarters after campaigns when he pretended he did not need food, rest, or gentleness. You had learned how to read his silences. You had learned when his anger was for enemies, when his irritation was for bureaucracy, and when his annoyance with you was only a thin, proud veil over something warmer.
Something hungry.
His gaze moved over you now, slow and possessive despite his restraint. From the bare line of your throat to the apron’s gold symbol. From your waist to your thighs. Then lower, where your feet were bare against the cool galley floor.
“You should not,” he said.
You lowered the heat beneath the pan.
“No?”
“No.”
You turned again, and this time you leaned your lower back against the counter, letting the apron fall between your thighs. “Should I take it off, then?”
Cato inhaled.
It was not a gasp. He was far too controlled for that. This was worse. A deep, measured breath through his nose, as though he had just caught your scent properly for the first time.
Your smile faltered into something softer, more real. Beneath the teasing, desire pulsed low in your belly.
“My lord,” you murmured, “the door is sealed.”
His eyes lifted to yours.
“And?”
“And no one comes here unless you summon them.”
His mouth tightened. “That is still no excuse for insolence.”
“No,” you agreed. “But it does make it easier.”
His expression darkened.
You were playing with fire, and you knew it. Worse, he knew you knew it. That was what drove him half-mad. The deliberate sweetness of your provocation. The innocence you could put on like silk while your body offered him every wicked answer, he had no business wanting from you.
He crossed the room with slow, controlled steps.
You held your ground until he stood before you, towering over you, close enough that you had to tip your head back to meet his gaze. He smelled of clean sweat, steel, and the faint sanctified oils used by the armourium. Beneath that, unmistakably, he smelled like himself. Warm. Male. Overwhelming.
“You think yourself very clever,” he said.
“I think you like this apron.”
“I think you have mistaken tolerance for permission.”
Your breath caught.
His hand rose, not touching you yet, only reaching for the edge of the apron where it lay against your collarbone. His gloved fingers brushed the gold-threaded Ultima. The contact was light, almost reverent.
“You wear my Chapter’s symbol,” he murmured. “On bare skin.”
“Yes.”
“You stand here with nothing beneath it.”
“Mmmhmmm.”
“You expect me to eat what you have prepared after presenting yourself like this.”
“I thought you might want dessert first.” You bit your lower lip, surprising yourself with your insolence.
His eyes flashed.
The next breath barely left your lungs before he took your face in one massive hand and bent to kiss you.
It was not gentle.
It was controlled, because Cato Sicarius did not lose himself easily, but it was hot enough to steal sense from you. His mouth claimed yours with a sternness that made your knees loosen. His beard scraped your skin. His thumb pressed along your jaw, angling your face exactly where he wanted it, and you opened to him with a soft, eager sound.
He swallowed that sound.
Then he made another one from you.
His free hand went to your waist, fingers spreading over the tie of the apron. For one terrible, thrilling moment, you thought he might rip it off you. Instead, he only tugged it tighter, pulling you sharply against him. Your bare breasts pressed behind the fabric. Your belly met the hard plane of him. Through the black bodyglove, you could feel the heat of his body and the unmistakable line of his arousal.
You whimpered into his mouth.
He broke the kiss just enough to speak against your lips.
“Is this what you wanted?”
Your fingers clutched at his shoulders. “Yes.”
“You wanted to distract me.”
“Ah!”
“To lure me into this galley like some undisciplined mortal youth.”
You tried to smile. “Did it work?”
His mouth moved to your cheek, then lower, dragging heat along your jaw.
“Yes.”
The single word sank straight through you.
His hand slid from your waist to your hip, then down, curving around the bare flesh exposed by the apron. He squeezed, firm and possessive, making you gasp. His other hand moved to the counter behind you, caging you there. The sheer size of him made the world disappear beyond his shoulders.
“You are fortunate,” he said, lips brushing your ear, “that I have locked this section’s access.”
Your pulse jumped. “You did?”
“I am not careless.”
“You planned this?”
“I planned privacy.” His teeth grazed your earlobe. “You were the one who planned sedition.”
You laughed, breathless and shaky. The sound became a moan when his hand slipped beneath the apron.
His fingers found you hot and already wet.
Cato went still.
The teasing vanished from your face. Your head tipped back against the cabinet, lips parting as his gloved fingers stroked through the slick heat between your thighs with terrifying precision. He watched you while he did it, his blue eyes intent, studying each tremor, each flutter of your lashes, each tiny break in your breathing.
“This,” he murmured, “from cooking in an apron?”
“From you looking at me in it.” You corrected him, and his expression softened for a fraction of a second.
Then his fingers pressed firmer, and you jolted.
“Cato.”
His name left your mouth too sweetly.
The control in his face thinned.
He sank to his knees.
Your breath stopped.
It should have been impossible, that a man like him, a warrior made monumental by gene-craft and war, would kneel on the galley floor before you. Yet he did. He gripped your hips and turned you slightly, then lifted you with effortless care onto the edge of the counter.
The metal was cold beneath your bare skin, making you hiss.
Cato’s mouth curved faintly.
“Too cold?”
“A little.”
“You should have worn more.” He chided, though there was no real heat in his words.
“You would have complained.”
“Such insolence!” His hands pushed your thighs apart, and just like that, your laughter died.
The apron still covered you from the front, hiding him momentarily from the view of any poor unsuspecting soul who might choose to override his commands, and shielding you from the cold air, but beneath it his hands were on you, spreading you open. He lowered his head under the fabric, and the sight of him disappearing beneath the blue apron stamped with the Ultima was so obscene, so absurdly intimate, that your whole body flushed.
Then his mouth touched you.
Your palms slapped down onto the counter.
“Oh.”
He kissed you there first, slow and deliberate, his beard scraping the tender skin of your inner thighs. He inhaled like a starving man trying to retain dignity at a banquet. Then his tongue dragged through you, deep and hot, and you cried out before biting your own knuckles to muffle the sound.
Cato pulled back only to murmur against you.
“No. Let me hear it.”
“My lord, someone might…”
“No one will enter.”
His tongue found you again.
The man who commanded armies ate you like a vow.
There was no hurried desperation in him at first. He licked you slowly, thoroughly, as if learning the shape and taste of your arousal were an exercise worthy of military precision. His hands gripped your thighs to keep you open. When you tried to close them around his head, overwhelmed by the heat gathering too quickly in your belly, he held you firm with almost insulting ease.
You sobbed his name.
He rewarded you with a low sound that vibrated against your flesh.
Your hips jerked.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “There you are.”
You shuddered. “Cato…”
“You taste best when you have been wicked.”
The words ruined you.
You bucked against his mouth, and this time he did not restrain you. He let you grind against his tongue, let you chase the pleasure he was dragging out of you. The apron shifted over his head with every movement, the Ultima wrinkling against the sharp bridge of his nose when he pushed closer. It should have been funny. It was, distantly. Mostly it was unbearable.
His tongue circled your clit, then flattened over it. Two fingers pressed inside you, thick and careful, stretching you with a slow insistence that made your spine bow.
“Cato, please.”
He lifted his mouth just enough to speak, fingers still working you. “Please what?”
“Please don’t stop.”
“I had no intention of stopping.”
With that, he returned to you with more hunger.
The first climax hit hard enough that you nearly slipped on the counter. He caught you immediately, one arm locking around your hips, mouth still on you as your body clenched and shook. You gasped, thighs trembling against his shoulders, your hand tangled in his dark hair without any thought of propriety.
He did not stop.
You whimpered. “Too much.”
His mouth softened, but his fingers stayed inside you, stroking with slower, deeper patience.
“You can give me another.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh but you can.”
“I’ll make a mess.”
At that, he looked up from beneath the apron.
His mouth was wet. His beard was damp. His eyes burned.
“You already have.”
Your face went hot enough to rival the stove.
He smiled; it was small, wicked, and devastating.
Then his mouth was on you again.
The second climax came slower, drawn from you with merciless devotion. He took his time, tasting you until your whole body felt boneless, until you were shaking too hard to tease him, until the only sounds leaving your mouth were broken, pleading fragments of his name.
When it finally broke, he held you through it, his palms warm and steady on your thighs while you came against his tongue.
Only when your trembling eased did he rise.
He stood between your spread legs, immense and satisfied, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in a gesture so blatantly male that your body clenched around nothing.
His gaze sharpened as he noticed your arousal climb once more.
Of course he noticed! Astartes missed nothing!
“Still?”
You swallowed.
The apron had twisted around your body. One breast was almost exposed; the fabric caught on the curve. Your thighs were slick. Your lips were swollen from kissing him. Your pulse beat everywhere.
“I wore the apron for you, cooked for you… I wanted you to see…” you whispered.
“Mission accomplished!” he chuckled as he ran his tongue over his lips, as though to taste your essence on them once more.
“And now…” you panted; his hands closed around your waist.
“And now,” he said, finishing your sentence for you, “I am going to take you over this counter.”
Your breath left you in a shaky rush.
He helped you down from the edge, but only long enough to turn you around. Your palms met the cool metal surface. Your cheek hovered over the counter as his hand pressed gently between your shoulder blades.
“Tell me now,” he said quietly.
The command steadied everything.
Beneath the heat, beneath the teasing, beneath the absurdity of the apron and the sanctified impropriety of it all, there was that line he never crossed without your invitation. You could feel him behind you, huge and hard and breathing with controlled restraint, but waiting.
Always waiting for the word that made it yours too.
You looked back at him.
“Take me.”
His eyes darkened.
He bent over you, his chest pressing against your back, mouth at your ear.
“Again.”
You trembled. “Take me, Cato.”
He kissed the side of your neck.
“Good girl.”
His hands moved with quick, efficient hunger. The apron stayed on. He only untied it at the back enough to expose you more fully, leaving the blue fabric draped over your front, the gold Ultima pressed beneath your breasts against the cold counter.
Behind you, he opened the fastening of his bodyglove.
You heard the soft shift of fabric, and then, you felt him.
Hot, heavy, and thick against your slick entrance.
Your fingers curled against the counter.
He rubbed himself through your wetness once, twice, dragging the head of his cock against your clit until your hips jerked. He exhaled through his teeth.
“You are soaked.”
“You did that.”
“Yes,” he said, with unmistakable satisfaction. “I did.”
Then he pushed inside.
Slowly…. Deliberately….
Even prepared, even wanting him desperately, you had to breathe through the stretch. He was careful, as careful as a man like him could be, one hand gripping your hip while the other braced beside yours on the counter. His size filled you inch by inch, splitting you open with a deep, heavy pressure that made your eyes sting.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Breathe.”
You did, or you tried to, anyway.
He stopped halfway, jaw clenched hard enough that you could hear the tension in his breath.
“More,” you whispered.
His hand slid over your belly beneath the apron, fingers splayed there as though he could feel where he was claiming space inside you.
“Greedy.”
“For you.”
A rough sound left him, and he pushed deeper.
You moaned, long and helpless, as he seated himself fully inside you. For a moment, he stayed there, buried to the hilt, his body bowed over yours, his mouth pressed against your shoulder. You could feel him shaking with restraint.
He was so controlled in war. So exacting. So proud.
And here, with you bent over a counter in a private galley, naked except for an apron bearing his Chapter’s sacred mark, he was barely holding himself together.
The thought made you clench around him.
Cato growled.
“Do that again and I will not be gentle.”
You did it again, deliberately now.
His hips snapped forward, in response and you felt the counter jolt beneath you.
You cried out as he took you with a roughness sharpened by weeks of discipline, by the constant closeness between you, by every teasing glance you had given him while pouring recaf or fastening a purity seal, by every time you had leaned just a little too close and pretended not to see how his gaze lingered.
Now he did not pretend.
He held your hips and fucked you hard, each thrust driving you forward against the counter, the apron trapped beneath your body. The metal was cold against your breasts. His body was furnace-hot behind you. The sounds were filthy in the enclosed space, skin meeting skin, your wetness taking him, your breath breaking around his name.
“You knew what this would do,” he said, voice low and ragged. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You wanted me like this.”
“Yes.”
“Bent over my galley counter.”
“Yes.”
“Wearing my symbol while I take you.”
You whimpered. “Yes!”
His hand slid up your spine, then curled lightly around the back of your neck, holding you in place without force. The gesture was possessive enough to make your mind go soft at the edges.
He leaned close, beard brushing your cheek.
“You taste best,” he murmured, “when you are spread open for me and trying to be quiet.”
Your body clenched violently around him.
He cursed under his breath, something in old Talassarian, rough and reverent.
“Again,” he said. “Do that again.”
“I can’t help it.” You whimpered as his hips snapped against your ass, driving him deeper into you.
“Oh my poor little woman, so desperate for my cock!”
His rhythm deepened. Slower now, harder, grinding into you at the end of every thrust until you could feel him everywhere. He knew how to use his strength, knew how to hold back just enough to keep from hurting you while still making you feel claimed down to the marrow. His hand slipped beneath the apron again and found your clit, slick fingers circling in time with each drive of his hips.
Your knees nearly gave, but he caught you, arm banding around your waist, hauling you higher against him so your feet barely touched the floor. The change in angle made you cry out.
“There,” he said.
You could not answer.
He had found the place inside you that turned pleasure into white heat. Every thrust struck it. Every circle of his fingers made your body tighten. You reached back blindly, and he caught your wrist, bringing your hand to his mouth. He kissed your palm, then pressed it flat to the counter again.
“Hold on.”
And you did.
The third climax rose like a wave with teeth.
“Cato, I’m going to…”
“Yes.”
“I’m…”
“Yes, come for me.”
You shattered around him.
He kept thrusting through it, drawing it out until pleasure blurred into something almost unbearable. Your body pulsed around his cock, slick and tight, and he groaned into the back of your neck, the sound torn out of him.
“Perfect,” he rasped. “You are so perfect.”
His rhythm faltered.
That was when you knew he was close.
You pushed back against him with what little strength remained. “Come in me.”
His hand tightened on your hip.
You turned your face enough for him to see your mouth, your flushed cheek, your eyes heavy with want.
“My lord,” you whispered, wicked even now. “Please.”
His control broke beautifully.
He thrust once, twice, then buried himself deep and came with a low, shuddering groan, his body locking around yours. Heat flooded inside you, thick and intimate, and the sensation made you whimper. He held you there, pressed to the counter beneath him, breathing hard against your skin as his release pulsed deep inside you.
For a long moment, neither of you moved.
The pot on the stove gave a small, offended bubble.
You laughed weakly.
Cato’s forehead rested between your shoulder blades.
“Do not laugh,” he said, though there was no bite in it.
“You ravished me in a galley while dinner burned.”
“It is not burned.”
“You checked?”
“I can smell it.”
You laughed again, softer this time, and he kissed your shoulder. The tenderness of it made your heart ache in a way the roughness had not.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew. You shivered at the emptiness, then at the warmth of him beginning to spill down your thighs. Cato saw it and went very still.
You looked back at him.
His gaze was fixed between your legs.
“Oh,” you said, breathless. “You like that too.”
His eyes lifted to yours with dangerous dignity.
“You will not survive your own mouth one day.”
“I survived yours just fine.”
He closed his eyes for a second, as though appealing to the Emperor for patience.
Then he reached for a clean cloth, wet it with warm water, and began to clean you himself.
That was Cato, too.
The same man who had bent you over the counter and fucked you until you forgot the ship around you was now careful with your tender skin, one hand steady on your waist while the other wiped you clean with almost ceremonial gentleness. He adjusted the apron over you when you shivered, tied it properly again, then turned you to face him.
The Ultima symbol was wrinkled now.
He looked at it.
Then at you.
“You have desecrated sacred heraldry.”
“I think you helped in that desecration, my lord.”
“I am certain I did most of the work.” He said, ruefully as he tried to straighten out the wrinkled apron the best he could.
You smiled up at him. “Would you like me to apologize?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to never wear it again?”
“No!” His answer came too quickly.
Your smile widened.
He sighed, long-suffering and utterly defeated.
“You are impossible.”
“And you my lord, are hungry.”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed you once, slower now, and you tasted yourself on his mouth. “I am.”
You reached behind you, turned off the heat fully, and then, lifted the lid from the pot. Steam rose between you, fragrant and rich. Cato watched as you spooned the food into a bowl with hands that still trembled a little.
When you offered it to him, he accepted.
The first bite made his expression shift almost imperceptibly.
You knew that look. A tiny softening at the corner of his eyes. A memory finding its way through duty and discipline.
“Good?” you asked.
He swallowed.
“Very.”
You leaned against the counter, bare legs still unsteady, apron crooked, hair coming loose.
“Better than ration brick?”
“That is not a high standard.”
“Better than the officer’s galley?”
“Easily.”
“Better than the honoured kitchens of Macragge?”
“Careful now!”
You laughed.
He took another bite, then set the bowl down. His hand came to your chin, tilting your face up.
“But you,” he said quietly, thumb brushing your lower lip, “taste better than all of it.”
Your breath caught as Cato kissed you again, deep and lingering, as the battle barge moved silently through the dark between stars, bearing warriors, weapons, duty, and war.
And in one sealed little galley aboard that immense machine of conquest, the proud symbol of Ultramar lay warm against your naked skin, wrinkled from his hands, and beloved because of it.
GODS... I DON'T KNOW WHAT CAME OVER ME!!!!
I swear I did NOT intend for this to turn into whatever this monstrosity is!!
Now, if you will excuse me, I shall go and douse myself with a cold shower!
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Summary: The tale is now moving towards swifter tidings. Sanguinius is called to quell a Xenos resurgence in the Signus Cluster. And something about this order from the Warmaster himself does not sit well with Guilliman. But he may have a more immediate trouble brewing well within Ultramar.
Author's Note: I have changed quite a bit about how Sanguinius receives the directive to go to the Signus Cluster for the sake of this story! And I may also have tweaked the timelines between the Signus Cluster fiasco and the fiasco involving Calth to bring them closer together... I think canonically they happened within a few years of each other but hey... suspension of canon a bit here!
Chapter 11
The morning that the Red Tear departed Macragge, the sky above Hera’s Crown held no cloud, no veil, no merciful dimness. Light poured down cleanly over the departure terraces, turning every edge sharp: the polished rails, the white stone, the red banners of the IX Legion gathered among Ultramar’s blue. The Fortress of Hera had seen a hundred departures and would see a hundred more, but there was something different in the air that day. No one named it. Naming a thing gave it shape, and there were mornings when even disciplined souls preferred ignorance.
Cassia stood near the eastern balustrade with her folio held against her breast and watched the Blood Angels prepare to leave.
Their vessels waited beyond the terraces and in the high orbital light, crimson hulls glimmering like heart’s blood caught in a jeweller’s hand. Their warriors moved with a grace unlike the XIII. Ultramarines were geometry in motion, proof that order could be given muscle and oath. Blood Angels, on the other hand, carried beauty like it were a second weapon. Even their silence seemed gilded. And as they stood, ready to board, their armour caught the morning and returned it warmer, red and gold burning against the colder marble of Macragge.
Among them moved mortal attendants, remembrancers, serfs, medicae, logisticians and scribes, all the human machinery of a Legion that war songs forgot. Cassia’s gaze found them first, as it always did: a deckhand tightening a strap twice because his fingers shook, a young scribe pressing a letter into the hand of an older woman, a remembrancer arguing with a servitor over the fate of a crate marked FRAGILE in increasingly hopeless tones.
Then she saw Rowena.
Rowena Gulliver was waving both arms as though the entire departure had been arranged for the benefit of her dramatic farewell. She wore a practical travelling coat cut in the deep wine-red favoured by the Blood Angels’ civilian staff, but she had tied a gold ribbon at her throat in deliberate defiance of practicality. Her hair refused every attempt at discipline, and her smile, when she caught sight of Cassia, was so bright that it hurt.
Cassia had intended to remain composed; she had prepared for it. She had told herself that farewells were common in the Great Crusade, that assignments changed, that remembrancers moved where history required them. Yet when Rowena crossed the terrace and seized both her hands, all those excellent arguments became useless little clerks dropping papers in a gale.
“You look as if I am being led to execution,” Rowena said, squeezing hard enough to make Cassia’s rings press into her fingers. “I am going to Signus, Cass, not into a mythological underworld. Though with the Blood Angels, I admit the distinction may become theatrical.”
Cassia tried to smile and failed by being too fond. “You are going toward a war zone.”
“I am a remembrancer. We follow war zones the way gulls follow ships. Besides, Valerian says the campaign will be precise, glorious, and over before I can become properly insufferable about it.”
“Valerian underestimates you.” Cassia offered, attempting at humour.
“He adores me. It has affected his judgment.” Rowena preened, though it did not harden the look of adoration she sported at the mention of her Blood Angel.
Cassia laughed then, because of how easily humour seemed possible when Rowena was around. Beyond Rowena’s shoulder, she saw the Blood Angel in question standing at the base of the embarkation ramp. Valerian was helmed, motionless, and pretending with heroic failure not to watch them. His golden pauldron bore a small fresh scratch. Cassia wondered whether Rowena had already noticed it and planned to scold him later with the full authority of a woman who had no command rank and therefore unlimited nerve.
Rowena’s expression softened, almost too quickly for comfort. “Write to me.”
“I will.”
“No, Cassia.” Rowena’s fingers tightened again, less theatrical now. “Not dispatches. Not polished little paragraphs that smell of ink and self-control. Write to me. Tell me what Calisthenes has complained about. Tell me whether Lady Euten has bullied Roboute Guilliman into eating something that was not handed to him between councils. Tell me whether you have finally stopped looking at that man like he is a problem in need of annotation.”
Cassia’s cheeks warmed. “Rowena.”
“That is not a denial. Excellent. Progress, then!”
“I am not discussing this on a departure terrace.” Cassia huffed, almost succeeding in her attempts at censure.
“Then discuss it when I return and make sure there is more to discuss.” Rowena’s smile returned, but something trembled beneath it, a little bird beating its wings behind the ribs. “Get loved idiot.”
Cassia’s breath caught between a laugh and something dangerously close to tears. “That remains terrible advice.”
“It remains my best advice.” Rowena leaned forward and embraced her, tight and sudden, all perfume, paper, and stubborn life. “And Cassia? Send ordinary things. If the campaign grows dull, I shall need them. And if it grows difficult, I shall need them more.”
Cassia held her longer than she meant to. “Come back and demand them in person.”
“I intend to be unbearable about it.”
When Rowena stepped away, her brightness returned like a curtain drawn over a window. She blew Cassia a kiss, pivoted toward the ramp, then turned back once to point two fingers at her eyes and then at Cassia, a silent threat of future scrutiny. Cassia answered with a small, helpless shake of her head.
Then, the terrace shifted.
Every conversation lowered without command. The change moved through the gathered ranks like wind crossing grass. Cassia turned.
Sanguinius had emerged from the inner archway.
No portrait, no illuminated manuscript, no hymn had ever prepared her for the simple fact of him, not even after all the days she had spent in his presence. The Angel walked beneath the Macraggian morning as if light had been invented so it might find him. His wings were folded at his back, white feathers threaded with soft gold where the sun touched them. His armour gleamed, but it was not the armour that drew the eye. It was the grave serenity of his face, the tenderness held there without weakness, the sorrow that seemed to have made its peace with beauty and stayed.
Guilliman walked beside him.
Roboute Guilliman in deep blue robes and ceremonial plate at the shoulders, gold catching at the edges of him, looked colder beside his brother, more carved, more deliberate. Yet Cassia had learned him too well to mistake that composure for ease. His hands were clasped behind his back. The left thumb moved once over the right knuckle, a small pressure, quickly stilled. A sign of thought. A sign of displeasure carefully denied the rank of expression.
Tarasha Euten stood a little apart, wrapped in pale blue and ivory, her gaze moving between the brothers with the quiet ache of a mother watching sons walk toward duties older than comfort. She did not speak. She did not need to. Her silence had more authority than many people’s proclamations.
Sanguinius held a sealed order in one hand. Cassia saw the mark of the Warmaster upon it, and beneath that, the notation of transmission.
Word Bearers’ channel.
The words seemed innocent. They were only administrative fact. Yet Cassia felt them settle coldly in the page of her mind.
Guilliman’s voice carried across the nearest stretch of terrace, low enough for privacy, clear enough for the record. “Horus sends you to the Signus Cluster through Chaplain Tanus Kreed of the Word Bearers. His claim is that the Nephilim have seized control or risen again under another form. The reports are incomplete.”
Sanguinius turned the order slightly between his fingers. “Incomplete, yes. But urgent. Horus believes delay will worsen the cost, and he has asked the IX to answer swiftly.”
“The Nephilim were thought broken.” Guilliman’s gaze was steady, blue and exact. “Their tyrannies ended. Their capacity for coordinated power was judged negligible.”
“So, the archives say.” Sanguinius’ faint smile held no mockery, only patience. “Archives are faithful servants, brother, until the galaxy remembers that it is a place older than our records.”
Guilliman did not smile. “And Lorgar’s sons carry the message.”
“They do.”
“That is an unusual courtesy.” Guilliman mused.
“It may be only that.” Sanguinius looked toward the waiting ships. For a moment, the morning brightened along the white sweep of his wings, and Cassia had the strange thought that even the great angel could be outlined by uncertainty. “Or it may be Horus making use of the nearest hand. We are spread thin. The Crusade pulls every Legion across too many stars.”
Guilliman’s jaw set by the smallest measure. “I dislike commands that arrive second-hand when the matter is urgent.”
Sanguinius looked back at him, and what passed between them then was inscrutable, something that belonged among brothers, not strategists or warlords. “You trust Horus, Roboute.”
“I do.”
“As do I.”
“But I also know that trust is not lessened by clarity,” Guilliman said. “It is strengthened by it. And it is strange he doesn’t share more.”
Sanguinius’ expression was marred with something like sadness and a tinge of what Cassia imagined was guilt. “That is why you were made as you are. You wish even Love to be properly documented.”
A faint stir moved through the officers close enough to hear, immediately suppressed. Guilliman’s look then, could have frozen a river. Sanguinius only smiled at him, beautiful, impossible, and entirely unafraid.
Then the Angel stepped closer, lowering his voice. Cassia did not hear all of what he said. She heard only fragments carried by the terrace wind, enough to understand that strategy had yielded to something more intimate and dangerous.
“Do not save every tenderness,” Sanguinius murmured, “for a peace that may never arrive.”
Guilliman’s answer came after a pause. “You would turn farewell into prophecy.”
“No,” said Sanguinius, with a smile on his lips. “Only counsel.”
There was no more teasing in him now. He lifted one hand and laid it briefly against Guilliman’s shoulder, a gesture both fraternal and solemn.
“I will return,” Sanguinius said.
Guilliman’s face did not change. “See that you do.”
The Angel inclined his head, then turned toward Cassia.
She straightened before she meant to, clutching her folio. Sanguinius approached with a gentleness that made his grandeur harder to bear. He stopped before her, and the terrace around them seemed to soften its noise.
“Lady Varenna,” he said, “I leave my brother in familiar hands.”
Cassia lowered her head. “My lord, I am only his remembrancer.”
“Yes.” His smile deepened, though his eyes held something luminous and sorrowful. “That is why I ask.”
The words entered her quietly and took root before she could defend herself against them. She wanted to say that Roboute Guilliman needed no looking after. She wanted to say that Primarchs were not men one kept safe with ink and stubborn perception. But Sanguinius had never mistaken power for invulnerability, and that made refusal feel childish.
“I will remember him truly,” she said.
“I know.” Sanguinius took her hand with courtly care and bowed over it, not quite kissing her knuckles, only lowering his bright head enough that the gesture became blessing without becoming spectacle. “And when Rowena writes, believe half her boasts and all her fears.”
Cassia’s fingers tightened around his for a heartbeat. “You think there will be fears?”
Sanguinius looked toward his ships again. The morning lay flawless upon them. “There are always fears. We are simply not always wise enough to respect them.”
Then he released her and went to his Legion.
The departure began.
Commands passed in disciplined sequence. Ramps sealed. Engines woke beneath the terrace with a deepening thunder that entered Cassia’s bones. The Blood Angels boarded in files of red and gold, their mortal retinues swallowed after them into the bellies of ships. At the last ramp, Rowena turned, pressed her fingers to her lips, and flung the kiss skyward this time, as if trusting Macragge itself to deliver it.
Cassia lifted her hand.
Sanguinius stood at the threshold of his gunship for one final moment. His wings filled the opening behind him, pale against shadow. He looked first to Guilliman, then to Tarasha, then to the gathered household and Legionaries of Ultramar. Last, impossibly, his gaze found Cassia. The look carried no prophecy she could read. Only farewell.
The ramp closed and the gunships rose.
Red hulls lifted from white stone into the clear morning, one after another, their engines turning the air silver with heat. The banners snapped hard in the wash. Cassia’s shawl whipped against her arms. Tarasha held her ground without flinching, though one hand had closed around the edge of her mantle. Guilliman stood motionless, eyes tracking the ascent with the full attention he gave to war, law, grief, and anything else he refused to name.
The Blood Angels climbed through Macragge’s light.
For a while they were magnificent. Then they were smaller. Then, they were points of red fire against the blue.
And then, they were gone.
The terrace remained, the banners settled, and the morning continued with indecent clarity, as if nothing had been taken from it.
A chime sounded from Cassia’s slate, and she looked down.
One message: sent before the fleet cleared transmission discipline.
ROWENA GULLIVER:
GET LOVED, IDIOT. THIS REMAINS OFFICIAL ADVICE.
Cassia laughed. The sound broke from her before she could stop it, bright and aching and entirely human. Several nearby officers pretended not to hear. Tarasha’s mouth curved. Guilliman turned his head slightly, and though Cassia did not look at him at once, she felt the weight of his attention as surely as sunlight on her skin.
When she finally lifted her eyes, his gaze was already on the empty sky.
Not empty, she corrected herself. Not yet.
Only waiting.
Cassia opened her folio with hands that were steadier than her heart and wrote the first line of the day’s record.
The Angel departed in clear light.
She paused, listening to the engines fade into the high distances.
Then, beneath it, smaller:
I do not trust clear things anymore.
That evening, the day’s light did not leave the fortress all at once; it withdrew slowly from Hera’s Crown, retreating first from the high terraces where the Blood Angels had stood in red and gold, then from the colonnades, then from the white stone of the departure decks where the heat of their engines still lingered like a memory pressed into marble. By late evening, the sky had turned the deep blue of a bruise beneath clean skin. The first stars appeared above the peaks, sharp and pitiless, and beneath them the Fortress of Hera resumed its order.
That was the cruelty of great houses and war machines alike: they did not pause because something beloved had departed. Crates still required inventory. Officers still required signatures. Astropaths still murmured themselves hoarse in sealed chambers where messages crossed distances no human heart was built to imagine. Servitors rolled along their prescribed tracks. Scribes bent over ledgers. The fortress breathed, shifted, calculated, endured.
Cassia tried to do the same.
She spent the hours after the departure in the archives, though little of use came from her hands. Her folio lay open before her, and the formal record of the morning’s events had advanced only by disciplined fragments. She had written the names of the ships she knew, the order of embarkation, the hour of lift, the ceremonial honours given to the IX Legion. She had noted Sanguinius’ words where she could remember them accurately, and left space where memory had failed or privacy had intervened. She had written Rowena’s name once in the list of remembrancers attached to the Blood Angels, and once again in the margin, smaller, unnecessary, private.
Rowena Gulliver. Departed in clear light. Laughing.
Cassia stared at that line for too long.
At the ninth bell, a junior adjutant found her and delivered a folded request from the Lord of Ultramar’s office. It was not a summons in the formal sense. Guilliman did not summon her privately unless the matter required witness or work. This was phrased more gently, though no less precisely. The morning’s departure record was requested for review before archival duplication. Any notes concerning the Warmaster’s dispatch to the IX Legion were to be included under restricted classification.
No personal word. No unnecessary flourish.
And yet Cassia knew him well enough now to hear what the phrasing did not say: Bring the record. Come yourself.
She gathered her papers, secured Rowena’s message inside her private folio, and walked the long route to the strategium wing.
The corridors near the command chambers were quieter than the rest of the fortress. Never empty, never sleeping, yet tuned to a lower frequency of urgency. Guards stood at intervals, each one a blue-armoured pillar beneath the lumen glow. Mortal aides moved with soft steps, carrying slates and sealed cylinders. A cart of untouched supper stood outside one closed office, its steam fading into the air while a steward glared at it as though betrayal had arrived in the form of cooling broth.
Calisthenes would be furious, once he knew. The thought almost made her smile.
The doors to Guilliman’s private strategium stood open just enough to spill a narrow line of blue light across the floor. Cassia paused at the threshold, not out of fear, though there had been a time when fear would have been the easiest name for what she felt near him. Entering that room always felt like stepping into the inside of his mind. Maps, ledgers, projections, decisions, all arranged with such severity that even uncertainty seemed expected to stand in a proper column and await instruction.
She knocked once against the frame.
“Enter,” came his voice.
Guilliman stood alone at the central hololithic table, robed still in deep blue, though the ceremonial gold clasp at his shoulder had been set aside. The informality was slight, almost invisible to any eye less trained by affection, but Cassia saw it at once. His bracers were unfastened at the wrist. His left hand rested bare upon the table’s edge, broad fingers splayed against the projection grid. The light from the holo-map rose through them, ghosting blue along old scars and the ink-dark line beside his thumb.
Above the table hung the Signus Cluster.
Cassia knew it from star-charts, of course. Being a remembrancer meant that she had known many places and many worlds through the words of her peers scattered to the various corners of the galaxy with the crusade. Under the strategium’s cold light, the Signus Cluster looked like a wound made of stars, a small cluster burning in suspended geometry, each system marked with tags of amber, red, and uncertain grey.
Guilliman did not look up immediately. “You brought the record.”
“I did, my lord.”
“Set it there.”
She placed the folio on the secondary table beside a spread of older reports. The seals upon them bore not only Ultramar’s marks, but archived sigils from xenological surveys, compliance registers, and campaigns long settled enough to become neat. Cassia’s eyes found a name repeated several times.
Nephilim.
“The records are old,” she said softly.
“Old records remain useful when new intelligence is incomplete.” Guilliman touched one projection marker. It expanded into a thin column of notation, casualty estimates, fleet encounters, the classification of a Xenos power Cassia had only ever seen rendered in cautious bureaucratic language.
“The Nephilim were tyrants of considerable psychic influence and technological arrogance. Their dominions were not merely conquered territories. They were systems bent inward around fear.”
Cassia stood beside the table, close enough to see the figures reflected faintly in his eyes. “And yet they were defeated.”
“Broken. Dispersed. Judged incapable of coordinated resurgence.” His mouth tightened by a measure. “Judgments are sometimes made in haste by men who want a file closed.”
There it was… irritation that belonged to a mind built to hold worlds and disliking anything that arrived smeared at the edges.
Cassia glanced to the sealed copy of Horus’ dispatch. It lay apart from the older reports, pristine and authoritative. Warmaster’s seal. Secondary transmission notation. Word Bearers relay. The thing looked harmless because it looked correct.
“Does the order trouble you?” she asked.
Guilliman turned his gaze toward her at last. The full attention of him was never something one received lightly. It did not merely fall upon a person. It measured the bridge between what was spoken and what was meant.
“The lack of clarity troubles me. The involvement of a secondary Legion channel troubles me. The claim that a broken enemy has regained enough strength to merit the IX Legion’s deployment troubles me.” His voice remained even, each concern placed with care. “The order itself does not.”
“Because it comes from Horus.”
“Because it comes from the Warmaster,” Guilliman corrected, though not sharply. “And because Horus has earned trust in war a hundred times over.”
Cassia lowered her eyes briefly to the map. Signus turned slowly above the table, innocent in its distance. “Trust and certainty are not the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “They are not.”
For a while, neither spoke. The machines filled the silence with their quiet hum. Beyond the high windows, the last of the evening faded from the mountain peaks, leaving only the reflection of the strategium’s blue light against the glass. Cassia thought of Sanguinius standing at the ramp with his wings lit by morning. She thought of Rowena’s ridiculous message, still warm inside her folio as if affection could generate its own heat. She thought of how a clean dispatch could carry a beloved person away more efficiently than any blade.
Guilliman reached for one of the older reports and turned it toward her. “There are no recent confirmed sightings of Nephilim power consolidation. No verified requests for aid from local worlds. No civilian distress chains consistent with occupation. Yet the cluster is distant enough from stable lines that absence does not prove safety.”
“That sounds like a reason to question the order.”
“It is a reason to verify the surrounding intelligence.” His hand stilled on the page. “It is not reason enough to doubt Horus.”
Cassia looked at him then, and because she had learned courage badly enough to use it at inconvenient times, she said, “Sometimes the shape of a silence is the first evidence.”
His eyes narrowed, not in rebuke, but in thought.
Once, she would have stepped back after such a sentence, frightened by the audacity of it. Now she held her ground. Their years of work together had taught her the measure of his displeasure and the rarer measure of his listening. He was listening now.
“A poetic formulation,” he said at last.
“A true one.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Yes,” she said, softer. “That is why I said first.”
Something changed in his expression then. The faintest yielding around the eyes, the smallest admission that her answer had found its mark. Guilliman turned back to the map and drew several route lines outward from Macragge toward Signus. They flared briefly, then settled into ordered blue.
“I will request a discreet review of astropathic traffic along the approach corridors. Nothing that implies mistrust. Verification only.”
“Of course,” Cassia said, and this time she did allow herself a small smile. “Verification is a very dignified word for worry.”
He looked at her, the severity of his face almost undone by the dry patience in his voice. “You have acquired my mother’s habit of naming things too accurately.”
“Lady Euten considers that a virtue.”
“My mother considers many of her habits virtues.”
“She is usually right.”
“She would agree with you.”
The exchange should have felt lighter than it did. Perhaps on another evening it might have. But the map of Signus still turned between them, and Sanguinius’ absence had already become part of the room. Cassia wondered if Guilliman felt it as she did, not as an emptiness, but as a displaced weight. The fortress had adjusted to the Angel’s departure. And Roboute had not.
“He made departure look like reassurance,” Guilliman said after a long silence, still watching the turning stars. “That is one of his gifts.”
Cassia thought of white wings in morning light, of Rowena’s last wave, of the red ships dwindling into points too small to follow. “And you make worry look like procedure.”
His gaze came to her then, dry and tired around the edges. “That is one of mine.”
There was no laughter after it. Only a shared understanding too small to count as confession and too precise to be dismissed as accident.
Cassia set her hand lightly on the edge of the table. The projection light spilled over her ink-stained fingers, making them seem briefly translucent. The stars of Signus rotated between them, distant and clean, held in blue by machine intelligence and strategic certainty. She could see why men trusted maps. Maps were obedient. They made the galaxy appear as though it could be managed by distance, colour, line, and scale. They did not show fear. They did not show laughter at a boarding ramp. They did not show a woman in a red coat promising to return unbearable.
“What is it?” Guilliman asked.
Cassia had not realized her expression had changed. “Maps are merciful,” she said. “They leave out the people who make them unbearable.”
His hand, still resting on the table, closed very slightly.
“The omission is necessary.”
“I know.”
“It is also dangerous.”
She looked up.
He did not turn from the map, yet the admission seemed to cost him more than the sentence itself should have. “That is why I asked for you.”
There it was again. Not affection in any soft or easy shape. Not the kind Rowena could tease into a ribbon and fling across a terrace. With Roboute Guilliman, tenderness arrived armoured in function. He gave her trust as assignment, dependence as reason, want as necessity. Yet Cassia had learned to hear the human thing breathing under the official one.
She lowered her gaze before it could betray too much. “Then I will write what the maps omit.”
“I know,” he said.
A pause followed, deep enough for the machines to seem loud.
Cassia drew the morning’s record from her folio and opened it to the page where she had written Sanguinius’ departure. Guilliman stepped closer, his shadow falling over the parchment. He read without touching it. His eyes moved over the lines with the exacting attention he gave legislation, treaties, casualty lists, and every other thing that made history both weapon and burden.
He stopped at the margin.
Rowena Gulliver. Departed in clear light. Laughing.
Cassia felt herself still. She had forgotten to remove it. Or perhaps some secret treacherous part of her had not wanted to.
Guilliman said nothing for several breaths. Then, in a voice gentler than she expected, he said, “Leave it.”
“It is not part of the formal record.”
“It is part of the truth.”
The words entered her with a force almost physical.
Cassia could not look at him immediately. She looked instead at the page, at Rowena’s name, at the ink that had dried black and permanent. All at once, the fortress seemed less cold, though nothing in the room had changed. She thought of all the names she had tried to save from the clean hunger of archives. Marra. Jira. Valec. Workers and scribes, children and medicae, the nameless hands that held up the grandeur of men who could not stop to see them all. And now Rowena, laughing under a perfect sky, already travelling toward a darkness no one had yet earned the right to fear.
Guilliman placed the sealed Signus dispatch beside her record.
“Include the transmission chain in the restricted archive,” he said. His voice had steadied again, though the steadiness no longer felt like distance. “Mark the relay through Chaplain Tanus Kreed. Attach relevant Nephilim histories and any verification reports we receive.”
Cassia inclined her head. “Yes, my lord.”
The title returned the room to its proper shape but this time, it did not undo what had passed through it.
As she gathered the documents, his fingers brushed hers in a way that was too deliberate to be a thing of chance. A glancing touch, brief enough to be a thought one denies before it becomes speech.
Yet, it was enough.
Cassia secured the dispatch inside the folio and held it against her chest. Guilliman turned back to the Signus map, already rebuilding unease into process. She watched him for a moment longer: the broad shoulders under blue cloth, the scarred hand moving through starlight, the face lit by a cluster that had become a question.
At the threshold, she paused.
“My lord?”
He looked up, waiting for her to continue.
“I will write to Rowena tonight. I will ask what she sees when they reach the outer systems.”
A flicker of concern crossed his face, gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Do so. Personal messages may carry texture that formal reports omit.”
Cassia held his gaze. “That is a very dignified way to say you trust her eyes.”
His expression softened by a fraction. “I trust yours, Cassia.”
The words followed her into the corridor long after the doors closed behind her.
Outside, the fortress went on breathing. The stars sharpened over Macragge. Somewhere in the dark beyond them, red ships bore Sanguinius and Rowena toward a cluster that official records called troubled, distant, and strategically urgent.
Cassia walked back through the blue-lit halls with the Warmaster’s dispatch held against her chest.
The seal was unbroken. The message was clean.
That was what troubled her most.
In the days that followed, at least for the first two weeks, Rowena wrote to Cassia as if Signus and her cluster of worlds in need of the Angels’ oversight were only a very distant inconvenience dressed in crimson and gold.
Her first message arrived while Cassia was in the lower archives, elbow-deep in grain levies from three compliant moons whose administrators had discovered, with astonishing creativity, seven different ways to lie about barley. The slate chimed beside her half-drunk cup of tea, a bright little interruption in a chamber that smelled of vellum, dust, and old disputes. Cassia looked up from a column of falsified weights with irritation already prepared, then saw Rowena’s name.
Her whole body softened before she could stop it.
The message opened with no greeting, because Rowena considered greetings a waste of good drama.
‘Valerian has decided that standing exactly three paces behind me counts as subtle. It does not. I have informed him that if he wishes to lurk, he must at least commit artistically. The man is eight feet tall in red ceramite, Cassia. He has the presence of a cathedral falling down a hill. And just as much subtlety.’
Cassia laughed aloud in the archive.
Three scribes looked up, scandalized by joy.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth, not to hide the laughter but to keep it close. Rowena’s words filled the dim room with the memory of departure light: the gold ribbon at her throat, the kiss flung into the sky, the stubbornness with which she had insisted that love was not a thing to be negotiated with fear. Cassia read on, slowly, savouring every ridiculous sentence.
‘The fleet is magnificent, of course. Lord Sanguinius appears carved from sunrise and melancholy, which is unfair to the rest of us who are only trying to keep our hair neat in shipboard humidity. The Blood Angels sing during some of their rites. Did you know that? Not loudly, and never where outsiders are meant to linger, but I heard a fragment through a chapel door. It was beautiful enough to make me angry. Imagine being engineered for war and still having the audacity to harmonize!
‘We are still far from the cluster. The official word remains Nephilim incursion. The unofficial word is that no one likes the silence from the outer stations. Valerian says not to worry until there is something worth worrying about. Naturally, I began worrying immediately.
‘Write to me. Send ordinary things. Tell me whether Calisthenes has finally declared war on improperly folded napkins. Tell me whether Lady Euten has frightened another diplomat into honesty. Tell me whether Roboute Guilliman has smiled in public and caused structural damage.
‘Also, in case you forgot… get loved idiot.’
Cassia sat for a long while after reading it, the slate held between both hands like a cup of warmth. Around her, the archive resumed with its scratching quills and whispers. The ordinary world continued, stubborn and blessed.
She wrote back that evening from her chamber with the window cracked open to the mountain air. She told Rowena of Calisthenes scolding a junior functionary for stacking correspondence by size rather than urgency, an offence he had described as “aesthetic treason.” She wrote that Tarasha Euten had rearranged a reception seating plan with such serene violence that two feuding provincial ministers had ended the evening funding the same aqueduct. She wrote, after several minutes of staring at the line, that Lord Guilliman had not smiled in public, thereby preserving the architectural integrity of Macragge.
She did not write that he had said, ‘I trust yours.’
She did not write that the words had lived in her for days, quiet and dangerous, like a coal cupped in both palms.
Instead, she wrote:
‘Macragge remains itself. The mountains behave like elderly magistrates, stern from a distance and surprisingly changeable when clouds gather. Come back and insult them in person.’
The reply arrived six days later.
That delay was not alarming. Space was vast, astropathic channels temperamental, and military communications were never arranged for the emotional convenience of remembrancers. Cassia told herself this. She even believed it for most of a morning.
Rowena’s second message was shorter, but still bright around the edges.
‘We have passed beyond the last reliable relay. Signal quality is poor, so if this message arrives with half my words replaced by static, assume the missing parts were brilliant.
‘Fleet mood remains fine. You know what that means. Everyone is pretending not to notice the officers pretending not to notice the captains speaking softly near sealed doors. Lord Sanguinius is calm, which has the unfortunate effect of making everyone else feel foolish for being tense. I resent serenity in beautiful people. It feels like hoarding.
‘Valerian continues to be insufferably noble. He has asked me not to wander near restricted holds, recovered wreckage, strange readings, Blood Angels officers discussing “anomalous silence,” or anything else remotely interesting. I told him this was an unreasonable restriction upon scholarship. He told me scholarship did not require walking directly toward danger. We have agreed to disagree, by which I mean he thinks he has won.’
There was a line after that where the ink of the transmission blurred into meaningless black scatter. Cassia adjusted the slate, coaxed the machine-spirit, whispered promises she would not have admitted aloud. Nothing changed. The message resumed several sentences later.
‘I keep dreaming of red water. Ridiculous, yes? I grew up on Terra. I barely know what a real sea looks like. Tell me about Macragge’s sea, if you can see it from the fortress. Tell me something that smells of wind and stone and not recycled air.’
Cassia read the phrase again.
Red water.
The archive felt colder after that, though the lamps had not dimmed.
That evening, she wrote of the sea below Hera’s cliffs: dark blue in morning, iron-grey before storms, silver under certain moons when the wind moved over it like a hand smoothing silk. She wrote of gulls crying around the lower docks and of the way salt found its way into every exposed hinge despite the best efforts of the household engineers. She described a storm that had come up suddenly from the west, shaking rain against the fortress windows so hard that even Calisthenes had conceded the weather was “being unnecessarily theatrical.”
She wrote ordinary things until ordinary became a kind of prayer.
The third message took eleven days.
By then, Cassia had begun to notice the delay and deduce the possibilities of it.
She checked the slate too often and pretended she did not. She carried it from archive to scriptorium, from chamber to dining hall, from corridor to corridor as if a message might arrive more safely if she kept herself near enough to receive it. When it chimed at last, she was with Tarasha in one of the household sitting rooms, where the older woman was reviewing correspondence from Iax with a cup of tea cooling untouched at her elbow.
Cassia froze so completely that Tarasha looked up at once.
“Read it,” Tarasha said. And Cassia did.
‘Cass, signal poor. Forgive brevity. We found ships.
‘No warp capability. No living crew. No bones either, which is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Empty clothes. Restraints cut from the inside. Hulls intact, almost polished in places where they should be burned. Valerian says I am not to go near recovered material. I did not. This is a lie, but a dignified one.
‘There is no smell of rot.
‘That is worse.’
Cassia’s thumb hovered over the next section, but the text broke apart into a static smear. Lines tried to reform and failed. Her breath had become shallow. Tarasha did not ask what it said. She only rose, came around the table, and stood near enough that Cassia felt steadier for the simple fact of another person’s presence.
The message resumed in fragments.
‘Sanguinius looked at the dark beyond the bridge glass today as though it had spoken his name. I know that sounds like poetry. I do not mean it as poetry.
‘The lower decks are restless. Mortal crews whisper. Some of the Blood Angels have become too quiet. Others laugh too loudly. I am learning that warriors can be afraid without ever naming fear. It comes out in other ways. Sharpened blades. Longer prayers. Hands lingering over armour seals.
‘Do Blood Angels pray, Cass? I thought they sang. There are words in the chapel now I do not understand.
‘Tell me something ordinary. Tell me Calisthenes is still terrorizing furniture into alignment. Tell me Lady Euten has conquered a room with one eyebrow. Tell me about him, if you dare. Tell me he is impossible and alive and still making worry look like procedure.
‘Tell me Macragge is still there.’
Cassia did not realize she was crying until one tear struck the edge of the slate and broke against the glass.
Tarasha took the tea from her own place and set it near Cassia’s hand, as if she had the wisdom to know that hands needed something warm when the mind had begun arranging grief even before anything worth the grief had come to pass.
“Don’t begrudge yourself the fear, dear Cassia,” Tarasha said quietly. “One only fears the loss of what and who one holds dear. And that is hardly a fault.”
Cassia laughed once, weakly, and wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand. “That sounds like something you would say to make my panic feel respectable, Lady Euten.”
“Panic has no manners. Fear can be taught some.” Tarasha sat beside her, not opposite. It was a small mercy, that refusal to make the moment an interrogation. “What does your friend ask for?”
“Ordinary things.”
“Then give them to her.”
Cassia looked down at the slate, at Rowena’s broken words, at the plea hidden beneath jokes and observation and stubborn courage.
Tell me Macragge is still there.
It seemed such a small request for a galaxy that had promised unity between the stars. A world remained a world whether one woman confirmed it or not. Mountains did not vanish because a remembrancer failed to describe them.
Yet Rowena had asked, and the asking made Macragge suddenly precious.
Cassia wrote with Tarasha beside her.
She wrote that Macragge was still there. She wrote that the mountains had spent the morning wearing cloud like ceremonial shawls and that Calisthenes had, in fact, corrected the angle of a chair that no one else had noticed was misaligned. She wrote that Tarasha had read three letters, rejected two proposed marriages, and terrified a visiting envoy into admitting he had not actually read the trade clause he had objected to.
Then she paused.
Tarasha’s gaze rested on her profile with terrible gentleness.
Cassia wrote:
‘He is impossible. He is alive. He has not slept enough. He continues to turn concern into procedure with such discipline that one almost admires the attempt before wanting to throw something at him. He asked for verification on the Signus intelligence. Quietly. Properly. In the language of men who do not call worry by its name. He remembers the transmission chain. He remembers everything.’
She stared at the last line.
Then added:
‘Come back. There are too many ordinary things here, and I cannot carry them all for you.’
She sent it.
For several moments the slate displayed the rotating sigil of transmission. Cassia watched it with her heart beating too hard, as if the strength of her attention could push words across the void. The sigil turned once, twice, a third time.
Then the screen flashed amber.
TRANSMISSION UNCERTAIN.
Cassia closed her eyes.
Tarasha’s hand covered hers, warm and dry and steady. She did not offer false comfort. And that too, was mercy.
In the days that followed, the fortress continued, as always.
Guilliman requested the astropathic summaries he had promised. Reports arrived, clean and partial and maddeningly inconclusive. There were distortions along certain routes, but nothing that could not be explained by distance, warp weather, interference, or the ordinary failures of an empire stretched across too many stars. There were no official distress calls from the Blood Angels. No confirmed losses. No declaration of emergency. Nothing, in the language of command, that could justify alarm.
But Rowena did not write for twenty-three days.
Cassia counted them despite herself.
She counted them in margins, then scratched the marks out. She counted them in how often she looked toward the astropathic towers when crossing the upper cloister. She counted them in cups of tea gone cold, in reports reviewed without memory, in dreams where red water climbed the steps of the Fortress of Hera and left no stain when it withdrew.
On the twenty-fourth day, a message arrived.
It was barely a message.
Cassia received it near midnight, alone in her chamber, the lamp low and the fortress hush pressing close to the windows. She had been trying to finish a formal summary of labour rotations in the shipyards, but every sentence had gone flat beneath her hand. When the slate chimed, the sound seemed much too loud.
The text flickered in and out, words forming like bodies glimpsed through smoke.
‘Cassia.
I saw him today. Sanguinius. He looked tired in a way angels should not be allowed to look.
Valerian will not tell me what he saw on the bridge.
There are stars here that do not behave as stars.
Do not laugh. I know what I sound like.
I heard singing in the lower decks and then I realized no mouths were open.
Cassia pressed one hand hard against her lips.
The message juddered, fractured, returned.
Tell me something ordinary. Anything. Lie if you must but make it kind.’
The final line came through after a long delay.
‘Please.’
Cassia sat very still.
The room around her sharpened unbearably: the edge of the desk beneath her wrist, the smell of ink, the faint woollen roughness of the shawl around her shoulders, the narrow darkness beyond the window where Macragge’s mountains slept under their old indifference. Ordinary things. The world was full of them, and for the first time she understood that ordinary was not lesser than glory. Ordinary was the thing people begged for when glory had teeth.
She took up her stylus.
‘Calisthenes declared war on a soup tureen today, she wrote. It had been placed on the wrong side of Lord Guilliman’s setting. The tureen has survived, but I suspect it has learned humility.’
She stopped and breathed until the words steadied.
‘Lady Euten says fear can be taught manners. I am trying. I am failing somewhat, but politely.’
Another pause.
‘Macragge is still here. The fortress is still here. The sea struck the cliffs all afternoon and the gulls were rude enough to interrupt a formal landing. Lord Guilliman remains impossible and alive.’
Her fingers tightened.
‘So must you.’
She sent the message and watched the slate struggle with the transmission. It was taking longer than before… longest it had ever taken.
At last, the amber sigil appeared again.
TRANSMISSION UNCERTAIN.
Cassia did not cry this time.
She sat with the slate in both hands until the lamp burned low, and the room filled with the smell of heated metal and fading oil. Beyond the window, the stars shone clear and cold over Macragge, clean as polished lies.
Somewhere beyond them, Rowena was asking whether Macragge still existed.
Cassia opened her journal and wrote only one line before dawn.
Messages are supposed to cross the dark.
Then, beneath it, smaller:
I am beginning to think the dark has learned to answer.
By the time Rowena’s silence had stretched from weeks into months and nearing a year, Cassia had all but memorized the path to the strategium.
She had also memorized every unanswered message she had flung into the void at her friend in hopes for a response. All she had received in return was silence.
Now, Cassia walked to the strategium beneath lumen strips whose cold light pared colour from the stone. At this late hour, the fortress had entered that late-night state, where even those that didn’t need sleep, pretended at rest. Servitors moved with muffled hydraulics along the walls. A pair of serfs passed her carrying a covered tray, their expressions arranged into the careful blankness of household staff bringing food to a man who would not eat it unless physically outmanoeuvred. Farther ahead, a courier in Ultramarine blue strode too quickly, one hand closed around a sealed cylinder.
Cassia slowed.
It was not the speed that troubled her. It was the silence around the speed, the way the corridor seemed to make room for urgency without admitting it existed.
In recent weeks, Guilliman had spent more of himself in the strategium. Not merely his hours for his hours had always belonged to duty; and she had never known him to hold them loosely. But now some inward portion of him seemed to have taken up residence there, among the turning maps and fleet paths, among the calm voices of officers who spoke of worlds as coordinates because any other method would break the mind. He still attended councils. He still reviewed petitions. He still received envoys and corrected drafts and listened when Tarasha told him, with perfect serenity, that even a Primarch could not govern efficiently while starving himself.
Yet when his formal duties ended, the strategium drew him back.
Cassia understood the impulse more than she liked. When dread could not be answered, he gave it shape. When grief had no place to stand, he converted it into inquiry. Route analyses. Relay checks. Astropathic summaries. Verification requests. Guilliman had turned his worries into actions that gave him something to do, as was his way. Cassia was beginning to learn this all too well.
She reached the outer doors and found them already open.
That, too, troubled her.
Inside, the strategium glowed blue.
The great hololithic table had been expanded to full projection, its surface alive with lanes of light and suspended star-fields. Officers stood in disciplined arcs, their faces pale under the map’s cold illumination. Data-serfs waited with slates held to their chests. A vox-officer murmured into a bead at his throat, his voice low enough to become texture rather than sound. No one looked idle. No one looked alarmed.
That was how Cassia knew the matter was serious.
Guilliman stood at the centre of it all.
He wore no ceremonial plate now, only robes of deep blue over a plain cream tunic, the clothing of a ruler interrupted after the hour when ceremony had exhausted its usefulness. His hands rested on the edge of the table. The light of a dozen systems moved across his skin, touching old scars, ink lines, the hard architecture of his knuckles. His face was calm… Too calm.
Marius Gage, the illustrious First Captain stood near a side console, his mouth set in a thin line. Tarasha was absent, which made the room feel colder. Perhaps no one had sent for her yet. Perhaps they had, and she had chosen to wait where the household would need her once the public machinery of the moment had done its work.
A senior adjutant saw Cassia and stepped toward her. “Lady Varenna. The Lord of Ultramar requested a record.”
She inclined her head and moved to the narrow desk kept for transcriptions along the strategium’s eastern wall. Her place had been prepared already: parchment, slate, ink, recording stylus, a clean seal-cloth. The neatness of it chilled her more than disorder would have. For a moment, their eyes met and Cassia felt that familiar warmth return in his eyes… and a silent apology for having called on her so suddenly. She gave him a subtle nod before she moved to her seat.
The room continued without granting her the courtesy of explanation.
“Repeat the chain,” Guilliman said.
The vox-officer straightened. “Primary authentication: Warmaster’s seal. Secondary confirmation: fleet-command cipher, verified against Luna-issued command registers. Tertiary relay through Segmentum command, clean. No corruption in the main body of the message.”
“No corruption,” Guilliman repeated.
The words held no relief.
The adjutant beside him read from a slate. “The Warmaster requests the mustering of the XIII Legion under your authority for coordinated action against ork concentrations in the Veridian System. Strategic assembly point designated within Ultramar jurisdiction for logistical efficiency and fleet consolidation.”
Cassia’s stylus moved across the parchment.
Warmaster. Muster. XIII Legion. Coordinated action. Veridian System.
Clean words. Orderly words. Words that belonged in ledgers and campaign archives. Words that did not yet know what history would make of them.
“Continue,” Guilliman said.
The adjutant looked down again. “The XVII Legion is ordered to join the XIII at the designated assembly point to reconcile force strength, share intelligence reports, and proceed under combined operational staging.”
The XVII… Word Bearers.
Cassia’s stylus slowed, though it did not stop.
She thought of the sealed notation from Sanguinius’ summons. Word Bearers channel. Chaplain Tanus Kreed. She thought of Signus, and Rowena’s messages arriving like torn cloth from the dark.
No bones. No rot. Red water. Stars that did not behave as stars. Tell me Macragge is still there.
When Cassia chanced a glance up at Guilliman, she found that his expression had changed in a way she had not expected.
For one breath, the Lord of Ultramar seemed less burdened.
Not naïvely so, as if this news had suddenly lessened his burdens to nothing. His mind would already be turning through the implications: force strength, theatre staging, supply chains, the Veridian threat, Calth’s capacity, the political optics of a joint deployment. All the many vectors that would come into play sooner or later in this exercise. Yet beneath the machinery of thought, something human moved.
A chance, Cassia realized.
He saw a chance.
“Lorgar has accepted the call for the joint action?” Guilliman asked, and though his voice remained controlled, it carried a quieter note beneath the words.
The adjutant consulted the slate. “The Warmaster’s dispatch states that the XVII Legion has been notified and is proceeding in good order. Their compliance with the muster is confirmed through command channels.”
Guilliman looked down at the projection table. Light moved over his face, carving him briefly in blue. Cassia knew enough of Monarchia now to understand why the silence that followed mattered. The name of Lorgar did not enter a room empty-handed. It carried ash with it. It carried hymns. It carried a city of white stone and fire, and a wound between brothers that Imperial necessity had covered without truly healing.
At last, Guilliman said, “Then we will receive them properly.”
The words were simple, and it did little to hide the effect of them… the subtle warmth creeping in.
Several officers looked up. Gage’s gaze sharpened, briefly, before lowering again to the floor in front of him.
Guilliman continued, “There has been too much distance between the XIII and the XVII. If the Warmaster’s design brings our Legions into common purpose, then we will use the opportunity well. This muster is military, but it may also serve another necessity.”
“Reconciliation, my lord?” asked the adjutant.
Guilliman’s eyes remained on the stars. “Function first. Reconciliation can come through that, if it can be achieved. Brother Legions should not be strangers to one another, least of all when the Crusade requires unity.”
Cassia wrote the sentence down, because it felt important.
Because people would be quoting this in scholae across the segmentum in a hundred years.
And because, for reasons she could not prove, it frightened her.
“Identify the muster world,” Guilliman said.
The adjutant read clearly. “Calth, my lord.”
There it was: Calth.
Cassia wrote it down as well, as though her very act were making some small mark of profound meaning.
The ink pooled at the curve of the C and seemed, absurdly, darker than the rest.
Guilliman touched a command rune. The projection shifted, Signus and its troubled distance vanishing from the table’s centre. Calth rose in its place: a world rendered in obedient light, ringed with orbital stations, supply routes, staging markers, agricultural zones, munitions corridors, ship capacity indices. A good world. A useful world. A world within Ultramar’s keeping.
The sight seemed to settle Guilliman further. Calth was not an unknown dark. It was his realm, his system, his people’s work made visible in infrastructure and order. If reconciliation with Lorgar had to begin somewhere, where better than a world built to support purpose?
“Calth is suitable,” he said. “Exceptional, in fact. Orbital capacity?”
“More than sufficient, my lord,” replied the logistics officer. “Shipyards, staging docks, ground-side mustering fields, agricultural reserves, repair capacity, and civilian transport networks capable of adaptation.”
“Adaptation only where necessary,” Guilliman said. “Calth is not to be treated as an empty board for military convenience. Prepare civic advisories through proper channels. Do not give them cause to panic. The people should understand the honour of receiving the muster without being made to bear its weight blindly.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Notify Chapter commands. Begin readiness audits. Fleet disposition proposals to my desk before second bell. I want an independent review of the Veridian ork threat, not because the Warmaster’s summary is doubted, but because Ultramar does not move blind when it can move informed. Assign liaison structures for the XVII. Formal reception protocols. Joint operational chambers. Shared briefings. Separate logistical tracks where required, common command access where it’s useful.”
The orders came more swiftly now, each one finding its place. Cassia wrote as quickly as she could, following the architecture of his thought. She had seen him prepare for war before. This was different. Not softer, no, never soft. But purposeful in a way that reached beyond victory.
He was already building the bridge.
“Should remembrancer access be extended to the XVII delegation?” asked one officer.
Guilliman paused, and Cassia felt that pause in her wrist.
“Yes,” he said. “Within standard restrictions. Let it not be said that Ultramar offered fellowship with one hand and hid its face with the other. We will be observed as we are.”
A faint warmth touched Cassia’s chest, painful because it was so like him. That was his bravery, one of his many foolish noble braveries. To answer an old wound with transparency. To meet discomfort with structure and call it hope because hope, too, could be organized if one had the patience.
The machinery of obedience began around him. Officers dispersed into smaller tasks. Orders became sub-orders, which became slates, which became messages, which would become ships fuelled and men armed and worlds rearranged around the gravity of a command bearing Horus’ seal.
It was all so reasonable.
That was the horror of it.
Cassia looked at Guilliman through the blue of the map and saw a man accepting an opportunity to mend what had been broken because he believed broken things ought to be repaired if the materials remained. Horus had ordered a muster. The Veridian threat was plausible. Calth was ideal. The Word Bearers were formally allies. Lorgar, perhaps, had chosen at last to stand beside him as brother rather than accuser.
Every piece fitted.
That was what made the shape so terrible to her.
Guilliman turned then, perhaps feeling her stillness. For a heartbeat, his eyes met hers across the blue-lit room.
No command passed between them. No comfort. No confession.
Only a question he did not speak.
Cassia lowered her gaze to the page because she had no answer fit to give him. She had only Rowena’s broken messages and a feeling in her bones that clean things could lie. That was not evidence. That was not strategy. That was the remembrancer’s curse: to feel the human shape of wrongness before history admitted it had teeth.
Guilliman looked away first, his attention returning to the duty that stood before him.
“The Warmaster has decreed, and Macragge will answer,” he said.
The room straightened around the words.
Cassia wrote them.
Macragge will answer.
A fine sentence. A strong one even. One fit for the archives, for the monuments and for the future child from that unnamed schola.
Then Guilliman spoke again, quieter, with something almost solemn beneath the command.
“Prepare the muster at Calth.”
Cassia set her stylus to the page.
Outside, beyond stone and mountain and the disciplined breath of the fortress, the stars remained clear over Macragge. Somewhere far away, messages struggled through darkness and arrived broken, pleading, afraid.
This one had come whole. And that was what made it terrible.
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!
And with that we come to the end of this chapter!
Now, I need to go refresh my gooldfish memory on all that happened in Calth... and then the Ruinstorm... and all that good stuff!!!
Until the next, sending you loads and loads of love!!
The primarch of the Word Bearers had fallen. His armour, once red and engraved with scripture, was an ashen husk of charred plate. Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.
‘He’s dead.’ Ellas spoke softly.
‘Fire again.’ Delantyr breathed the words. ‘Fire again.’
‘You bled the core,’ Kei replied. ‘We’re plasma-starved.’
‘Fire the suppressing tracers. Three bursts.’
Ardentor’s anti-infantry bolters spat their tracer fire at the prone primarch. The first burst chewed glass, spraying fragments everywhere. The second two punched home in the scorched armour, blasting the fallen Emperor’s son onto his back – a vessel of cooked, punctured meat.
‘We just killed a primarch.’ Kei swallowed. ‘We just killed a primarch.’
Delantyr’s grin showed almost every tooth he had. ‘Crush him. Leave them nothing to bury.’
Ardentor walked. Its backwards-jointed legs hammered down on the steaming, downsloping glass, breaking it underfoot as it staggered down into the crater. When it reached the primarch’s body, Ellas raised the right claw-foot, and steered both control levers to slam the limb back down.
The Warhound shook, unbalanced with one leg in the air. Great gears in the war machine’s knee and hip protested with rough, mechanical coughs.
‘Get the leg down,’ Delantyr ordered. ‘Finish it.’
Ellas gave the control levers another wrenching shove. ‘Something’s obstructing us.’
Kei lifted his targeting visor again, looking out of the Warhound’s left eye-windshield. He took a slow breath, and glanced back at his princeps.
‘My princeps? The World Eaters in the ruins… They’re cheering.’
The bleeding demigod had torn his way through the ground, giving voice to his resurrection with a bellow nothing short of ursine. Gore sheeted him, painting him in dark, rich red wetness. He threw his axes away, ruined and never to be wielded again, and breathed freedom into his lungs. It smelled of melted glass and felt like sunburn.
‘Lorgar.’ He spat blood as he said the name, rising to his feet at last.
The Word Bearer lifted a scalded hand, not for aid, but in warning. Angron had no time to lift his mutilated brother, sprawled at his feet. The sun went dark, as dark as night falling in an instant.
He turned, raising his arms, and took a god-machine’s weight on his shoulders.
Every muscle in his body locked tighter than the iron trying to crush him. Drool stringed through his metal teeth, skinned knuckles white as he defied the will of a Titan. He gave a bear’s roar as the foot lowered another half-metre. Sinews crackled in his shoulders. His broken boots skidded back on the patch of unglassed rock; something cracked in his spine, something else cracked in his left knee. The compression of his bones sounded like twigs breaking underfoot, which was a vivid burst of imagination he didn’t appreciate.
But he could hear his men cheering. He could hear them howling as they killed, and crying his name.
He blinked to clear away his sweat’s greasy sting, and dug his boots into the ground. With a smile slitting across his broken-angel face, he shifted his slipping, blood-slick grip on the Titan’s clawed foot, and started pushing back.
‘Lorgar.’ Angron spoke in something that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘Get up. I can’t hold this forever.'
~Betrayer, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Please feel free to let me know if you wish to be tagged or wish to be removed from the taglist! ☺️ I would be delighted to add you to it!
Summary: Samira starts working for Felix in his personal archives. Surely, the first day would go smoothly, right? Surely these two adorable idiots will not end up in some situation that is downright adorable but aggravating, right? RIGHT?!!!
Also, Samira's past may hold ghosts that may haunt her in the near future!
Chapter 7
Samira stepped into the personal archival department of the Tetrarchal Annex and felt the doors seal behind her with a soft sigh.
For a moment, she did not move. She stood just inside the room, clutching her docket to her chest with both hands, listening to the faint mechanical settling of the lock at her back. The sound was small and precise. Final.
She could still hear the murmur of water through the hydroponic channels and the whisper of leaves under false suns beyond the sealed doors. As far as workplaces went, she could hardly complaint. Not every serf got to work surrounded by the little pocket of green hidden in the iron ribs of the Lord of Vespator.
Such an absurd thing… a living garden in the middle of a warship built for siege and fire.
With a subtle shake of her head, she moved further inwards, taking in the archives around her for the first time.
She had expected something vast and forbidding, some chamber of towering shelves and hanging banners, with servitors chained to rails and cogitators chanting in metallic voices. Instead, the first room was modest by the standards of the Imperium, though still far larger than any space that had ever belonged to her.
The ceiling rose high enough for an Astartes to stand comfortably, which meant it might as well have been a cathedral to someone of her size. The walls were lined with dark metal shelving reinforced by brass rails. Each shelf held archive boxes, sealed folios, parchment tubes, data-slates nested in charging cradles, and narrow drawers marked with neat alphanumeric codes. The lights were warmer here than in the cargo decks, their glow softened through thin amber plates, as if someone had decided that old parchment deserved gentler illumination than soldiers did.
The air inside smelled of dust, oil, treated vellum, ink, ozone, and the faint breath of growing things from the Hortus Node outside.
Samira drew that air carefully into her lungs and wondered at how different it was to the lower decks. There was less sweat here, less old metal, less fear ground into corners by too many people trying to make themselves useful enough to be spared notice. This room had a different kind of pressure. It was cleaner. Quieter. More deliberate.
A place where things were kept because someone had decided they mattered. That thought made her fingers tighten around the docket. She had never trusted places where things were kept, to be remembered. So different to how she wished to be… to disappear, to never be sought out. For to be sought out often meant trouble.
After Calphor, she knew that truth far more intimately than she would like.
Her gaze travelled slowly across the first chamber. The shelving ran along three walls, interrupted by a recessed work alcove, a cogitator desk, and two tall doors leading deeper into the archive. The floor was black composite stone, polished to a subdued sheen. No scuff marks. No dropped wax. No careless stacks. Even the dust seemed organized.
On the nearest table lay a set of instruments arranged with ritual exactness: gloves of pale handling cloth, a soft brush, three stylus sets, sealing tabs, a magnifier, a slate-key, and a narrow knife for cutting archive cord. Beside them sat an induction tablet waiting with the patient malice of bureaucracy.
Samira stared at it for a long breath.
Then, because standing still had never saved anyone for long, she forced herself forward.
Her boots made almost no sound on the floor; she had spent years learning how to move quietly, as most serfs learnt in the first few years of their service. The archive seemed to accept her steps without complaint.
She set the docket down on the table and read it once more, though she knew the words already.
Serf Samira. Logistics and Archives. Tetrarchal Annex. Personal archival department. Effective immediately.
The words looked more impossible every time she read them.
Placing a slender fingertip on the scanner of the induction tablet, her nails gently scratching the seal of the Tetrarch above it. She withdrew her hand at once, as if the seal might object to her touch.
She chuckled a little at her own absurdity. Seals didn’t object! Men did, systems did… Superiors did when people spoke up, and doors did when the wrong token kissed their plates.
The seal was only inert until people decided it had authority.
She pressed her fingertip to the scanner once more and this time, it lit up, clearly having recognized her biometrics.
Text scrolled across the surface in a clean Administratum font, all angles and certainty.
WELCOME TO THE ARCHIVAL ATTACHMENT.
She swallowed, as she pressed “Accept”.
The tablet, on cue, began presenting instructions.
Personal archival department, Tetrarchal Annex. Environmental stability to be maintained within assigned ranges. No food or drink past the first threshold. No ungloved handling of pre-Indomitus manuscripts. No removal of sealed folios without authorization. No independent access to black-flagged drawers. No copying of personal correspondence unless task-stamped by the Tetrarchal office. No verbal discussion of contents outside approved channels. No deviation from indexing protocols without notation.
A great many noes. And Samira read every line twice.
Rules soothed her when they were clear. A rule when clear enough allowed one to survive it, no matter how severe it was. And she had endured far worse than a tablet telling her where not to put her hands.
She tapped in her acknowledgement.
The tablet shifted to a map of the room and the chambers beyond. A simple layout formed under her gaze. Outer workroom. Preservation alcove. Active correspondence stacks. Civic archive annex. Campaign annotation room. Sealed cabinet. Private desk.
Her attention caught on the last designation.
Private desk.
She looked toward the second door.
No. Not yet.
The induction tablet chimed softly and opened her first task queue.
INITIAL ASSIGNMENT: CATALOGUE AND CROSS-REFERENCE INBOUND MATERIALS FROM FORTRESS OF HERA TRANSFER CRATES.
Below that appeared a list.
Crate A-1: personal correspondence, unsealed, active.
Crate A-2: campaign annotations, mixed date range.
Crate A-3: civic reports, Vespator and Eastern Marches.
Crate A-4: requisition histories.
Crate A-5: sealed memoranda, restricted handling.
Samira exhaled. Work… the bridge back from bewilderment. The clean, narrow plank one could cross when the water on either side was too dark to look at.
She removed her shawl and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. The room was warmer than the corridor, perhaps because of the garden beyond, or perhaps because the archive’s preservation systems kept the chill at bay. Her fingers brushed the little spare toggle in her pocket as she adjusted the shawl’s edge.
Daelus’ voice returned to her with dry authority.
Breathe. It remains fashionable.
Her mouth betrayed her with the smallest curve.
Then she reached for the handling gloves.
They were too large. Of course they were too large! Everything in this ship seemed to be built around the possibility that an Astartes might one day need to use it personally. The glove’s fingers swallowed hers in pale cloth, making her hands look borrowed from some ghostly child. She flexed them experimentally and frowned.
Useful enough.
She moved to the first transfer crate.
It sat near the far wall, sealed with a clamp and marked with Felix’s sigil, though this one was smaller and plainer than his public seal of some mythical female monster with snakes for hair atop stylized aquilan wings, set within the inverter omega of the Ultramarine Chapter. It was simpler… the monster almost looked beautiful in this one. Still, she hesitated.
These were his things. His correspondence. His annotations. His records. The architecture of his duties bundled and sealed and sent into the void because he had carried his office onto a ship and dragged a small corner of Macragge’s order with him.
Samira placed her hand over the crate latch.
For five years in the Fortress of Hera, she had moved through rooms that belonged to men like him. She had cleaned floors, counted linens, updated ledgers, delivered sealed packets, arranged supplies, carried warmed broth past officers who forgot that broth had human hands behind it. She had learned that power had habits. Some men left chaos in their wake and expected others to tidy it into dignity. Some men treated people as objects, and objects as disposable simply because they could. Some others kept nothing because memory made cowards of them.
Lord Felix kept things. And people.
Samira pressed the latch release, and the crate opened with a whisper of pressure equalization. The scent that rose from it was faint, almost austere: parchment, leather, ink, old wax, and the cold mineral air of the Fortress of Hera. Her chest tightened with a homesickness she had not expected.
Home was too large a word for the fortress. It had not loved her, hells, it had barely known her. Yet, it was home. For the five years since Calphor’s burning, the fortress had been home. In the lower halls of Hera, she had known which pipes sang in winter, which stairwell smelled of polish in the mornings, which corner near the linen room caught a thin square of sunlight if one stood there at the ninth bell. She had known where to vanish.
Here, she knew nothing yet. And it made her insides squirm.
Clean. Angular. Controlled. The letters stood like soldiers given no permission to slouch.
Samira placed the folio on the worktable and opened the catalogue slate. Her task was straightforward: register physical item, confirm seal status, cross-reference digital log, apply archival code, and finally assign shelf or task bin.
She could do this. A servitor could do this!
“Why me?”
Throne, she wanted to curl inwards and die, when she remembered how brazen her question had been to the Tetrarch.
No. There was so much work left to do! Dying would be counterproductive.
The first folio contained correspondence from a planetary prefect on Vespator. A formal message, excessively so. Samira did not read beyond the indexing lines, because the task did not require it, and because her discipline forbade it. Yet her eye caught fragments as she entered the reference code.
… labour fluctuation in lower manufactorum districts…
… ration adjustment proposal…
… projected unrest if reductions are delayed…
A note had been attached in the margin, written in Felix’s steady hand.
‘Do not reduce civilian rations below survival dignity. Find waste in administrative surplus first.’
Samira stopped typing.
She read it again: Do not reduce civilian rations below survival dignity.
The words were precise, dry, almost severe. No tenderness softened them. No great moral flourish adorned them. A bureaucrat might have filed them as a constraint. A hungry woman in that manufactorum would know them as mercy wearing iron.
Samira’s throat worked.
In a galaxy where she knew men to reduce rations because numbers made suffering abstract and abstraction made cruelty clean, where clerks used phrases like acceptable loss with the serenity of men trimming candlewicks, this was almost an abundance of mercy… No, not abundance. Just enough.
She entered the notation carefully.
The second item was a casualty register.
Samira almost set it aside for later; she was not ready for death this early in her new duties. But the task queue had no sympathy for readiness. She opened it enough to confirm identifiers.
Names. Rows and rows of names.
Some Astartes. Many mortal auxilia. Attached personnel. Ship crew. Civilians caught in evacuation corridors. Each name had been checked. Some twice. Some carried small marks in Felix’s hand beside them.
‘Confirmed.’
‘Duplicate entry. Corrected.’
‘Kinship notification incomplete. Trace through Macragge civil office.’
‘Do not abbreviate.’
Her breath left her slowly.
Do not abbreviate.
It was such a small command. Almost absurd. A command about letters, about the shape of a name in a line of ink.
And yet Samira understood it at once.
A shortened name was easier to misplace. A code was easier to forget. A designation could be filed, stamped, and buried. But a full name demanded a little more room from the page. It insisted on itself.
She thought of her own name printed on the reassignment docket. Samira. No patronymic. No family line. No origin marker beyond the ghost of Calphor Station. A single word holding the weight of all she had been allowed to keep.
Lord Felix had said it like a thing worth pronouncing correctly.
Samira shut the register with care.
The third folio was older. Its edges were reinforced, the parchment slightly warped by previous exposure to damp or smoke. The label had been replaced more than once. It belonged to a campaign file, though the date range meant little to her until she saw the attached note.
‘Unnumbered Sons deployment record. Personal retention authorized.’
She went still.
The Unnumbered Sons.
She knew only what all shipboard serfs knew in fragments and half-heard reverence: the Primaris who had fought in the early storms of the Indomitus Crusade, warriors unmoored from chapters, made into vast grey ranks of purpose before being given colours, names, brotherhoods. Men carried from one age into another yet born into neither like ordinary souls.
She looked at the folio differently then.
Personal retention authorized.
Why had he kept this?
The question felt intrusive.
She assigned it to the campaign annotation room without opening the inner leaves. A strange relief moved through her as she placed it in the pending stack. There were things about him that she did not need to know. And yet, in this room, every shelf whispered of him.
Lord Felix did not seem a man who lived loudly even in the privacy of paper. But the traces were everywhere once she began noticing them.
His notes were never expansive, yet they were never careless. He corrected dates no one else would have corrected. He preserved logistical addenda that might have been discarded after action. He kept copies of civilian evacuation tallies beside military summaries, as though the number of saved noncombatants belonged in the same moral ledger as ammunition spent and territory gained. He wrote in the margins with enough pressure that some pages bore the shadow of his hand even where the ink had dried long ago.
It occurred to Samira, with a quietness that hurt, that Lord Felix remembered things because for him, forgetting them would be a kind of failure.
She stood with a folio open beneath her gloved hands and let that realization settle. He seemed a man who would remember every minute detail. And then, as always, her thoughts turned to her own past.
She had survived by becoming someone the system did not have to remember too clearly. Because sometimes clarity was dangerous.
The thought passed through her like cold water.
She closed the folio.
No. Work first.
The hours changed around her without asking permission. Somewhere outside the archive, the ship’s hum shifted in subtle layers as the Lord of Vespator carried itself through the empyrean, encased in sanctified field and machine-prayer.
She catalogued twelve folios, eight data-slates, two parchment tubes, and a sealed packet marked for restricted handling. She made no mistakes that she could find, then checked again because one couldn’t be too sure.
When she finished the first crate, her shoulders ached.
And Samira, in her own true fashion, ignored it.
Crate A-2 was heavier. The grav-sling beside it had been left dormant, perhaps because an Astartes had positioned the crate and assumed the next person to need it would possess arms like siege pistons. Samira studied the crate, then the sling, then the narrow gap between the container and the table.
“I see,” she murmured to it. “You intend to be difficult.”
Her own voice startled her in the quiet.
She looked around, absurdly embarrassed, as though the shelves might report her for impertinence.
Samira lowered herself to one knee and examined the sling mechanism. It was not complicated, only stiff. She adjusted the lock, set her shoulder carefully against the crate’s side, and shifted just enough weight for the sling pad to slide beneath. The crate resisted at first, then relented with an inelegant scrape.
The sound made her flinch.
She froze.
No alarm. No shout. No door opening with an officer’s anger framed in it.
Only the archive. Only the ship. Only her pulse trying to batter its way out through her throat.
She hated that her body still did this. Hated the way a sound could lift her out of the present and drop her into some old corridor where the air tasted of smoke and the wrong footsteps meant running. Hated the way fear made a child of her muscles even when her mind stood aside, tired and scolding.
She pressed one gloved hand flat against the crate lid.
“Here,” she whispered.
The word came from her berth. From the rough blanket. From the night of translation.
“I am here.”
The ship hummed, and the archive held.
After a moment, she activated the sling. The crate rose a few inches with a soft mechanical whine, suddenly almost weightless. Samira guided it to the table and set it down gently.
“Good,” she told it, then felt foolish again.
Crate A-2 opened on campaign annotations.
These were more difficult.
The materials were mixed: battle maps, margins crowded with abbreviated tactical assessments; fragments of local reports from worlds whose names Samira did not know; after-action notes; supply chain corrections; personal observations written in clipped phrases that seemed to assume the reader would already understand the war behind them.
She handled each piece with increasing care.
Just as she closed one file and moved to the next, the edge of the folio caught the cuff of her oversized glove. A thin slip of paper slid free and fluttered to the floor.
Samira went cold.
The paper landed face-down near the base of the table, light as a shed petal, yet her body reacted as if it had been a blade.
“No,” she whispered.
She crouched at once, heart pounding, and lifted it with both hands. No tear. No crease beyond the original fold. No ink smear. She turned it over.
It was a small memorandum. Older than the others. A copy, perhaps, or a retained extract.
The text was brief.
‘Personnel irregularities during emergency evacuation are to be resolved by immediate reassignment where possible. Disputes regarding identity reconstruction shall be deferred until regional stabilization. Survivors without intact records are to be processed under provisional designations and entered into labour allocation systems according to need.’
Samira could not breathe.
For a moment, the archive vanished.
There was only a corridor choking on smoke, a hand clamped too hard around her wrist, someone screaming for a door to open, a deck alarm stuttering because half the speakers had failed. There was the taste of blood where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. There was a man’s voice, close and wet with panic and rage, saying that no one would know, no one would care, no one would even be able to tell which dead girl she had been once the station came apart.
Her fingers clenched around the memorandum.
The paper crumpled slightly.
She saw what she was doing and released it at once, horror flooding her.
Careful. Careful.
She smoothed the edge with shaking fingertips. The page was not damaged beyond a slight bend. It was only a page. Only an old policy extract. It did not know her. It did not accuse her.
Survivors without intact records.
She set the memorandum aside in the appropriate file with more precision than necessary.
Her breath had gone thin, as she stepped back from the table and pressed her palms against her skirt, feeling the fabric beneath the gloves, needing texture, needing proof that she was not there, that Calphor was not breaking open around her again.
The archive’s amber lights glowed steadily overhead.
No alarms. No smoke. No hands.
A ship whole around her.
A garden beyond the door.
A Tetrarch somewhere above, issuing orders in a voice that made chaos arrange itself.
Samira closed her eyes.
Breathe. It remains fashionable.
A broken little laugh left her, barely sound at all.
Daelus was ridiculous. Saints preserve him, he was ridiculous, and perhaps that was why the memory worked.
She breathed.
When she opened her eyes, she forced herself to look at the task queue.
Four items remained from the second crate.
She could stop. No one had told her to complete it all before the next bell. Lord Felix had said she would be corrected gently. He had also said she would not rush.
But if she stopped now, the old memory would think it had won.
Samira returned to the table.
The next file was mercifully dull. Ammunition flow between staging vessels. Fuel purification delays. A dispute between two supply officers over whose seal had been applied prematurely to a batch of winter field cloaks. Samira seized upon the dullness with gratitude bordering on devotion.
She catalogued. Cross-referenced. Marked. Assigned.
The world narrowed to boxes and codes.
At some point, she discovered the rhythm of Lord Felix’s system: He used the barebones of the Administratum’s way of working, and gave it his brand of stern mercy. Matters were arranged by consequence, not merely by date. Civic reports connected to martial logistics. Logistics connected to campaign notes. And campaign notes connected to outcome.
His mind, Samira realized with an emotion bordering on something tender, did not store war apart from governance, or governance apart from the survival of the ordinary people.
It made her work easier once she understood how his mind worked in these matters… and it made it more intimate.
For now, she could see the mind behind the man. And even from her station, so ridiculously low, she understood why he had been made Tetrarch.
Felix seemed cursed to care about all things and all people under his governance. And that curse, she thought, might be why he looked so tired when he believed no one noticed.
She stopped. Was that not what started all of this? The small things? And how she had striven to alleviate even a little of his burdens?
Figs on a desk. A balm for a knee he had not named. Ginger in a cloak pocket. Broth left warm under cloth. A strip of bandage. A charm.
Small things.
She looked down at her gloved hands and felt her face warm in the empty room.
It was foolish. Dangerous too, perhaps.
She was not so naïve as to mistake the attention of a powerful man for safety simply because it had been gentle thus far. She had seen gentleness used as bait by men far lesser than him. She had seen kindness become ownership in the space of a breath.
But Lord Felix had not asked for the offerings. He had not demanded continuation once he discovered her. Nor had he punished her for trespassing.
He had learned her name and brought her here.
No. That last thought was too large. She set it aside with force.
He had reassigned a capable serf for practical duties. That was the shape of the matter. That was the only shape that could be safely acknowledged.
Samira returned the final file from Crate A-2 to its assigned tray.
Only then did she permit herself to look toward the inner doors.
The map on the induction tablet identified the first as the civic archive annex.
The second led to the campaign annotation room.
And beyond both, accessible through a narrower side passage, lay the private office.
Private desk.
She should not go there unless assigned.
She checked the task queue again.
Crate A-3: civic archive annex. Place pending Vespator and Eastern Marches reports in active review cabinet beside private office.
She gathered the first stack of civic reports against her chest; they were heavy, though not beyond what she could carry. Ignoring the fatigue that was setting into her body, she trudged towards the archive doors that hissed open at her token’s approach and revealed the chamber within.
The civic archive annex was narrower, lined with taller shelves and several locked cabinets. Here the scent of ink was stronger. A cogitator station glowed in the corner, its screen scrolling through population figures, manufactorum output, tithe irregularities, militia readiness, agricultural failures, and atmospheric deviation reports.
The world of Vespator existed here as numbers.
Samira wondered what it would look like from orbit. Whether its skies would be clear or stained by industry. Whether its people knew the name Felix yet, and if it inspired with hope, fear, resentment, or no feeling at all. Eighty-six worlds, Guilliman had said. Some lost. Some resistant. Some waiting, perhaps, for the hand that would govern them.
She placed the reports into the active review cabinet, and watched the drawer accept them with a smooth mechanical click.
The next batch took her farther along the side passage.
The lighting changed there, becoming dimmer and more focused. No broad lumen warmth now, only thin strips along the floor and desk edges. The passage ended in a half-open door.
Samira paused.
The room beyond was smaller than the others: the private desk of the Tetrarch within the archives.
She had expected the private desk of a Tetrarch to be grand, perhaps severe, perhaps lined with symbols of authority meant to remind all who entered that they approached power. Instead, this room was functional almost to the point of austerity. A desk. A high-backed chair scaled for an Astartes. Two smaller chairs along the wall, clearly included for mortal officers or scribes. A side cabinet. A sealed drawer bank. A narrow viewport looking into the Hortus Node through reinforced glass, so that the green shimmer of leaves moved silently beyond it.
She knew this was merely one of his many seats within the voidship; a place where he may preside over the serfs working within the archives…like her.
Samira stepped inside with the reports held tight to her chest.
Here, the scent of him existed. It wasn’t as evident as it had been in his chamber back at the fortress. She would know, from the many clandestine trips she undertook to leave him small offerings for his many unspoken necessities. She closed her eyes and let herself take in the notes that hung in the air: ceramite polish, cold metal, a hint of ozone, parchment, and the faint, clean severity of the soaps the Astartes used. But underneath it all, there was something quieter, and so uniquely him.
Samira started as she realized what she was doing. She should not be noticing such things. But that didn’t seem to stop her from taking in another lungful of the air in this room of his.
The active review cabinet that she sought stood beside the desk, marked with a brass plate. She moved toward it quickly, grateful for an objective. The first drawer opened at her token’s signal. She placed the reports inside, checked the order twice, and closed it.
Then, as though drawn by an invisible thread, her eyes fell on the desk.
She had not meant to look! That was what she told herself immediately, with the desperate sincerity of someone already guilty of the glance.
There was little on it. A slate dock. A stylus. A sealed folio. A small weight shaped like the sigil of Ultramar. No ornaments. No personal indulgences. Nothing soft.
Except the drawer at the right-hand side was not fully closed.
It was open by the width of a finger.
Samira stood still.
Leave said sense.
Close it and leave, urged habit.
Do not touch what belongs to a lord, implored every law that had ever kept her alive.
But the gap showed pale cloth. It was so familiar.
Her heart gave a single painful thud.
No… it couldn’t be….
But she knew before she moved. She knew with the terrible certainty of scent recognized in a crowd, of a voice heard from another room, of a memory answering its own name.
Samira took one step closer.
The drawer had not been left carelessly open. Something in its track had caught on a folded corner of cloth, preventing it from sealing fully. That was all. A small obstruction. A practical problem.
She could correct it. That was within her duties. Preservation included order. A drawer left open invited dust.
She reached down with gloved fingers and eased the drawer outward just enough to free the caught edge.
Then, she saw it… the kerchief lay inside… her kerchief.
It was folded precisely; the frayed corner had been mended in slightly darker thread because that was the only thread she had possessed at the time. The edge still bore the faint, irregular pull from where she had tied it too tightly around her hair during long shifts. It had been washed, perhaps before she lost it, perhaps after. The old jasmine scent would be gone by now. Yet she could almost smell it anyway, because memory was a crueller keeper of scents than any vial.
Samira did not touch it, her hand remained hovering above the drawer, fingers curved uselessly in the oversized archival glove.
He had brought it aboard. Such a small thing… it ought not to affect her so much and yet…
For a moment, she could not feel the floor; it wasn’t fear of punishment… not the prickle of shame, though she should be feeling something akin to that, knowing something that once belonged to her now sat nestled in the private desk of the Tetrarch himself. It was a strange feeling… it made her world shift just a little.
She had spent most of her life believing the evidence of her care disappeared into other people’s needs. Linen folded and taken. Food eaten and forgotten. Wounds wrapped, then hidden under armour. Rooms cleaned, then dirtied again by those who never knew the name of the person who had knelt there. Survival itself had trained her to leave no trace. A trace could become a question. A question could become a hand around the throat of the past.
But here was a trace… preserved.
Something of hers remained folded in the private drawer of a man who kept casualty names complete and refused to abbreviate the dead.
Samira lowered herself slowly into the smaller chair beside the desk before her knees decided the matter for her.
Her eyes stung, and she strove not to cry. The archive did not seem like a place where crying would be forbidden, exactly, but it seemed like a place where tears would be recorded with great seriousness, and she could not bear that.
She stared at the kerchief instead.
A humble square of cloth, worn thin by work.
The first proof, perhaps, that she had once been brave enough to step into his room and then scared enough to run.
Well… brave was too big a word for how she felt that night, She had run past him when he let her leave, her kerchief had slipped loose, and she had prayed to every saint and the God Emperor himself that he would not find her.. that he would forget as many others had… that he would not end every fragile anonymity she had built for herself, with blood and loss.
But he hadn’t forgotten… and some part of her realized that this was part of the answer to the question she had asked him….
Why me?
Samira leaned forward, elbows on knees, and pressed her gloved hands together until the cloth bunched between her fingers.
“What am I to do with this?” she whispered.
The question was not meant for anyone. And the archive, being an archive, answered in silence.
Samira sat there for perhaps a minute. Perhaps five. Time became soft around the edges. The garden moved beyond the viewport, leaves trembling in conditioned air, forever growing beneath artificial light because someone had decided growth was worth the absurdity.
At last, she rose.
There was a task to complete. There was always a task. Work had saved her more faithfully than hope ever had.
With great care, she adjusted the kerchief, so no fold caught on the drawer track. She touched only the edge, and even that felt like placing her fingers against a secret that was not wholly hers anymore.
The drawer slid shut, and this time it closed completely. The small click sounded final enough to make her flinch.
Stepping back, she turned to the active review cabinet that waited for the remaining reports. She retrieved them from the annex and placed them in order. Her hands still trembled a little, but thankfully, her body moved and her mind served as was expected of her. The perks of a lifetime of servitude, she mused, not too bitterly.
When the task queue finally marked Crate A-3 as transferred, Samira returned to the outer workroom.
The amber lights seemed warmer now. The silence had changed as well. Where earlier, the room had felt like a place where silence was expected, now it felt like a conspirator, holding a small, impossible secret of hers, and daring her to voice out her thoughts.
Her hands worked themselves out of the oversized gloves and laid them precisely where she had found them.
Why me?
When her gaze fell on her hands, they looked too bare, too naked.
She started out of her thoughts as a bell rang beyond the walls.
She checked the time and realized that she had worked way past the expected break interval for her first shift. Being the only person in the archive, no one had come to stop her… no one had told her to leave. Her work queue still showed pending items, but the immediate induction tasks expected of her for the day had been completed.
She should return to her berth. She should ask a deck officer for meal allotment.
She should report to someone. The tablet perhaps. The quartermaster. The office. Did the Tetrarchal Annex have a steward? Surely it had a steward. There were always stewards orbiting men of great importance like the Tetrarch.
She reached for the induction tablet, and before her finger touched the screen, the outer doors chimed open.
Samira froze, and after what felt like an eternity, she turned towards the open door.
Tetrarch Decimus Felix stood framed in the threshold.
For one absurd moment, all Samira could think was that the archive had probably summoned him because she had touched his drawer. Maybe he came to deal her the punishment for her insolence.
He was unhelmed, still cloaked, the cloak lay over his impossibly large frame, drawn back from one shoulder. The warm light of the archive softened none of him. He remained vast and composed, a figure carved from duty and majesty. Yet his gaze moved at once to her face, then to the worktable, then the open crates, then the completed task queue glowing on the induction tablet.
He saw everything.
“My lord,” Samira said, bowing too quickly.
The motion made the room tilt very slightly. She steadied herself against the edge of the table before she could hide the need for the support.
Felix’s eyes narrowed by a fraction.
“You have been working since I left,” he said.
It was not quite a question.
Samira lowered her gaze. “Yes, my lord.”
“How many crates?”
“Three partially, my lord. Two fully logged. One transferred to active review.”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
She wondered if she had done too much. Or too little. Or done the wrong thing with too much initiative, which in some offices was worse than laziness because it meant twice the labour for everyone involved, a sign of very little consideration.
Felix stepped into the room, letting the door sigh close behind him. He approached the worktable and reviewed the tablet. Samira stood very still beside him, hands folded, eyes lowered, aware of his nearness in a way that made every disciplined breath feel borrowed.
His presence did not crowd the room. That was the danger of him. He had enough control over himself to leave space, and somehow the space made her more aware of him than looming would have.
He scrolled through her entries.
One page. Another. Another.
His expression did not change.
Samira’s pulse misbehaved.
At last, he said, “Your indexing is correct.”
Relief moved through her so quickly she nearly swayed.
“Thank you, my lord.”
“And excessive.”
Her stomach dropped.
“I… my lord?”
Felix looked at the crates, then back to the completed logs. “This volume of work was not expected within the first interval.”
She swallowed. “I thought it best to make a proper beginning.”
“A proper beginning does not require you to exhaust yourself.”
“I am not exhausted, my lord.”
Felix regarded her.
Samira realized at once that this had been the wrong battlefield on which to attempt a lie.
His gaze moved to the stiffness in her shoulders, the faint tremor in her fingers, the pallor that lingered beneath her skin after the encounter with the memorandum, the way she had braced one hand on the table when she bowed.
“You are tired,” he said.
It was spoken with such certainty that denying it would have been less a lie than an insult to his intelligence.
“A little,” she admitted, sheepishly.
“A little,” he repeated, amused.
Samira looked down. “I wanted to be useful.”
For that, Felix said nothing, and the silence stretched once more.
Only after it had become almost unbearable did he answer, quieter than before.
“You do not need to prove your usefulness by injuring your capacity to work tomorrow.”
The sentence was practical. Stern. Entirely reasonable.
It struck her harder than softness would have.
Samira folded her hands more tightly. “Yes, my lord.”
His eyes remained on her for a moment longer.
Then his gaze shifted, not to the worktable, but past her.
Toward the side passage, and his private office. Samira felt heat rise to her face with dreadful speed.
He knew! Of course, he knew! He probably had live pict feeds informing him of what always transpired in his office!
Or perhaps he had, with that Astartes astuteness, noticed the drawer now properly closed. Perhaps he had simply read the guilt in her shoulders. Perhaps the Tetrarch of Vespator was impossible to deceive in any room where his own records lived.
“My lord,” she began, voice catching. “I apologize.”
Felix looked back at her.
“For what?”
The question was calm.
That made it worse.
Samira’s throat tightened. “I corrected a drawer in the private office. It had not sealed properly. I did not mean to intrude.”
Felix was still… very still.
There were different kinds of stillness. Samira knew them the way prey knew weather. The stillness of anger before it struck. The stillness of calculation. The stillness of disappointment. This was none of those, and yet it was heavy enough to change the air.
“The right-hand drawer,” he said.
Her eyes lowered further.
“Yes, my lord.”
The silence after that was softer than she expected.
At length, Felix said, “It catches if the contents shift toward the track.”
Samira’s fingers tightened against each other, as she kept her eyes lowered to focus on a singular spot in front of her feet.
“Yes, my lord.”
“You corrected it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you performed a useful task.”
She looked up despite herself.
Felix’s face was composed, but something had altered behind his eyes. Something in them drove her to say the three words she knew she ought not to say. And so, she uttered them, her voice becoming a small, meek thing.
“I saw it.”
He did not ask what. Something in his demeanour told her he understood exactly what ‘it’ meant.
Felix looked down at the induction tablet to his side, though Samira had the sense he was no longer reading it.
“Yes,” he said, and left the sentence at that.
Her courage, what little of it she possessed, gathered itself like a shawl around trembling shoulders.
“Why did you keep it, my lord?”
The question fell between them before she could stop it.
It was not the same as ‘why me’, though it came from the same hidden chamber in her heart.
Why did you keep a serf’s kerchief?
Why did you fold it?
Why did you carry it into the stars?
Why did you make a place for something so small among records of worlds and wars?
Felix’s jaw tightened by a degree. And for a terrible moment, Samira thought he would dismiss the question. Or rebuke her. Or retreat into the safety of rank, which would be his right and her punishment.
Instead, he answered. Slowly, as if each word had to pass inspection within his mind before being allowed into existence.
“It was the first honest proof I had,” he said, “that someone had been kind to me without command.”
His words felt so huge in the silence between then that for a moment, Samira forgot how to breathe.
Felix did not look at her as he said it. His gaze remained on the table, on the arranged instruments, on the slate-glow and the folios she had ordered. But the words were there now, alive in the air, impossible to return to silence… The first honest proof. ‘Kind without command’.
Her vision blurred slightly.
She lowered her head quickly; afraid he might see too much in her face.
“I did not think of it that way,” she whispered.
“No,” he said. “I imagine you did not.”
There was no accusation in it. Once again, that was the trouble with him. From a man of his rank, he offered her understanding even when he didn’t need to. And that felt so much more dangerous than anger.
Samira drew a careful breath.
“Kindness is not rare, my lord.”
Felix’s eyes moved to her then.
“When it expects nothing in return, it is.”
There was silence in the room once more. Samira felt the moment balancing between them, fragile as a drop of water on the edge of a leaf. If either of them breathed too hard, it might fall. It should fall, perhaps. There were rules. There were ranks. There were histories. There were dangers with names and dangers still unnamed.
Felix stepped back first, and mercifully, that movement restored distance.
“You will stop for the current interval,” he said, his voice returning to its formal register, though not entirely. Some warmth had entered it and refused to be dismissed. “You will eat. You will rest. You will resume after the next assigned cycle.”
Samira blinked.
“My lord, there are still two crates pending.”
“They will remain pending. They are paper. They are unlikely to stage a revolt before morning.”
The sentence was delivered so dryly that Samira’s mouth betrayed her.
A smile flickered: small… tired… real. And Felix saw it. Something eased in his expression, no more than a shadow shifting beneath the surface of a lake.
“Yes, my lord,” she said.
“Additionally,” he continued, “your duty hours will be defined by schedule. And you will stick to it, both when you begin, and when you end.”
Her smile vanished into startled confusion. “My lord?”
“You are attached to the personal archival department, not sentenced to die among my correspondence.”
That almost did it. The laugh rose too quickly and had to be swallowed. It escaped only as a breath, but it changed her face all the same.
And Felix looked faintly alarmed by his own success.
Samira lowered her eyes to spare him the sight of her amusement, though she suspected he noticed that too.
“As my lord commands,” she said.
He inclined his head.
Then, after a pause, “If any personnel question your presence here, you will direct them to the Tetrarchal office.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“If they persist, you will record their name.”
Her brow furrowed. “Their name?”
“Yes.”
“What will happen then?”
Felix’s expression became very calm.
“That will depend on how foolish they have been.”
Samira stared at him for half a heartbeat, then wisely looked down.
“Yes, my lord.”
The warmth in her chest was dangerous now. Dangerous because now, it felt like protection. And protection from one man, especially one such as Felix could invite unwanted attention from others. Dangerous because some part of her, tired and foolish and so very human, wanted to fold herself into the certainty of his voice and believe the galaxy might allow such things without demanding blood in exchange.
She knew better. Yet, she still felt it.
Felix turned toward the door, then stopped.
“Samira.”
Her name again.
She looked up. His gaze held hers with that grave, measured attention that made her feel as if she had been written in full rather than abbreviated.
“You may ask questions concerning your duties,” he said.
A pause.
“And when uncertain, you will ask before attempting to solve every difficulty alone.”
The words should have been merely procedural instruction from a Tetrarch to a serf in his archives. Yet, they felt so much more than that. Samira merely bowed her head.
“I will try, my lord.”
Felix considered that.
Then, with the faintest dryness, “I have found that is often the more honest answer.”
Her smile returned before she could stop it. This time, she did not fully hide it.
Felix turned before either of them could make too much of that.
The door opened to the soft green beyond of the Hortus Node. He stepped through, his cloak moving behind him like a dark line drawn through warm light.
Once the door sealed after him, the archive room seemed to exhale as though it too had been holding its breath at the meeting.
For a long while, she did not move; the worktable waited. The gloves lay pale and oversized. The crates sat in their ordered rows, half done and half waiting. Somewhere beyond the side passage, a drawer remained properly closed, holding a kerchief folded by hands that could command worlds and yet had preserved a serf’s lost cloth like evidence of a mercy he did not know how to name.
At last, Samira reached for her shawl.
She folded it around herself with careful fingers, checked the induction tablet to mark her interval complete, and dimmed the worktable light as instructed.
Before leaving, she looked once around the archive.
It seemed different now. No less dangerous. Perhaps more.
But it was no longer empty of her; she had touched its order and left no wound. She had read the edges of a man’s burden and not turned away. She had found proof that a small kindness could survive the machinery meant to grind such things into dust.
Then Samira stepped through the door into the green hush of the garden, carrying hunger, exhaustion, confusion, and a fragile warmth she did not yet dare call by any gentler name.
Behind her, the personal archive settled into silence.
It kept its records, and its secrets.
And now, whether either of them understood it or not, it kept hers as well.
For the first time in forever... I wrote a chapter that was just one scene!! And I hope you enjoyed it, my lovelies!! I swear the next chapter has the plot moving a bit... actually a lot!! But I SIMPLY HAD TO WRITE THESE TWO HAVING A MOMENT!!!!
Ahem... As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read my ramblings! I love you all very, very much! MWAH!!!
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Summary: Even as Cato Sicarius moves to strike the Cult of the "Burning Cycle" at its heart, there are other nets laid in waiting. Will the Lord Regent be ensnared? Or will his long reach tear the nets apart?
A/N: This is another slightly chonky chapter! I am so sorry for that!! But it was such fun to write! I attempted writing a bit on espionage and the almost discoveries of hidden truths and I hope I've done it justice! Also, this chapter involves some plot building for folks who might be into that!
Chapter 14
Retia Occulta et Manus Regentis || The Hidden Nets and the Regent’s Hand
Every morning, Raghav Nayar wakes up before the first bell, unlocks the shutters of his lamp-stall beside the eastern ghats, takes in the dewy air at dawn and tells himself that Kashi is still beautiful.
It is an old habit of his, older than his weakening knees, or the ache that lives in his left shoulder when the river mists come in thick and cold. And it is a mantra that he needs to renew before the day can wear it thin.
The river outside runs silver beneath the gently dawning sky. The first of the bathers are already descending the steps with brass pots held against their hips, their voices low, their breath ghosting pale before their mouths. Priests in saffron and cream move along the waterline, muttering invocations to the God-Emperor, to the saints of Indus, to the older names folded carefully beneath Imperial language until none can tell where one prayer ends and another begins.
Above them, Kashi rises in layers: balconies cared like lace lean over narrow streets. Gold-tipped domes catch the first of the sun’s rays. Aquila banners flutter beside ancient lotus sigils, making one wonder which master does the winds of Indus serve more faithfully. Incense smoke climbs from shrine niches set into the walls. Cows with painted horns nose through garlands discarded from yesterday’s worship. Children with bare feet and bright eyes dart between the legs of pilgrims, selling flowers, sugar cakes, strips of red thread, and little clay lamps by the basket.
Raghav sells the better lamps.
He reminds everyone of this, whether they ask or not.
“Cheap clay cracks when the oil warms,” he tells a woman who tries, with great theatrical sorrow, to bargain him down to half price. “You want your offering to drown in the river before the flame touches it? Buy from Govind down the lane. His lamps are so thin even the mosquitoes are embarrassed to land on them.”
The woman clicks her tongue, but she smiles while doing it. That means she will buy. People in Kashi argue as a form of affection and haggle as a form of prayer. Raghav gives her two extra wicks when she finally pays, because her son is in the palace militia and because she has not slept properly in five days. She thinks he does not notice the way her fingers tremble while counting coins.
Everyone seems to be on edge of late, in some way or the other, and the city has learned to hide it beneath its usual bustle.
By full morning, the ghats are swollen with life. Bells ring from the river shrine. Drums answer from the temple district. Women in bright saris descend the steps with trays of marigold and jasmine. Men in linen dhotis stand waist-deep in the river, palms lifted toward the sun, murmuring the same petitions their fathers murmured before the Imperium found Indus and renamed all its gods into saints, martyrs, allegories, and permissible civic devotions. Palace messengers ride through the upper street in pairs, their horses lathered, their turbans pinned with the Maharaja’s sigil. No one looks at them for too long.
Raghav trims a wick, lifts it to the flame, and watches the street through the veil of ordinary commerce.
He has a good stall for watching. His father had chosen it for that reason, though his father had only wanted to watch customers, thieves, tax men, and beautiful women walking to the river with wet hair down their backs. From here, Raghav can see the lower ghat, the turn toward the spice market, the mouth of the lane that leads to the funeral houses, and the shaded arch where the palace granary carts pass when they do not want to brave the main road.
That morning, three carts pass before the second bell.
Covered… Guarded… Marked as grain tithe.
Raghav squints through the smoke from his own lamps and spits into the dust beside his stool.
“Grain, my wrinkly ass,” he mutters.
Purna, the lady who sells betel leaves next to his stall leans sideways and chuckles.
“What is it now, old man?”
“Nothing.”
“Speak up. My hearing isn’t what it used to be.” She chuckes.
“Says the old hag who can hear a fly land on shit three streets away.” Raghav mutters without much heat to his accusation.
Purna lets out a softer laugh before placing a folded betel leaf into the palm of a passing pilgrim, and takes his coin. Her expression remains the same as she remarks as though discussing the weather.
“Three carts yesterday too.”
“Four,” Raghav says.
Purna looks at him.
He looks down at his lamp wicks.
“Four?” she asks.
“One before dawn.”
“Ah.” She folds another leaf, slow and neat. “The palace eats well, as always.”
“The palace has always eaten well. It is the tunnels that have grown hungry.”
For a moment, Purna’s fingers pause.
It lasts only a heartbeat. Then she laughs loudly and swats at his arm with the end of her shawl, as if he has said something foolish and harmless.
“You and your stories. Tunnels, ghosts, tax collectors with no shadows. One day your tongue will wander off without you and find a knife waiting.”
“Then I hope it bargains well before it dies.”
She laughs again, and the sound is convincing enough that a group of pilgrims smile as they pass.
The carts move under the arch. Their wheels leave dark tracks though the morning has been dry.
Oil, not grain, Raghav thinks.
The smell lingers after them, hidden beneath cardamom, river mud, dung smoke, and incense. Most people would miss it. Kashi is an assault upon the nose at the best of times. But Raghav has sold lamp oil for thirty-two years. Sesame, ghee, camphor, mineral distillate, sanctified butter, cheap fish oil smuggled from the river villages and disguised with cloves. He knows all of them by scent. The covered carts do not carry grain. They carry oil treated with something metallic and sweet, something that clings at the back of the throat.
The same scent had risen from the funeral lane two nights ago.
The same scent had clung to the hands of a boy who came to buy a lamp at midnight and asked, in a voice too calm for his age, whether flame could burn underwater.
Kashi is still beautiful.
Raghav repeats this as a child runs to his stall and asks for six clay lamps, the cheap kind, because her grandmother has died and the family must send flame downriver before noon.
He gives her the better lamps and charges her for the cheap ones.
“Tell your grandmother to speak well of me when she reaches the Emperor’s court,” he says.
The girl nods solemnly, as though such intercession is entirely within her grandmother’s expected duties, and runs away with the lamps clutched to her chest.
Purna watches him from the corner of her eye before she sighs, “You will go poor from kindness.”
“I was poor before kindness. It cannot take credit.” He chuckles before he turns to place the coin he got from the girl into his coffers.
By the third bell, the funeral houses begin their work.
The dead of Kashi pass through the city wrapped in white, saffron, or crimson, depending on family, caste, guild, or region. Some are carried high with music, some in silence beneath thin cloth. A few have families wailing behind the dead as though grief can break the sky open. Others have loved ones walking with faces devoid of all feeling. The river takes all their lamps just the same; flame after flame drifts across the water, trembling in little clay bowls until the current, wind, or fate extinguishes them.
Today, however, there are fewer bodies than there should be. What with the plague spreading in the southern quarter, the riots and the violence that spills out in the outer wards, there should be more bodies. The funeral houses should smell of sandalwood, ash, and sweat from dawn until dusk.
Instead, only three processions pass before noon, all small, all watched by men who wear temple scarves too new for their profession.
Near midday, old Harish from the third funeral house comes to buy wicks. He is a thin man who has spent so many years among corpses that the living seems to offend him. His beard is stained yellow from tobacco, and his hands are scrubbed raw. He usually complains of the price of oil, the laziness of nephews, and the decreasing quality of mourning songs.
Today, Harish is silent.
Raghav measures the wicks onto a square of cloth.
“Aren’t you the cheerful ray of sunshine this day!”
Harish continues to stare at the river.
“Your nephew still stealing sandalwood from the pyres?” Raghav asks.
“No.”
“Then the world has truly entered its last age.”
Harish’s mouth twitches but the chuckle dies before it becomes anything audible.
Raghav folds the cloth, slow enough to make the silence seem casual.
At last, Harish says, “We prepared nine last night.”
“Nine is good business.”
“Only four remained by morning.”
Raghav ties the packet with thread.
“Dogs?”
Harish looks at him then, and the insult in his gaze is almost verbal.
“No dog unties purification knots and reseals the doors.”
A cart rattles past them; its driver keeps his eyes forward. Two men walk beside it with staffs capped in brass. Temple guards, perhaps. Palace guards, perhaps.
Raghav scratches his jaw. “You tell the watch?”
Harish exhales through his nose. “The watch told me to speak less if I wanted my family pyre kept warm when my turn comes.”
A woman approaches the stall, veiled in blue, bangles chiming. Harish takes his packet and leaves without farewell.
The woman in blue buys lamp oil. Too much for one household. Too little for a temple. She pays with palace coin and keeps her thumb pressed over the stamped side until she thinks Raghav has looked away.
He has not.
The coin bears the mark of a department that should have nothing to do with lamps, funerals, or oil.
Astropathic relay maintenance.
By late afternoon, heat settles over the city like a damp hand. The river turns gold and the ghats grow slick with spilled offerings. In the market lanes above, spice sellers shout themselves hoarse beneath awnings dyed turmeric-yellow and madder-red. The smell of frying batter rises from iron pans. A blind singer near the well begins an old ballad of the first queens of Indus, those women who were said to have bargained with rivers and stars before compliance made such stories inconvenient.
Raghav closes his stall halfway and leaves Purna to watch it; she does not ask where he goes, and that is why he trusts her more than he trusts most priests.
Hauling a basket of wrapped lamps on one hip, he trudges on as he had done for decades. For all who see him, he is the same lamp-seller making deliveries; an old man with a limp and a habit of muttering curses at uneven stones in his path. He passes through the spice market, pauses to argue with the coriander merchant over the right of way through a narrow alleyway, buys a paper cone of roasted chickpeas from a boy with a scarred lip, and climbs toward the relay quarter. Clearly, even the Astropaths need lamps, he chuckles.
The astropathic district of Kashi is quieter than the ghats, built around pale towers and old listening halls whose windows are narrow and high. The walls here are washed with lime. The doorways bear Imperial seals beside Indus protective knots drawn in vermilion and ash. Adepts move between buildings with their heads lowered. Some wear the grey of the Administratum. Others wear the red-edged robes of sanctioned communication choirs. Their faces have the drawn, inward look of people who spend too much time near voices no human throat has made.
Raghav stops at the public shrine beside the relay gate and sets down three lamps.
“For your daughter?” asks the shrine keeper.
“For my knees,” Raghav replies. “They died years ago and refuse to leave me in peace.”
The shrine keeper smiles, but his eyes flick once toward the gate.
There are new guards there.
No, Raghav corrects himself, not new guards. Old men in new authority.
One of them wears a palace sash, another, a temple scarf. The third wears no local sign at all, only a dark coat despite the heat and gloves buttoned at the wrist. A rosette hangs at his throat, half-hidden beneath black cloth. He does not speak to the others, as if he has no need to; they step aside even before he reaches the gate.
Raghav lowers his head over his lamps and arranges them carefully.
The man in the dark coat passes within arm’s length.
He smells faintly of antiseptic, old parchment, and the same metallic-sweet oil from the carts. Then, the gate closes behind him with a loud clang.
Raghav lights one lamp for his knees, another for the God Emperor and the third, he leaves unlit.
When he rises, everything is as it was before, save for the strip of paper slightly protruding from beneath the empty lamp. The shrine keeper’s hands are folded; his face is serene when he clasps Raghav’s hands in a sigh of solace. Raghav does not look at him again as he carries his empty basket downhill.
Only once he reaches the crush of the market does he allow the paper to slide into his palm.
It contains six words and a number.
The Vessel preserved. Gate beneath black lotus. 19.
Raghav chews a chickpea until it tastes like dust.
The Vessel… He does not know what that means.
No… that is a lie. Kashi has lived under too many masters to miss the smell of language when it begins to rot. And he knows what men mean when they stop saying woman, queen, prisoner, daughter, and instead begin saying vessel, witness, asset, conduit.
He returns to the ghats before dusk to find Purna sitting there with a smug angle to her chin. The woman has sold half his stock and overcharged three wealthy pilgrims from the looks of it.
“You robbing my customers again, Purna?” he asks, like a father chiding his favourite child.
“Ah, they were from the western estates. For the taxes we pay to their coffers, I’d call it reparations.”
He cannot argue with her and so, he sits and watches the evening crowd thicken. Lamps begin to glow along the steps, and the river takes their reflections and breaks them into a flutter of gold.
Across the water, on the far bank where the old cremation grounds lie, men move with covered lanterns.
Raghav counts them without turning his head.
Seven… Then twelve… Then nineteen.
Something settles cold behind his ribs, his mind turns alert.
At the top of the ghat, the palace bells ring for evening prayer. People stop where they stand, heads bow, hands make the sign of the Aquila. The city murmurs devotion as one body, and for a moment, Kashi seems holy enough to shame the darkness beneath it.
Raghav bows with the rest.
When he opens his eyes, a boy is standing before his stall.
He is perhaps twelve, perhaps younger. Hunger and fear make ages difficult to read. He wears a courier’s vest too large for him and holds a garland of marigolds in both hands.
“For the river?” Raghav asks.
The boy shakes his head and places the garland on the counter.
“For the lady,” he whispers.
Raghav keeps his hands still.
“What lady?”
The boy’s mouth works. His gaze darts to the side, to the temple guards, to the palace road, to the places where knives might be hiding in plain sight. Then he leans forward with the solemn desperation of a child who has been given an adult’s burden and knows he may die from the weight of it.
“The one they took below. The one who came back from the stars.”
The Princess… Vallabha.
Raghav lifts the garland, pretending to inspect the flowers. A small bead, dull and black, sits tied into the thread. A pilgrim might take it for a charm against the evil eye. A priest might take it for village superstition.
Raghav closes his fist around it.
“Who gave you this?”
The boy swallows.
“The woman with no eyes.”
Akshara, perhaps. Or one of the rebels’ hidden couriers. Or someone else already dead.
The boy’s eyes glisten. “She said the blue angels are coming. She said if the old lamp man was still at the river, I should give him this.”
Purna’s laughter rises beside them, bright and false, as she distracts two approaching customers with a story about a merchant whose third wife ran off with a devotional singer. Raghav leans across the counter and places a coin in the boy’s hand.
“Go to the sweet seller near the south arch. Tell him Raghav says your mother wants jaggery for the baby. He will take you inside. You will stay there until morning.”
“I don’t have a mother.”
“Tonight you do.”
Something like understanding passed over the boy’s face, and he turns and runs.
Raghav watches him vanish into the crowd.
Then, he waits.
He waits until the evening lamps are all sold, until Purna packs her betel tray and curses her back, her ankles, the price of lime, the decline of music, and men in general. Then he waits some more until the last pilgrim leaves a floating flame on the river and the watch begins driving the poor from the steps with bored cruelty.
Only then does he close his shutters. But Raghav does not go home. Not yet.
There is a narrow lane behind the lamp-stalls, too cramped for carts and too foul-smelling for respectable men. Raghav walks it slowly, basket in hand, muttering to himself in the harmless way of the old. Twice, shadows shift above him. Once, a rat skitters over his foot and saves him the trouble of feigning a startled curse.
At the lane’s end stands a shrine to a saint no one remembers clearly. Her face has been rubbed smooth by centuries of fingers. Offerings pile at her feet: wilted flowers, copper coins, broken bangles, three sugar cakes hard as stone. Raghav kneels with some difficulty, places one unsold lamp before her, and twists the saint’s left hand.
The stone clicks, and a panel beneath the offerings gives way.
He slips inside and pulls it shut behind him.
The chamber below is small, dry, and older than the shrine above. Its walls are lined with clay jars, prayer scrolls, and, hidden behind both, things no lamp-seller should possess. A compact vox unit wrapped in oilcloth. Cipher slates. Seal breakers. A map of Kashi’s underways marked in red, blue, and black. A needle pistol with three shots remaining. A strip of parchment bearing the sigil of Ultramar, so small and carefully inked that it might have been no more than a devotional flourish to an untrained eye.
Raghav Nayar sets down his basket.
For several breaths, he only stands there.
Then the old man vanishes by degrees.
The limp eases. The muttering stops. His eyes, which all day have seemed watery and mild, sharpen into something cold and clear. He takes the bead from the garland thread and crushes its outer shell beneath a brass weight. Inside is a sliver of data crystal so fine it might be mistaken for glass.
He places it into the reader, and fragments bloom across the slate.
Grain tithe diverted.
Oil stores moved below black lotus cistern.
Funeral houses stripped.
Relay gate compromised.
Inquisitorial clearance observed.
Vessel preserved until gate opens.
Subject Vallabha alive.
Ritual source external to Vessel.
Possible Ordo contamination.
Raghav closes his eyes as he tries to make sense out of the chaos.
Above him, Kashi continues to exist in its bells, river, and the many muttered prayers for the day to come.
Finally, he opens the vox.
The first burst goes out cleanly, beamed through a relay hidden in the shrine’s finial, masked beneath the evening devotional broadcast. It will bounce twice through dead maintenance nodes before it leaves the atmosphere. If the Emperor is kind, if the codes still hold, if the fleet is listening, it will reach Macragge’s Honour as a whisper inside static.
He begins with the phrase he was told to use only when concealment no longer mattered.
“Regent’s eye, Kashi cell. Confirmation follows.”
The vox crackles softly and he feeds the packet of data into the relay. The machine accepts half before the chamber door above groans.
Raghav stills as he watches the dust fall form the ceiling and the shrine panel open.
The first man entering the room wears a temple scarf too new to be honest. The second wears palace leather. Then, the third… the man with the black gloves buttoned at the wrist.
Raghav looks at the vox: transmission at sixty-five percent.
He lifts the needle pistol from beneath the clay jars and shoots the lamp out. Darkness swallows the chamber like a heavy veil over the face.
The men curse and one fires blind, the shot chewing stone from the wall beside his head. Raghav drops behind the table, one hand returning to the vox controls by memory. He has no illusions about surviving. The Lord Regent had not chosen fools for this work. Fools are useful in courts, councils, and places where men mistake noise for courage. In the dark places under cities, one requires a rarer sort of servant.
Someone lunges. Raghav fires his second shot and hears a body fall against the jars.
Transmission at seventy-eight percent.
The man in the black gloves speaks from the darkness.
“You should have remained a lamp-seller.”
Raghav smiles, though no one can see it.
“I was never especially good at it.”
He slams his palm down on the emergency rune.
The vox screams, burning through its concealment in one raw, brutal pulse. No subtlety remains. No safety. The message tears upward through shrine, smoke, prayer, and night.
“Macragge’s Honour, receive. The rot is within the Ordo. Repeat, the rot is within the Ordo. The vessel is not the source. Vallabha lives. Gate beneath black lotus. Third witness preserved. Ritual sustained from hidden circle. Ordo access confirmed. Ordo access con…”
A blade enters below his ribs.
It is strangely quiet.
Raghav grips the edge of the table as the chamber tilts. The vox hisses; the boots crush clay lamps beneath them, one after another, little bodies breaking before they ever hold flame.
The man in the black gloves leans close enough that Raghav can smell antiseptic, parchment, and that metallic-sweet oil.
“You have achieved nothing.”
Raghav’s blood fills his mouth; it tastes of iron.
Above them, beyond stone and murder and the old saint’s forgotten shrine, the bells of Kashi ring again.
He thinks of the boy with the garland. Purna’s sharp eyes. Harish’s raw hands. The woman who bought too much oil. The bodies stolen from their last rites. The queen beneath the mountain. The blue angels falling through storm.
He looks at the vox slate.
Transmission complete.
Raghav Nayar, who’s real name lay forgotten in some Imperial Dossier aboard the Macragge’s Honour, laughs once into the dark.
It is not a large sound; it does not need to be.
Then the last lamp in the chamber gutters out.
The strategium aboard the Macragge’s Honour has never truly been silent.
Even when no officers speak out their reports, when no orders move from command dais to vox-pit, when no Administratum clerk bends over their data slate to catch the precious words leaving the lips of the Lord Regent, the Gloriana class Flagship of Roboute Guilliman breathes as a living thing around her master.
Plasma conduits thrum beneath the deck like the heart of some iron colossus. Cogitator banks mutter in machine-cant, their sacred calculations flickering across brass-rimmed displays. Hololithic light spills across polished adamantine and marble, rendering Indus in ghostly blue and gold above the central tactical table.
Below her, the planet turns as always, unmindful of the machinations of Men and Machines alike.
Cloud bands curl across the green-gold continents of Indus. Kashi glitters on the curve of the main river like a jewel caught in a serpent’s mouth. Storm systems gather over the mountains, their bellies bruised with lightning. The Thunderhawk bearing Cato Sicarius and his strike force is already a descending mark on the hololith, a bright bead slipping through layers of atmosphere toward the hidden routes Guilliman has purchased with silence, calculation, and the measured betrayal of official appearances.
And now, Guilliman stands with both hands braced upon the edge of the table.
He hasn’t moved for several minutes.
Lesser men might mistake his stillness for calm when they see his immense figure clad in blue and gold with the serene severity he sports, the masterful restraint in every line of his posture, and decide that the Lord Regent is above menial things like feelings or emotions.
Those who have served him closely know better. Marneus Calgar knows better.
The Chapter Master stands to Guilliman’s right, one gauntleted hand resting on the head of his relic sword, his remaining eye fixed on the shifting tactical display. His expression is stern, as ever, but there is an old heaviness beneath it. He has seen the shape of his gene-father’s anger before. Guilliman’s rage rarely announces itself with raised voice or theatrical gesture. It refines… narrows…. And then, it becomes policy, command structure, deployment, sanction, annihilation.
High Inquisitor Alexius stands farther back, thin fingers worrying the chain of his rosette.
The man has protested thrice already. None of the protests improved with repetition.
“My lord,” he ventures again, his voice catching slightly beneath the immense vault of the strategium, “I must formally reiterate that Commander Sicarius’ unsanctioned descent into an active heretical site, however tactically motivated, poses considerable procedural complications. If the woman is indeed central to the ritual, then extraction without Ordo supervision could allow contamination to spread beyond containment.”
Calgar’s hand tightens on the hilt of his sword at the blatant arrogance, while Guilliman continues to gaze at the hololithic projection of Indus.
“Formally noted.” Guilliman’s voice is cold as steel.
Alexius blinks. He had expected argument, perhaps. Rebuke. Permission to continue. Something against which he might press the full weight of his office until it regained shape. Guilliman gives him nothing beyond two words, clean as a sealed door.
The High Inquisitor swallows.
Beside him, Inquisitor Halix stands with his hands folded into the sleeves of his dark robes. He has said little since the Thunderhawk departed. Less than little, in truth. Alexius had filled the air with enough anxious doctrine for both of them. Halix has watched, listened, and occasionally lowered his gaze as if in contemplation of necessary sorrow.
Guilliman has marked it, as he marks everything.
He notices the angle of Halix’s shoulders when Alexius speaks of contamination, the absence of surprise whenever Alexius unwittingly admits to new information about what transpires below. He also marks the way Halix’s breathing stays unnaturally steady when Kashi’s underground warrens appear on the hololith. The same routes that Guilliman himself had shared much earlier with Sicarius. A fact that only six living souls aboard the flagship know the full significance of. Six, if Guilliman’s count remains true.
As if on cue, a vox-officer below the dais stiffens.
“My lord…”
The words cut through the strategium with enough urgency that even Alexius falls silent.
Everyone turns to face the officer who looks young by the standards of Ultramar’s fleet. His eyes move rapidly over a bank of incoming signal returns. Static blooms across the auspex station’s screen in jagged lines of green-white light.
“Anomalous transmission, my lord. Weak. Origin masked within Kashi’s civilian devotional broadcast network. It is routed through dead maintenance nodes and a shrine relay. Encryption pattern...” The officer pauses, as if he doubts his own reading. “Encryption pattern corresponds to Regent’s Eye protocols.”
Calgar’s gaze sharpens, even as Alexius’ fingers stop moving on his rosette. Halix, however, does not move at all.
Guilliman straightens from the table. The shift is slight, but every officer on the dais feels the atmosphere change.
“Isolate it.”
The vox-officer turns to the adepts beside him. Hands move, runes flare, and servitors pivot in their alcoves, cable-spined skulls dipping as they receive command-packets. The devotional broadcast washes faintly through the chamber speakers for half a heartbeat: bells, river chants, a woman’s voice singing an evening hymn to the Master of Mankind in Kashi’s old melodic mode.
Then the hymn fractures as static eats the edges of it.
A man’s voice emerges, strained, old, and made harsh by compression.
The strategium goes very still as Guilliman descends one step from the command dais.
“Clear the channel. Get me a clearer read of the message.”
“Attempting, my lord.”
The voice returns in shards.
“...grain tithe diverted... oil stores moved below black lotus cistern... funeral houses stripped... relay gate compromised... Inquisitorial clearance observed...”
Alexius takes a step forward. “What is this?”
No one answers him.
The officer’s jaw tightens. “Signal integrity at forty-one percent. Source is burning concealment protocols. They are forcing it through.”
Guilliman’s eyes remain fixed on the vox-bank.
The old man’s voice comes again, louder now, broken by bursts of machine-scream.
“The Vessel preserved until gate opens. Subject Vallabha alive. Ritual source external to vessel. Possible Ordo contamination.”
Alexius’ face drains of colour.
“That is absurd.”
Calgar turns his head slowly.
The High Inquisitor appears to realize, a breath too late, that he has spoken before any accusation has been made.
“My lord,” Alexius continues, gathering himself with visible effort, “I mean only that such a message, received through compromised civilian channels, cannot be treated as reliable intelligence without verification. Heretics forge voices, seals, oaths. They mimic loyalty. They prey upon institutional distrust. This may be an attempt to fracture cooperation between the Lord Regent and the Holy Ordos at the precise moment unity is required.”
Guilliman still does not look at him.
“The possibility has occurred to me.”
Alexius falters. “Then you agree that caution is required.”
“I always require caution.”
The signal shrieks.
Several serfs flinch. One makes the sign of the aquila before she remembers where she is and lowers her hands, face pale with embarrassment. Guilliman does not rebuke her. He would sooner rebuke the stars for shining through smoke.
The voice breaks through again.
This time, it is no longer controlled. There is pain in it. Urgency. The sound of a man speaking while darkness closes around him.
“Macragge’s Honour, receive. The rot is within the Ordo. Repeat, the rot is within the Ordo. The vessel is not the source. Vallabha lives. Gate beneath black lotus. Ritual sustained from hidden circle. Ordo access confirmed. Ordo access con...”
A wet sound cuts across the transmission.
Then nothing but static.
The hololith of Indus rotates slowly above the tactical table. Kashi gleams. Storm clouds move over the mountains where Cato’s Thunderhawk continues its descent, unaware of the message that has just torn itself bloody through the void.
Guilliman closes his eyes once.
When he opens them, something in his face has changed so slightly that most in the chamber fail to name it. Calgar does not. The Chapter Master shifts his stance as though preparing for impact.
“Replay the final segment,” Guilliman says.
The vox-officer obeys.
The dead man’s voice rises again.
“...The rot is within the Ordo. Repeat, the rot is within the Ordo. The vessel is not the source. Vallabha lives. Gate beneath black lotus.. Ritual sustained from hidden circle. Ordo access confirmed...”
“Stop.”
The voice cuts away.
Guilliman turns at last, his gaze moving over Alexius to fall on Halix.
The lesser Inquisitor meets the Primarch’s eyes with the grave composure of a man prepared to grieve for any horror. His face is lean, his beard neatly trimmed, his dark robes untouched by the frantic discomfort that has seized Alexius. If he is afraid, he hides it well. If he is surprised, he hides that better.
There are men, Guilliman knows, who reveal guilt through panic.
There are others who reveal it through preparedness.
“Inquisitor Halix,” Guilliman says.
Halix bows his head by the smallest degree. “My lord.”
“You have been quiet.”
“In the presence of such grave intelligence, I find haste unbecoming.”
“A rare discipline.”
Alexius glances between them, unsettled by the shift in attention. “Lord Regent, surely we should first establish whether the message is genuine. The phrase ‘rot within the Ordo’ is so blunt as to be suspicious. No trained operative would speak with such imprecision unless under duress, and if under duress, his words could have been coerced.”
Calgar’s voice comes like a blade drawn halfway from its sheath.
“He died sending it.”
Alexius stiffens. “I do not dispute the apparent sacrifice, Lord Calgar, only the conclusion drawn from it. Death does not sanctify accuracy.”
“No,” Guilliman says. “But it does clarify motive.”
The High Inquisitor turns back toward him. “My lord?”
Guilliman steps down fully from the dais. Officers make space without being ordered. The Primarch moves toward the hololith, and the map of Kashi enlarges in response, swelling until its ghats, palace districts, shrine roads, relay quarter, all hang in the air.
“An agent embedded within Kashi burns a covert relay in order to transmit intelligence moments before capture or execution. He does not ask extraction. He does not attempt negotiation. He does not offer speculation on broad heresy. He gives logistics: grain, oil, bodies, clearance, site, subject status, ritual structure. Then he gives the one institutional warning most likely to force me to treat his death as operationally significant.”
Alexius looks as though he has swallowed ash.
Guilliman’s gaze remains on the map.
“That is not hysteria.”
He raises one hand. The black lotus cistern appears beneath Kashi’s temple district, drawn from old civil schematics, rebel maps, palace surveys, and the route Arjun had confirmed before descent. Layers stack atop layers. The cistern lies below the older pilgrimage roads, beneath reservoirs no longer listed in public maintenance ledgers. From there, narrow passages reach toward the mountain root.
Toward the cult sanctum.
Toward Vallabha.
“Cross-reference black lotus cistern with the route provided to Sicarius.”
The adepts work. Lines of light crawl across the hololith.
A red convergence blooms.
The vox-officer speaks, voice low. “My lord, the cistern lies within one thousand seven hundred metres of the predicted secondary ritual chamber. Subterranean drift suggests an unmarked passage may connect to the deeper network.”
Alexius’ hand returns to his rosette. “Even assuming the route is accurate, this information complicates the Commander’s descent. If the ritual source is external to the woman, then extracting her without identifying the true conduit may fail to collapse the incursion. We must recall Sicarius until an Ordo strike team can be assembled and a proper containment protocol established.”
Calgar turns fully now.
“Recall him?”
“My lord, surely you appreciate that a Victrix detachment, however formidable, is inadequate for complex daemonic containment if the intelligence is accurate. If the ritual is sustained through hidden circles and corrupted clearances, the field becomes jurisdictionally sensitive.”
“Jurisdictionally sensitive,” Calgar repeats.
The words land like stones.
Alexius lifts his chin. “Yes.”
For the first time since the transmission began, Guilliman smiles, though there is little warmth in it.
“High Inquisitor, there is a woman chained beneath that mountain whom your institution has repeatedly misjudged, mishandled, and nearly abandoned to death. There is a cult using civic, palace, and possibly Inquisitorial channels to move corpses, oil, and prisoners through one of the most strategically important worlds in this region. There is a strike force already descending, commanded by a warrior who knows the terrain of failure in this matter better than any man in this chamber.”
Alexius opens his mouth.
Guilliman’s gaze pins him shut.
“I will not recall him so that bureaucracy may arrive in ceremonial armour and discover the dead have grown inconveniently cold.”
The High Inquisitor goes rigid.
Calgar’s expression does not change, though something grim and satisfied passes through his eye.
Halix lowers his head. Perhaps in thought. Perhaps to hide something. Perhaps merely because he is wise enough to let Alexius absorb the Primarch’s displeasure.
Guilliman notices that too.
“My lord,” Halix says quietly, “there is wisdom in speed, of course. Yet if the message speaks truth, then Commander Sicarius may be walking toward a ritual designed to anticipate him. The cult has shown recurring interest in symbolic convergence. The woman’s history with him, his involvement at Estakhr, his current descent beneath Indus. Such things are not incidental to warp practice. It may be that his presence strengthens the rite.”
Calgar looks sharply at Halix.
Alexius seizes the point like a drowning man catching rope. “Yes. Precisely. That is exactly the risk I mean to identify. The Commander’s emotional entanglement with the subject, whatever its origin, may be an exploitable vector.”
Guilliman says nothing.
The silence lengthens.
Halix keeps his gaze lowered. His posture is careful. Reverent. Useful.
Too useful.
Guilliman turns back to the hololith. The Thunderhawk marker continues to descend. Atmospheric distortion blurs it, then clears. A stream of telemetry scrolls beside it: altitude, speed, armour integrity, hostile auspex returns, storm interference. The bead of light moves closer to the mountains.
Cato is already committed.
There are moments in war when command becomes the art of deciding which uncertainty one can endure. Guilliman has built empires on refusing false choices, on multiplying options where lesser rulers see only ruin. Yet time remains a tyrant even to Primarchs. He can feel it now, pressing at the edges of decision.
Recall Cato, lose the hour, perhaps lose Vallabha.
Let him advance, risk the ritual’s design, perhaps spring a trap whose teeth are already closing.
Trust Alexius, and the machinery that failed her once may fail her again.
Trust Halix, and the very suggestion tastes wrong.
Trust Cato, who is brilliant, wounded, furious, loyal, compromised, and already falling through storm because Guilliman made certain the path would be open.
A lesser commander would demand certainty.
Guilliman has buried too many certainties to worship them.
“Open a narrow-band channel to Sicarius,” he says.
The vox-officer’s hands move, then pause. “My lord, atmospheric interference and subterranean shielding are already degrading contact. We may get one clean packet before insertion, perhaps two if the storm breaks.”
“Then the first will matter.”
Alexius starts. “Lord Regent, I must object to any unsupervised disclosure of compromised Ordo intelligence to a field commander who may be under emotional strain.”
Guilliman turns his head.
“Your objection is recorded.”
“My lord, with respect, recorded is insufficient.”
Calgar makes a low sound. It might be a laugh in another man. In Calgar, it sounds like a fortress gate shifting open before cannon fire.
Guilliman walks toward Alexius.
The High Inquisitor does not step back. Credit must be given where it is due. His face pales, his throat moves, his fingers clutch the rosette, but he does not retreat. Zeal, Guilliman thinks, has carried many mediocre men farther than courage would have managed alone.
“Alexius,” Guilliman says, and the absence of title does more damage than anger could. “I have heard every caution you have offered since Estakhr. Some were useful. Some were frightened noise dressed in holy language. At this moment, I have no time to determine which this latest protest is.”
Alexius’ lips press together.
Guilliman’s voice lowers.
“There are few things more dangerous than a loyal fool.”
The High Inquisitor flinches as though struck.
Guilliman’s eyes shift, briefly, toward Halix.
“One of them is a traitor who has learned to sound like one.”
No one breathes.
Halix’s expression remains sorrowfully grave.
Too grave.
Guilliman turns away before either Inquisitor can answer. “Transmit to Sicarius. Priority: highest. Cipher: paternal hand.”
That draws Calgar’s eye. Paternal hand is no formal fleet code. It is an old internal designation used rarely and never lightly. It means the message is not merely tactical. It means it carries command, trust, and warning together. It means the recipient must understand the hand behind the order as much as the words themselves.
The vox channel cracks open and static floods the strategium.
“Attempting lock,” the officer says. “Thunderhawk signal acquired. Degradation severe.”
Guilliman speaks.
“Commander Sicarius. Intelligence received from Kashi confirms Vallabha lives. Repeat, Vallabha lives. Ritual source appears external to her. Visible sanctum may not be the sustaining point. Suspected hidden circle beneath or beyond black lotus cistern. Ordo clearance has been used by hostile actors. Treat all non-Ultramarine authority below as compromised until proven otherwise.”
He pauses, and in that pause the whole chamber seems to lean toward him.
“Your primary objective remains extraction of Lady Vallabha. Secondary objective: identify sustaining conduit if possible. Do not allow rage to choose your route. Do not allow certainty to be sold to you by the enemy. Trust Arjun’s local knowledge. Trust your brothers. Advance.”
The officer glances up. “Signal breaking, my lord.”
Guilliman’s jaw tightens. He adds, quieter, though the vox still carries it.
“Cato. Bring her back alive.”
The channel collapses into static; no confirmation comes.
For a moment, Guilliman stands with his head slightly bowed, as if listening for a reply no machine can recover. Then the strategium returns around him in harsh increments: cogitators, reactor hum, officers breathing too shallowly, Alexius’ anxious fingers, Halix’s controlled stillness, the planet turning beneath them with all its hidden mouths open.
“Prepare orbital auspex saturation over Kashi’s mountain district,” Guilliman says. “Discreetly. I want no broad-spectrum bombardment signatures. Deploy silent interceptors to monitor all outgoing astropathic or vox traffic from the palace, relay quarter, and Inquisitorial compounds. Any unauthorized transmission leaving Indus is to be captured, mirrored, and traced before suppression.”
Orders begin to fly.
“Lord Calgar.”
Calgar straightens. “My lord.”
“Ready reserve strike assets. No launch without my order.”
“At once.”
“Seal access to all command-layer operational intelligence. Review every officer, adept, and attached observer who had knowledge of the descent routes, including my own staff. Quietly.”
Calgar’s expression hardens with approval. “It will be done.”
Alexius takes one step forward, bristling now with fear sharpened into offence. “Lord Regent, surely you cannot mean to include the representatives of the Holy Ordos in an internal security sweep as though we were common suspects.”
Guilliman turns.
“I mean precisely that.”
The High Inquisitor stares.
Halix finally speaks, soft as a blade sliding free.
“The Lord Regent is wise to remove doubt. The Ordos should welcome scrutiny if it strengthens the hand of truth.”
Alexius looks at him, betrayed by the agreement.
Guilliman watches Halix as he says it.
There. A slight overcorrection. A performance offered one half-beat too quickly, dressed in reason, polished in humility. Guilliman has heard that tone in council chambers, war rooms, compliance courts, and the mouths of men who wish to seem brave before they choose treachery.
“Indeed,” Guilliman says, his gaze fixed on the Inquisitor who bows his head again.
The hololith shifts. The Thunderhawk marker flickers, then vanishes as it drops below atmospheric and geological interference. A cluster of smaller returns blooms briefly around the mountain approaches, then dissolves into static.
Cato Sicarius has entered the dark.
Guilliman looks down at Indus, at Kashi, at the black lotus cistern glowing like a bruise beneath the city.
He thinks of a woman standing before him in simple tunic and slacks, spine straight, eyes red-rimmed, refusing to bend beneath accusation.
He thinks of Cato, bloodied fists against adamantium, voice broken open around words no Ultramarine commander should ever have spoken where serfs could hear.
He thinks of the dead agent in Kashi, whoever he had been beneath his mask, spending his last breath on a truth that reached only halfway through the dark.
The Imperium is vast. It is rotten in places beyond counting. It devours the loyal and crowns the convenient. It produces men like Alexius, who mistake suspicion for purity, and men like Halix, who may yet prove to be something worse. It chains women to altars and then drafts memoranda on whether their screams constitute evidence.
Guilliman feels the old weariness rise.
He denies it room.
“Find the origin of that transmission,” he says.
The vox-officer hesitates. “My lord, if the cell was compromised, there may be nothing left to recover.”
“I did not ask if recovery was likely.”
The officer bows his head. “Yes, my lord.”
“Find him,” Guilliman says. “Name him. I will not have a servant die nameless in my war.”
The order passes into motion.
Above Indus, Macragge’s Honour turns its hidden eyes toward Kashi.
Below, beneath river, shrine, palace, and stone, the darkness waits with Vallabha’s face.
And somewhere inside that darkness, Cato Sicarius walks toward it.
There we have it folks!! This chapter was fun to write, even if it felt like passing a Kidney Stone at times! Let me know what you think! And as always, I love you all for the love you show my writing!!
Yeah, it happens to me too! I always have to go over my writing later to make it sound more like my style again, though if I'm currently writing fanfic that is centered around that book/media then it's fine. I do want it to fit in with the style of the universe, so hey, that's useful!
It also tends to invade my inner monologue tho, which is just funny. Why is the brain talking like a space marine.
Seriously! I'm whispering, "Courage and Honour" as I get ready for my deskjob... I'm sure the ultramarines would be slapping their foreheads in dismay if they found out!
I love when a human character gets *desensitized* to Space Marines by working with one or more of them for a while and befriending one. Going from "oh, an angel of the Emperor, I must abase myself" to "okay, my friend Decius just has geneforging-induced autism about war and duty. He's just a guy under all that, it's all good."
AAAAAH!!!! It's finally done!! I am so sorry for the incessant posting! With this, my itch has been sated... for now! And this one's a chonker! Close to 8k words! As always, thank you so much for all the love and support you have shown my work! And I hope you enjoy this one as well!
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This is the one in which Anvitha and Angron meet at last!! Will it go smoothly? Read on to find out!
Also, if you're brave enough, take a shot everytime the words "In." or "Hold." or "Out." make an appearance!
Chapter 5
In. Hold. Out.
The heat from within the closed blast doors hit Anvitha square across the chest.
In. Hold. Out.
The chamber beyond the doors was darker than the corridor outside. Lit by lumen strips that flickered where their casings had cracked, the room had shadows jumping across the walls in torn fragments. Every visible surface bore damage. The deck flooring was scored with deep gouges. One wall panel had been ripped half-free and bent inward like paper crushed in a child’s fist. Chains and cables of the inner wirings of the ship hung from the ceiling anchors and the wall brackets, some of which were intact while some were snapped and now lay swaying faintly in the aftermath of the storm.
She took one more step inside. The sound of her sandals against the deck seemed louder than she remembered.
Behind her, she could feel their presence: Lorgar, vast, grief-stricken and ready to step in; Khârn, rigid and vigilant at the threshold; Lotara, sharp-eyed and still; and poor Maia, whose fear reached Anvitha like the lapping waters of the ocean over shore.
For now, no one followed.
Good.
Or perhaps terrible.
She could not decide yet.
Then, something sparked near the far wall and she turned her attention that way.
For one heartbeat, Anvitha’s mind refused to understand what it was that she was seeing. There were mangled bits of machinery, then wreckage, then some broken apparatus fitted to the wall, and thenm the remnants of what it once was resolved.
A servitor… some unlucky fool who had been turned into a glorified appliance than now looked no better than a well-used punching bag.
She felt the blood leave her face as the torso came into focus, and then the slack mouth, the grey flesh stretched tight around metal. One augmetic arm dangled by cabling, the fingers of a once sentient being now lay twitching through some final useless signal. The cranial housing had been crushed inward, and the fluid within now ran down the side of the face, dark where it met the throat. A vox-grille embedded beneath the jaw emitted a thin, dying whine.
Then it went quiet. Eerily quiet.
The chains had held the servitor upright through its death as its executioner had pummeled it to its demise, as it had been hit over and over again, unable to escape.
Anvitha’s stomach lurched as she realized that the thing had been alive enough to fear, to suffer, its dying throes of anguish and grief assaulted her mind like tiny barbs on flesh.
For a moment, she thought of Tomas on the pallet in the maintenance decks of the Fidelitas Lex, hand clamped around hers, eyes wild with pain, voice breaking around terror.
The darkness… the terror…
This one had likely had no hand to hold.
Then, something moved at the corner of her vision and Anvitha turned towards it.
In the middle of the chamber, she saw the man she had married, for the first time.
Angron sat crouched amid the wreckage that he had wrought in his rage. One knee was pressed to the deck, and one foot was planted beside it. His shoulders hunched forward, broad enough to make everything else in the room seem smaller beside it. His head hung low, his hands were clenched so tightly, she could see the muscles in his forearms throb in response.
He was large… so much larger than any of her imaginings had allowed.
She had seen the other Primarchs. While lord Fulgrim and Lorgar had seemed softer, gentler in their mien and manners, Angron was wrought like a mountain weathered into the shape of a man by a million blows and slashes.
Bare arms corded with muscle and scars. Bare shoulders and back marked by old wounds. Skin slick with sweat. And as her eyes travelled up from his shoulders, she saw the Nails.
So many cables and implants crawled from his skill, and snaked down his neck and spine. Ugly iron roots appeared to burrow into living, throbbing flesh. The Butcher’s Nails caused his head to twitch and pulse with small mechanical jerks, as though some hateful parasite still fed on him from within.
His breathing filled the room, harsh, dragging, uneven.
Every inhale sounded like it pained him. Every exhale sounded like something inside him wanted to break its way out through his teeth.
Where before, with Tomas and with the servitor, Anvitha had felt their pain like a slap to her face, Angron’s pain lashed over her mind like a million different blows.
Tomas had been drowning, yes, but she had felt the shape of him beneath the panic. A young man, terrified and reachable.
What crouched before her now was so much worse… all she could sense was pain; pain braided into nerve, blood and breath until it became the very core of the body that housed it. If there was a soul underneath all that pain, it was like searching for someone while actively drowning in the ocean.
Anvitha felt her body tremble as tears flowed down her face in an incessant stream.
“My lord?” her voice sounded so soft and weak, even to her.
Angron did not move. His breathing continued, brutal and broken. A tremor passed through his shoulders, then down his arms. One of his hands struck the deck suddenly, and the sound rang hard enough to make Anvitha flinch.
Behind her, she heard a faint shift of armour. Lorgar perhaps… or perhaps it was Khârn.
She did not turn. For she knew that if she did, she might remember the sensible thing and leave.
“My lord,” she began again, slightly louder.
Again, there was no answer save the dying servitor’s whine that sputtered and faded into static.
Then, Angron’s head twitched in a movement so small that she almost missed it.
His face remained turned downward, but something in him had heard. Some primitive part, perhaps. Some wounded thing that knew sound meant presence and presence meant threat.
Anvitha swallowed as she took another step closer.
In.
Her lungs filled with hot, bitter air.
Hold.
Her heart struck against her ribs once, twice, thrice.
Out.
She took another step forward. A shard of broken panel cracked beneath her sandal; the sound was tiny, almost delicate.
Angron’s breathing hitched.
The room seemed to tilt toward him.
Anvitha stopped.
His shoulders rose, his hands opened and closed. The Nails gave a faint metallic tick as he twitched his head towards her direction, quick as insect legs.
From the threshold came Lorgar’s voice, low and strained.
“Anvitha…”
She heard all the things he did not say.
Don’t. Come back. You do not understand.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps none of them understood pain this old that seemed alien and unfathomable to anyone outside the skull it inhabited. Perhaps all compassion failed at the border of understanding.
She took another deep breath, focusing on all the lessons she had learnt from her teachers.
She took another step closer then, another.
The chamber narrowed around her. The smell of Angron’s swear and blood, the heat of him, the acrid stench of burning plasteel all folded inwards until her world became the distance between her hand and his twitching shoulder.
She could see him clearly now.
The scars were everywhere. There was one that continued from his lower back, up and up his broad back and shoulders, like a continuous rope, the scar twisting and turning before vanishing off over his shoulder. Red paint streaked on forearm, smeared unevenly across old wounds. What little she could see of his jaw was clenched so hard the muscles trembled. His eyes were hidden beneath the angle of his brow and the shadow of his lowered head.
The Nails twitched again, and another shudder went through him.
Anvitha’s fingers lifted before her courage could ask permission from her fear.
They trembled slightly as she reached for him and placed her fingertips against his heaving shoulder.
Hot… Slick… Real.
For the briefest fraction of a second, nothing happened.
And then, all hell broke loose.
Angron came alive with such speed that the world around them shattered into motion.
His head snapped up, his eyes were wild, bloodshot, and burning with a fierce rage that made her heart stop for a moment. A snarl tore through him, raw enough to scrape the air around them. His arms lashed out in a wide arc as though he sought to do away with whatever was in front of him. And at the moment, it was Anvitha.
She saw the blow only as a blur. And then, there was impact.
The blow struck her across the side and shoulder, terrible despite its lack of precision. Her feet left the deck and the chamber wheeled. Anvitha felt her breath leave her body as she hit the edge of the low sleeping platform behind her and she fell across it hard enough to make the frame groan.
Hot searing pain flashed bright along her ribs. Her mouth opened soundlessly, and for one sick heartbeat, she could not breathe.
The ceiling flickered above her, the sounds of a chain clinking somewhere nearby sounded very much like the final sound she would hear. Her fingers clawed at the bedding beneath her, seeking purchase… seeking air… seeking escape.
Then, her breath returned in a thin, broken gasp.
Behind her, voices erupted all at once.
Lorgar called out Angron’s name, commanding him to stop, the grief in it was unmistakable.
Lotara cursed, low and vicious.
Maia made a sound Anvitha had never wanted to hear from her.
And Khârn…
He moved.
It was the smallest thing, barely more than a shift of weight. But Anvitha saw it from the corner of her eye as she forced her head to turn towards the door. The equerry’s body leaned forward, one gauntlet flexing, chain links sliding over his forearm. For one breath, he looked ready to cross the room and place himself between Angron and the woman sprawled on the platform.
Then he stopped. Every line of him was locked tight as a single syllable came through his vox, where it was strangled before it could become a word.
“Lad…”
Perhaps he meant to call her Lady. Perhaps it was some other word that meant fool in his tongue.
Anvitha had no time to wonder at it, for the very next moment, Angron surged over her.
He came down like a collapsing wall, immense, hot and furious, one hand planting beside her head hard enough to make the platform jolt. His face filled her vision. Sweat ran down his temples. His teeth were bared as his lips parted in a snarl. His eyes were open and terrible, but they did not see her.
Angron was lost in his pain. And that was the true horror, thought Anvitha.
His gaze was full of other rooms, other worlds, other chains.
His other hand lifted, and Anvitha’s body understood death approaching her, well before her mind did.
A single blow was all it would take. A careless strike from that hand could break her skull, rip her throat open, rend her chest apart. She would become another human thing ruined in this chamber while others watched from a threshold and then later call it tragedy.
Fear rose in her like floodwater. And for one wild moment, she wanted her mother… she wanted her sister.
She wanted to be back in the Still Lake at dawn with her father’s books and the scent of rain through carved windows. She wanted to be a girl again, irritated by a braid pulling too tight, laughing with her sister, thinking the world’s cruelties were distant things that happened in stories.
Angron’s hand stilled above her trembled as he let out another growl.
Anvitha waited for the killing blow. She knew none waiting outside could reach her in time.
So, she reached Angron first.
She caught his face in both her hands and willed his mind open to hers.
Her palms struck the sides of his jaw with more force than tenderness. Her fingers spread along the hard line of his cheekbones; thumbs braced below the furious wet shine of his eyes. His skin burned beneath her touch. His breath poured over her face, hot and ragged, and full of blood’s copper tang.
With another push from her mind, she barged into his thoughts and his nightmare.
And Angron froze… only for a fraction. But that was enough.
“Breathe,” she whispered, as she felt her thoughts coalescing around his.
Angron’s raised hand hung above her, as his eyes widened, as though something had touched the storm raging within him and given it a shape it had not expected.
Anvitha tightened her hold on his face as she felt the hairs stand on her forearm and her nape.
Her ribs screamed, her shoulder throbbed and that animalistic feeling of fear clawed at the inside of her throat.
She forced herself to breathe where he could see it.
“In,” she muttered, as her chest rose slowly.
Angron’s breath came in as a snarl, broken and too fast.
“No,” she whispered. “With me.”
She did it again.
“In.”
This time she exaggerated the breath, forcing her body to obey despite pain.
His eyes locked onto hers and for a moment, the chamber held on a knife edge.
Then his chest rose; it was violent, uneven… too sharp.
Yet, it was still a breath.
“Hold,” she murmured.
Angron’s whole body shook. The hand above her dipped, then jerked as if the muscles had forgotten which command to follow. The skin around the nails on his scalp twitched, and a raw sound grated from his throat, low and murderous.
Anvitha refused to let go.
“Hold,” she repeated, softer. “Just here.”
She wasn’t even sure if he understood the words. Perhaps words were meaningless in the state he was in. Perhaps tone and breath mattered more. Perhaps the hands on his face did, guiding, holding, showing, instead of shoving, striking, hurting.
“Out.” She whispered and then exhaled slowly.
Angron’s breath that tore out of him came over her in a ragged rush like the air leaving a furnace.
Anvitha willed herself to focus on him as she repeated the exercise.
“In.”
His chest hitched.
“In,” she insisted, her voice turning slightly firmer.
His breath dragged inward.
“Hold.”
The tendons in his neck stood out, his jaw flexed beneath her palms and his eyes flickered, still wild, yet now fastened on her as if she were the only fixed point in a room seemingly full of knives.
“Out.”
He exhaled.
His hand lowered by another inch.
Anvitha felt her hands shaking and yet she pressed her fingers into his skin.
“You are here,” she said, and his eyes narrowed.
“You are in this room.”
A growl moved through him, weakened by exhaustion, sharpened by pain.
She continued before fear could steal her voice.
“You are breathing.”
The nails clicked once more and his lips peeled back from his teeth once more.
For one terrible instant, she thought she had lost him. His face contorted, his shoulders bunched and the hand beside her head dug into the platform, splintering the edge of the metal frame. A crack shot through one support with a shriek.
Anvitha did not flinch.
But she wanted to…. The Gods of her mother, she wanted to!
Instead, she leaned up as far as her pinned body allowed and forced his gaze back into hers.
“In,” she said, more firmly now. The command in her voice surprised even her. Angron’s breath stopped momentarily.
Anvitha’s voice dropped once more, steady as a stream flowing over pebbles.
“In, my lord.”
Anvitha willed herself to not close her eyes. Then, something shifted.
Images flooded her mind.
A little boy, alone in an arena, surrounded by cheering people…. Alone… scared… confused…
Tears threatened to spill down her face as she pressed her fingers even more firmly into his skin.
“Please… Hold.”
His eyes shuddered closed for half a breath.
“Out.”
His exhale broke with a sound that almost sounded like a something strangled and caught between a growl and a sob, too wounded to belong to the monster everyone had prepared her to fear. It slipped out of him like something that had been trapped behind his teeth for years.
Her eyes stung.
No… No tears. Not now… Later, if there ever was a later to turn towards.
“In.”
He followed more readily now.
“Hold.”
His raised hand lowered further.
“Out.”
The hand dropped and landed beside her head with a dull, heavy thud. The platform shuddered beneath the impact. Anvitha’s braid shifted against her shoulder. A tiny blue bead snapped loose and rolled away into the wreckage.
Angron’s weight sagged.
His arms, braced on either side of her, shook now with exhaustion rather than attack. His head dipped. The fury in his eyes faltered, not fading fully, never that, but losing its edge as the body beneath it began to realize how tired it was.
Anvitha kept her hands on his face.
“You are here,” she whispered again. “No one is asking you to rise. No one is asking you to fight. You are breathing. That is all.”
Angron’s brow furrowed. For the first time, something like confusion entered his gaze.
Perhaps he saw her then, if only a little; a woman beneath him. Small, mortal, frightened, holding his face as though the whole chamber would splinter apart if she let go.
His mouth moved, yet no word came.
The Nails twitched again, but weakly now. His eyes fluttered, rage dragged backward by exhaustion’s heavy tide.
“In,” Anvitha whispered.
He breathed in.
“Hold.”
He held.
“Out.”
He breathed out.
His forehead dipped toward hers, and Anvitha’s entire body tensed. She expected teeth, or another roar. She expected the storm to return with renewed force because surely, breath could not stand against such engineered torment. Surely, one woman’s hands could not simply hold back a lifetime of indescribably pain!
Angron’s head sank to her shoulder, his cheek came to est against the pale blue fabric of her drape. His breath spilled hot through the cloth, One of the cables from his scalp brushed against a loose strand of her hair, cold metal against dark silk.
He exhaled once in a long, shuddering movement and then went still, with Anvitha lying frozen beneath him.
Her hands remained cupped around his face, though his weight had shifted enough that she no longer held him so much as cradled what part of him had collapsed within reach. His body covered her like a fallen wall, immense and terrible, yet no longer moving to strike. One arm braced near her head. The other lay heavy across the bedding, fingers half curled.
She waited and he took another breath, then another. The rhythm of his breathing changed a little, deepening.
Angron slept. The Red Angel had fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder!
At the threshold, Lorgar stood utterly still. His face that had held kindness, grief, even reverence at times along with a scholarly wonder along with hope… now it held awe.
And it frightened her.
Lorgar regarded the scene in front of him as though he saw more behind the woman trapped beneath a sleeping giant and for some reason. Anvitha could not bear it!
She looked away from him.
It was Lotara who spoke first. The shipmistress stood there, with her lips slightly parted, shocked in a way her pride would later resent.
“What,” the shipmistress breathed, so quietly that the word barely crossed the room, “did you do?”
Anvitha could not answer. Her arms had begun to ache violently; pain flared from her ribs everytime she breathed. Her shoulder still burned where Angron’s unsteady swipe had struck her. Sweat cooled at the back of her neck where the waterlily now lay twisted sideways across her collarbone, trapped between her body and his.
Maia stood behind Lorgar, with one hand pressed to her mouth.
Her eyes were huge and wet, and that undid Anvitha more than anything else.
She wanted to tell the one person who still regarded her as human enough that she was alive. That she ought not to cry, to be dignified and stead and useful, because that was what one did when everyone else was looking.
Instead, she lay beneath Angron and tried to keep breathing.
In.
Hold.
Out.
His breath, she realized, was mirroring hers now. And that realization struck her with fresh fear.
Would he wake up if she stopped? Would the storm return if she dared move?
Her fingers trembled where they rested against his jaw, one of his scars ran beneath her thumb, raised and uneven. Without thinking, she shifted her touch slightly to avoid pressing into it.
When she next turned towards those standing at the threshold, she saw Khârn regard her with an unknowable expression from behind his helm. And then, he entered the chamber… slowly, carefully.
Anvitha found it so strange how a man of such enormous stature, with so much armour on could move so silently. He came no closer than necessary before stopping beside the platform.
Lorgar moved as well, until Khârn lifted one hand without looking towards him.
It was a small gesture, but it stopped Lorgar on his tracks.
For a breath, something passed between them that Anvitha could not name: command, warning, experience, grief. Lorgar seemed to recognize that Khârn knew this room, the danger, that Khârn knew his gene father better than Lorgar could claim to.
Khârn’s voice came through his vox, low enough that the helm’s machinery almost swallowed it.
“No sudden movements.”
Nobody moved.
Lotara moved in next, her eyes moving over Angron, then Anvitha, then the dead servitor on the wall.
“We need to get her out from under him,” she said.
“Carefully,” Khârn replied.
“Why, thank you, equerry! I had planned to wake him by kicking the bed.” Lotara whispered, furiously.
The sarcasm should have been absurd given the circumstances but, it helped. If only a little!
Anvitha almost laughed, the sound that left her was a mix of breath and a whimper.
Angron stirred slightly at that, and everyone froze.
She felt his brow tighten against her shoulder, his fingers flexed once, crushing fabric in his grip, and a faint growl moved through his chest.
Anvitha tightened her grip at his temples a little.
“In,” she whispered before panic could take her.
His breath hitched.
“Hold.”
The growl faded.
“Out.”
He settled again.
This time, nobody moved for three full breaths.
Then, Khârn looked at her.
“Can you keep doing that?”
Anvitha swallowed before she answered, “Yes.”
It was possibly a lie, because she didn’t know if she could.
But it would have to be enough, as Khârn moved to study the angle of Angron’s body. This was no courtly rescue; no tale of a wife soothed beneath her sleeping husband. This was more a bomb defusal.
Angron’s arm lay partly across the drape near Anvitha’s waist, pinning her cloth rather than flesh. His shoulder and head trapped her upper body. His weight was immense, but unevenly braced. If shifted wrong, he could crush her without waking.
Khârn looked to Lorgar.
“His weight is on her shoulder,” he said softly. “We should lift carefully. I will give you the signal when. Do not do it before.”
Lorgar’s jaw tightened, and for a moment, Anvitha thought he might protest.
He was a Primarch, a son of the Emperor. A being made for command, and war, and impossible feats. Yet, in this room, before his slumbering brother, he had to lower his pride before a lesser man who knew his brother’s habits.
He nodded before stepping closer.
Angron stirred again, perhaps sensing the nearness of another presence like his own. His face tightened against Anvitha’s shoulder. His breath went rough.
Anvitha cupped his jaw.
“In,” she whispered.
Angron inhaled.
“Hold.”
Lorgar froze where he stood, one hand hovering inches from his brother’s shoulder.
“Out.”
Angron exhaled.
Khârn’s helm angled toward Lorgar.
“Now.”
Lorgar moved; his hands settled with impossible gentleness beneath Angron’s shoulder and upper arm. For all his size, for all the strength that could crush stone and bend metal, he touched his brother as though touching a wound.
Slowly, as though every movement had to be calculated to the micron, they gently shifted Angron.
Lorgar lifted his brother barely, causing the pressure to ease from her shoulder by a hair’s breath.
As she kept repeating the mantra, ‘In. Hold. Out.’ over and over again, Khârn stepped in, slipping his gauntleted hand beneath Angron’s wrist, taking the weight of the arm pinning the drape. Lotara stepped closer and gathered the freed fabric in both hands, drawing it away from beneath Angron’s forearm without a sound.
The pressure eased another fraction, causing the pain to flare along Anvitha’s ribs as she tried to shift. The blow he had dealt her now returned in full, hot and deep. Her breath caught before she could stop it.
Angron stirred once more, his head now pressed harder into her shoulder as his nails clicked.
Everyone froze as Anvitha gingerly placed her fingers onto his temples once more.
“In….”
Her voice shook a little even as Angron’s breath dragged inward once more, obediently.
“Hold…”
His face turned slightly into her palm, the gesture was small, unconscious and devastating… like a child seeking comfort.
“Out…”
He settled once more, and the others breathed out with him.
Once more, Khârn and Lorgar moved to lift Angron off her as Lotara pulled the last of the pinned drape clear.
Anvitha slid an inch more, the movement sent pain snapping through her side, but she kept her mouth closed. Then, another inch… and another.
“Keep him lifted.” Khârn’s voice cut low through the silence.
“I am… I have him, Khârn.” Lorgar said.
Anvitha slid free by degrees, her braid catching once beneath Angron’s cheek. She reached back with her shaking hand and freed it slowly. One blue bead snapped loose and rolled across the platform, falling to the deck with a sound too small for anyone but her to notice.
At last, her trapped shoulder was free. The absence of Angron’s weight now felt like a mountain had been lifted off her. Khârn waited until she was fully in the clear before nodding once to Lorgar.
“Down.”
They lowered the slumbering man with excruciating care, watching Angron’s head settle against the ruined bedding. His breathing roughened at the act just enough for Anvitha, now half-sitting with lotara’s hand braced at her elbow to lean forward before anyone could stop her.
“In,” she whispered.
Angron’s breath caught.
“Hold.”
The chamber held its breath with him.
“Out.”
Angron exhaled once more and sank again into the sleep she had conjured around his mind.
Anvitha caught Lorgar’s gaze shift to her as he gently withdrew his hands from his now sleeping brother.
There it was… that awe again. She lowered her gaze, unable to meet his.
“Can you stand?” came Lotara’s voice from her side.
“I… I think so.”
Anvitha tried to rise before her knees betrayed her. Thankfully, Maia was there before she fell.
Somehow, the older woman had crossed the room silently enough to have missed everyone’s attention. Maia’s arm came around her back, strong despite its gentleness, and her other hand caught Anvitha’s forearm.
“My Lady.”
Anvitha wanted to lean into her, to collapse against Maia’s shoulder and weep like a child who had barely made it out of a burning house.
Instead, she stood… or tried to.
Her knees trembled violently once more, and Maia immediately tightened her hold, disguising the support as assistance with her drape. Clever, loyal Maia. Even now, she sought to protect her mistress’ dignity in a room where things had gone beyond the need to pretend strength.
Anvitha tried to take a step forward and swayed.
Lorgar took a step forward, his hand eager to support her.
“Anvitha… are you hurt?”
Yes, she wanted to say.
Everywhere! In places your apothecaries cannot see.
Instead, she gave him a wane smile as she breathed, “I am fine, my lord. Alive…”
Lorgar’s face shifted with pain.
Behind him, at the threshold, the Word Bearers remained motionless. Further beyond, World Eaters stood like figures carved into the corridor shadows. Anvitha realized there were more of them now than before. Drawn by the noise. Held back by Khârn’s presence or Lotara’s command or fear of their own father.
A murmur moved faintly among them. No words she could catch. Only breath and armour and the beginning of something that might become rumour before the hour ended.
Khârn turned his helm toward them, and the murmur died.
Then he looked at Anvitha.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, his voice came low through the vox.
“You should not have survived that.”
Anvitha’s throat worked at the statement that almost felt accusatory.
“No,” she said. She then, lifted her chin, and looked him straight in the eye lenses.
“I know. And yet, here I am.”
Khârn regarded her silently for a moment before he inclined his head. It wasn’t total deference but there was respect in the act.
“Well,” came Lotara’s voice from the side. “That complicates things nicely, princess.”
Anvitha almost smiled as she turned to look at a sleeping Angron lying half on the bed and half on the floor.
Did she just put a Primarch to sleep?
No… that would be ridiculous. He slept because his body was exhausted beyond even what a Primarch could endure. Because the nails had spent him. He slept because his body and breath had found a rhythm and had followed it for one fragile moment.
Then, as though unbidden, she saw that little boy in the pits once more. On how the crowds had roared around him. How everyone had wanted him to be hurt, to fight, to kill…
She shuddered at the though and shook her head as though to clear away the stray images from that thought.
“Please…” she said at last, before anyone could speak anymore.
“I must rest. Please take me to my chambers.”
For a moment, no one moved.
Then, Lotara straightened.
“Of course.” Her voice resumed some of its iron. It sounded almost like mercy pretending to be procedure. “The lady has had a long welcome.”
Khârn moved first, returning to the threshold. With one glance, one subtle turn of his helm, he cleared the gathered World Eaters from the corridor. They obeyed slowly, reluctantly, eyes lingering on Anvitha until Khârn’s silence sharpened enough to cut.
Lorgar stepped aside, allowing Maia to guide Anvitha toward the door.
Every step hurt, her ribs protested, her shoulder throbbed, and her palms still burned with the shape of Angron’s face. She could still feel the phantom heat of his skin there, the hard line of his jaw, the tremor that moved through him when breath finally overtook violence.
As she passed Khârn, he spoke without looking at her,
“He will wake angry.”
Anvitha stopped, causing Maia’s arm to tighten around her in anticipation. She turned to face Khârn.
“Why? Because I touched him?”
Khârn did not turn to look at her and stood there silent, for a moment before speaking,
“He does not like those with psychic abilities. He would consider you a witch. This will complicate things, princess.”
Anvitha stood silent for a moment before proceeding to move towards the door once more.
The corridor air felt colder, cleaner. It felt like she had left the orbit of a blazing sun and now stood barely able to stand.
Without looking back at any of them, Anvitha and Maia moved as one until one of the serfs who had now materialized as though out of thin air, gently guided them both towards her chambers.
One step in front of the other. A deep breath. And then, repeat.
Anvitha was aware that she was walking through the many corridors of the ship, guided by the serf and seemingly by Lotara as well, who now walked beside her.
The entirety of the Conqueror was watching them.
Maia stayed by her side, with her arm arranged so neatly behind her that any watching eye might mistake it for an attendant guiding her lady through unfamiliar passageways. Anvitha knew better. Without Maia’s strength, quiet and unremarked, she would have folded before they reached the first turn.
The World Eaters who stood along the walls in clusters of white, blue, brass and dried red, seemed to regard her with a sort of curiosity that tired her even more. Some had come from the corridor outside Angron’s chambers, while others had followed the commotion, or the rumour of that which was already spreading faster than any footsteps that might carry it. It dawned on Anvitha, with a distant and dreadful clarity, that her first walk through her husband’s ship would be remembered.
All she wanted at that moment was to become small, and ordinary and preferably very far away.
Lotara walked ahead of the two women, her mere presence cut through the ship’s attention like a blade through silk. Her back remained straight, her officer’s coat immaculate, the enormous red handprint notwithstanding. Whenever a serf lingered too long or a World Eater failed to clear the passage quickly enough, the shipmistress turned her head by the smallest amount, and the way opened.
No one asked her twice.
Lorgar followed at a measured distance, flanked by his sons. Anvitha did not look back at him. She could feel him there, vast and troubled. She could almost hear the words he had not spoken in his brother’s chamber, and she feared them more in the silence that enveloped them now.
Father was right… She has a purpose… This is a miracle…
No.
Anvitha’s fingers tightened in Maia’s sleeve, and the older woman responded by shifting her hold, making the support firmer without making it obvious.
“Just a little farther, my lady,” Maia murmured.
Anvitha nodded because speaking seemed too arduous a task at the moment.
She whimpered a little when another step shifted her shoulder awkwardly, making the pain shoot through her body. Something was torn if not broken. And all this from a strike that wasn’t even aimed at her. A reflexive sweep of his arm had thrown her like a doll. A deliberate blow would have ended her very life.
The corridor curved and the air changed subtly, losing some of the burned-metal stink of Angron’s chambers and gaining the stale dryness of the habitation decks. The walls here had been patched more recently.
Lotara stopped before a sealed door guarded by two human arms men who looked as though they would rather be anywhere else.
“These are the chambers prepared for you, princess.” She said, turning to look at Anvitha.
Prepared… Anvitha almost let out a chuckle as she wondered what sort of preparation went into a room meant for the wife of a man such as Angron.
Did it have locks on the inside? Unbreakable furniture, perhaps? It was clearly set far enough from his own quarters that everyone could pretend she wasn’t there at all.
Lotara glanced at the guards. “Leave.”
They obeyed gladly and then; the door opened with a heavy slide.
The room beyond was larger than Anvitha expected and harsher than anything Lorgar would have arranged. It had been cleaned, or someone had tried. The deck had been scrubbed, the bedding changed, the walls cleared of whatever marks had been there before. A broad bed stood against one wall, too angular to be beautiful. A washbasin and water canister had been set nearby. A narrow writing desk waited beneath a lumen strip that hummed faintly. Her trunk from Veylorn’s Crown sat at the foot of the bed, looking impossibly gentle in that iron room.
Someone had placed the Shakespeare tome on the desk.
Lotara stepped inside first and looked around the room as though she expected someone to jump from the corners and attack. Anvitha wondered if something similar had happened before.
“I will leave you to settle in, princess,” she said. “If something is needed, inform the serfs assigned to this corridor. And if they fail, tell me.”
Anvitha tried to answer, but her mouth had gone dry.
Maia bowed in her place. “Thank you, Shipmistress.”
Lotara’s gaze shifted to her, then to Anvitha.
“You should have a chirurgeon look at her.”
Anvitha forced herself to speak. “No.”
The word came out too quickly, too sharply.
Lotara’s eyes narrowed.
Anvitha drew one slow breath, though it scraped. “Forgive me. I meant, not yet.”
Lotara studied her long enough that Anvitha wondered how much the woman could see. The shaking beneath Maia’s careful support. The way Anvitha held herself too stiffly around her ribs.
“Suit yourself,” Lotara said at last. “Though if you collapse dead in chambers assigned under my command, I’ll be irritated.”
Despite herself, Anvitha felt the ghost of a smile move through her exhaustion.
“I will endeavour not to inconvenience you.”
“See that you don’t.”
For a moment, neither woman looked away.
There was no affection there. No trust. Yet something had shifted between the docking bay and now. Lotara no longer looked at her as silk-wrapped paperwork. She looked at her as a complication with a pulse, which on the Conqueror might have been a promotion.
Then, Lorgar appeared at the threshold.
“Anvitha,” he said softly.
She looked at him because even now, courtesy demanded she show him the respect due a Primarch.
His face bore a tenderness that nearly undid her. “Rest. Allow me to handle things outside your chambers.”
She inclined her head in gratitude. “Thank you, my lord.”
Lorgar nodded once. Then, he turned and withdrew with his sons.
Lotara remained behind a moment longer.
“if he wakes before I return to the bridge, I will be very cross,” she said to no one in particular.
Then, she left too, with the door sealing behind her.
Once Anvitha was truly alone, she stood there, exactly where Maia had guided her, with a hand still caught in the older woman’s sleeve, her body held upright by habit, pride, and the remnant vestiges of terror.
And then, Maia pressed her hand gently.
“My lady?”
Anvitha opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound left her.
Maia, through the years of service she had endured before Anvitha, understood what went through her mistress’ mind. She guided her toward the bed, slow enough to not harm her already bruised ribs, but steady enough that Anvitha could walk without fear of falling.
When Anvitha sat, the mattress dipped beneath her, and the sudden release of weight from her legs made the entire room sway.
Maia knelt before her at once.
“Breathe, my lady.”
Anvitha nodded mutely as she tried and failed.
“In…Hold…Out.”
Hearing her own words from Maia made something within Anvitha break, and she let out what might have been a chuckle in kinder climes. Maia’s eyes softened as she gently pressed Anvitha’s hands.
“There… that’s a good start.”
The tenderness in it made it so much better… and so much worse!
Anvitha looked down at her own hands. They were shaking… violently.
Her palms were marked faintly with sweat, dust, and something darker near the base of one thumb. Blood, perhaps. His? Hers? The servitor’s? She did not know.
She stared at it.
The memory returned with savage clarity: her hands on Angron’s face, his skin burning beneath her palms, the scar under her thumb, the heat of his breath….
And then, the little child in the red sand pit, the way his small hands trembled when they held a gladius too big for him, the way the crowd around had cheered….
And then…. The way his face had turned towards her touch, that one moment where he had been at peace, the sound of a sob that left that giant ‘monster’ as he fell into slumber.
“I need to wash my hands.” She said, trying to get up.
Maia’s face changed.
“My lady…”
“I need water, Maia.”
“But my lady…”
“Give it to me!”
The command came too sharp, too unlike her. Maia didn’t flinch, but Anvitha saw the flicker in her eyes and shame rose like bile within.
“I am sorry…”
“There is nothing to forgive, my lady.”
Anvitha shook her head as she clutched her hands together tightly. She was too spent for words now.
Maia stood, poured water out of the canister into the basin, and dipped a cloth into it. She then came back and knelt again, holding the cloth between her two hands.
Anvitha reached for it, but Maia did not let go.
“My lady,” she said softly, “look at me.”
Anvitha raised her head slowly to regard the kneeling woman in front of her.
Maia’s face was lined with fear she had not permitted herself outside. Her eyes were wet, though no tears had fallen. She looked older than she had that morning. Or perhaps Anvitha had not understood until now what it cost Maia to remain steady.
“If you wash because you wish to be clean, I will help you,” Maia said. “If you wash because you believe you can scrub away what happened, I cannot let you hurt yourself again.”
Again.
Tomas.
The cloudy pink water in the basin aboard the Fidelitas Lex. Her reddened hands. Maia taking the towel from her before she could abrade her skin raw.
Anvitha closed her eyes.
“I can still feel him.”
“Lord Angron?”
His name uttered into the room made Anvitha’s breath hitch.
“I can feel his anguish… his rage… his pain…” She swallowed hard, even as Maia started to gently clean her hands, making sure not to cause pain to her shoulder.
“By the gods of the old ways, Maia… I saw his memories… he was… he was so little… and they… they…”
She let out a whimper as Maia continued to wipe the dust, sweat and blood off her fingers.
“And I thought he would kill me.” She took another gulp of air before continuing, “Even after he slept, I was so afraid!”
Two drops fell on her palms that lay in Maia’s gentle hold.
“My lady…”
“I think it would have been easier if he had just killed me… but now, I live, having glimpsed at his pain… it was too much… oh gods, too much!”
Anvitha broke down crying, letting all the pent up grief, terror and anger drain out of her as she sobbed into Maia’s embrace.
“My lady, I cannot fathom what you must endure everytime you soothe another’s pain and fear away. But this… you must never do this again.”
Anvitha looked up at Maia, tears now gleaming down her face.
“But that is what they want of me, is it not? That I ease his suffering?”
Maia’s jaw tightened a little as she continued to clean her mistress’ hands.
“Not to your detriment, my lady. You must find another way… I cannot see you like this.”
She continued to clean her hands in slow, careful strokes.
“I need my mother…”
The confession was so small, so meek, Anvitha felt Maia’s hands stop for a moment.
And then, she gently rose to sit beside her on the bed, careful of her shoulder or anything that might hurt. She guided Anvitha against her, and this time, she went to the older woman like a child, face turning into Maia’s shoulder, fingers clutching at the older woman’s sleeve.
And she wept.
“There,” Maia whispered. “There, my lady. I may be a poor substitute for your mother but, I am by your side. For however long you need me.”
The sobs came rough and uneven, dragged from places she had sealed since the day the imperial envoys came to Veylorn’s Crown. She cried for the wedding that had not been a wedding, for her sister’s trembling voice, for her mother’s silent hands in her hair, for Tomas screaming in the lower decks, for the dead servitor chained after death, for Lorgar’s kind eyes and Kor Phaeron’s hungry ones, for Lotara’s handprint, for Khârn almost stepping forward, for Angron’s raised hand, for Angron’s face turning helplessly into her palm.
She cried because she had lived.
She cried because he had slept.
She cried because some small, treacherous part of her already feared what would happen when he woke.
When the worst of the sobbing passed, she was hollowed by it. Her breath came in uneven pulls. Her face was wet. Her throat ached. Her ribs hurt with every inhale.
“I cannot do this,” she whispered.
Maia’s hand moved slowly over her braided hair.
“You already did.”
“No.” Anvitha pulled back enough to look at her. “Once. I did it once. I survived a moment. That is all. Tomorrow, he will wake. Tomorrow, everyone will know. Tomorrow, they will come with their meanings and their orders and their expectations, and I will be asked to walk back toward him because it worked once.”
Maia’s face did not soften into false comfort.
“Yes,” she said.
The honesty steadied her more than reassurance might have.
Anvitha stared at her.
Maia wiped one tear from Anvitha’s cheek with her thumb. The gesture was almost maternal.
“Yes,” she repeated. “They may ask. They may command. They may dress it in gratitude or destiny. But tonight, inside this room, you do not have to answer them.”
Anvitha looked toward the door.
It seemed very solid.
She knew better than to trust doors.
“And if they enter?”
Maia’s chin lifted.
“Then they will have to pass me first.”
A laugh escaped Anvitha before she could stop it. It broke through tears and turned into something painful, almost bright.
“Maia, he is a Primarch.”
“I did not specify that I would succeed.”
The laugh came again, fuller this time, though it ended in a wince as Anvitha pressed a hand to her side.
Maia’s brows drew together at once.
“I will call for the chirurgeon.”
Anvitha tightened her grasp on Maia’s sleeve.
“No…”
“My lady! You are hurt.”
“Tomorrow… Please… Not now.”
“If something is broken, waiting will make it worse.”
The firmness in Maia’s voice would have made an imperial officer proud. Anvitha stared at her, too exhausted to be offended, and then let her head fall back slightly.
“You are becoming tyrannical.”
“One must be to survive aboard this vessel.”
Anvitha chuckled before she winced again.
“Don’t let Lotara hear you. The shipmistress might consider you a direct threat to her position.”
Maia smiled as she gently patted her hands and moved to stand, only for Anvitha to pull at her hands.
“Please,” she said, and hated how small it sounded. “Not yet. Sit with me, please…”
Maia’s expression softened as she nodded and gently helped Anvitha to lie back against the pillows, arranging them so her ribs were supported and her shoulder did not bear much of her weight. Then she removed Anvitha’s slippers, loosened the drape, and unpinned the places where the fabric pulled too tightly. Each movement was unhurried. Each asked permission without making Anvitha answer aloud.
When Maia reached for the waterlily pendant, Anvitha caught her wrist.
“No.”
Maia stopped. “I was only going to set it straight.”
Anvitha looked down.
The pendant was twisted from where it had been trapped between her body and Angron’s. She had not noticed how tightly it pressed into her skin until Maia touched it. A small red mark had formed beneath the chain.
Anvitha released Maia’s wrist.
“Forgive me.”
Maia adjusted the pendant gently, letting the waterlily settle at the hollow of Anvitha’s throat.
“There,” she said. “Still yours.”
Anvitha closed her eyes.
Still yours.
Such a little phrase. Such a defiance.
Maia returned to the basin, changed the water, and came back with a clean cloth. She wiped Anvitha’s face, then her neck, then the place where sweat had dried at the edge of her hairline. The care was almost unbearable. Anvitha kept her eyes closed because if she looked at Maia too long, she would cry again.
And as her exhaustion landed upon her fully, Anvitha felt herself drift off to sleep.
Outside the chamber, the Conqueror carried its lord’s unnatural sleep like a secret too large for its walls. Somewhere beyond decks and doors, Angron lay amid wreckage, blood, and broken chains, breathing in a rhythm a mortal woman had given him. The ship would speak of it. The warriors would measure it. Lorgar would pray over it, perhaps, or worse, understand it.
Inside, for one night at least, Anvitha slept, with the only friend in her life at the moment, keeping watch over her.
There you go! It wasn't too bad as far as first meetings go, eh? Also, this would be one heck of a tale to tell their children, if they ever got there!
Also, we just had a pretty big earthquake here as I was posting this!! Big E doesn't want me making Angron happy!! It's an IMPERIAL CONSPIRACY!!!! (/jk)
Author's Note: Okay... hear me out! I had the afternoon off and my ADHD hyperfocus TOOK OVER and it ended in this!!! And I did promise Angron and Anvitha would meet this week! So, here's an interim chapter before the next one drops on Friday! (Please know that after this Friday, I am going to need to take the week off next because baby... my brain is going to shut down once I get this one out!!)
Aaaanyway, here's Chapter 4. Chapter 5 is being worked on at the moment and I'll have that puppy out this Friday!
If there's anyone who wants in or out of the taglist, please let me know and I'll be happy to oblige!
Chapter 4
“Do you know where souls go when they pass, Master Sileth?”
The wizened teacher looked down to where the little voice had put forth the question. Anvitha, a girl of seven summers, looked up at him as though he was the font of all wisdom. The older man smiled as he bent down to kneel beside her.
She was dressed in the fineries that befit her station. The daughter of the Keeper of the Ways. Someday, she would go on to be the most prolific healer among her people. A Soul Guider, as they were called amongst the wise of Veylorn’s Crown.
“Hmmm… that is indeed a question for the ages, isn’t it, little one?”
Anvitha’s face lit up with anticipation, her hazel eyes glittering in the light of the many lamps around them as she clasped the master’s sleeve tightly.
“Where do people go when they pass?”
Master Sileth considered the question with all the gravity it deserved.
“It is said amongst the wisemen of our world that the soul has no beginning and no end. It takes a body the way we take on vestments. And just as we change our clothes at the end of a long day, so does the soul leave a body and take on another.”
Anvitha’s eyes were now two round moons.
“Does that mean when my little Mittoo dies, she will come back?”
The little girl looked down to regard Mittoo, her hound that followed her like her shadow.
Death should never have been something a child of seven ruminated over. But then again, master Sileth knew her soul was older. Much older. He smiled at the little girl and her dog as he gently caressed her hair.
“Perhaps. If she wills it.”
“One can will it?!”
The master chuckled at the way her voice turned into an animated squeak.
“That is what the old wise ones say, my dear.”
Anvitha nodded sagely, as though she had decided on some grave decision.
“Then I shall come back again and again. And I will never leave Mama and Papa!”
Sileth smiled as he shook his head.
“But the goal is to break free of the cycle, Anvitha. To come back is to be bound.”The little girl smiled as she nodded before hugging her teacher and planting a soft kiss on his wrinkled cheek.
The deck beneath Anvitha’s sandals thrummed with an ugly impatience, as if the ship wanted to move and had been forced to stay still. Harsh light spilled in from the lumen strips overhead, throwing much of the space around them in a sharp relief of light and dark. The walls of the shuttle bay were dark, dented, patched in places, and streaked with the smoke from old fires. Somewhere far, far away, the machinery of the ship herself ground in a rhythm that felt eerily close to the gnashing of teeth,
Soon, she could feel eyes upon her.
The World Eaters stood along the eaves of the huge bay in loose formation. They did not possess the polished discipline of the Word Bearers but rather appeared to gather around in informal clusters of three or four, all enormous figures in battered white and blue plate, armours scarred and stained by histories Anvitha had no desire to know… yet.
Chainaxes rested at hips or in hands. Some helms were painted with red marks like open wounds. Others bore trophies of past victories: bones, broken links, and even scraps of cloth darkened by age and blood.
Those of the Twelfth who did not don their helms seemed even more intimidating.
They watched her with eyes that seemed too bright. There was amusement in some, hostility in most. Curiosity in a few that did little to calm her fluttering heart.
Maia stayed behind her, so close now that the edge of her sleeve brushed Anvitha’s drape. And she was glad of it. At least she would not be alone here.
As their retinue progressed further in, they were met by a more orderly gathering of warriors with a human woman in their midst.
The woman was most definitely small compared to the giants around her, and yet she seemed to exude an aura of command that made it clear that they listened to her and not the other way around.
She wore an officer’s coat so immaculate it seemed oddly out of place agains the grime around them. Her hands were clasped behind her back. A sidearm rested at her hip with the ease of a thing that was well loved and well used.
Her eyes were dark, steady and suspicious, even a little unimpressed.
But the most startling thing about the woman was the huge handprint across the front of her otherwise crisp white uniform. It had been stamped over breastbone and ribs in what looked like dried blood. From the mere size of the print, it was clear it did not belong to any ordinary man. The fingers had dragged slightly, as if the hand had closed there once in passing, in pain, in possession, or perhaps simply with the careless force of a Primarch who forgot the bodies around him were mortal and weak.
But the woman seemed the opposite of weak. She stood there, proud and unyielding and when her gaze struck Anvitha, it held.
“So,” she said, her voice barely hiding the contempt she felt. “That’s the wife.”
A few of the World Eaters around her shifted, while one made a low chuckle as though amused.
Anvitha inclined her head,
“I am Princess Anvitha of Veylorn’s Crown.”
The woman’s brow lifted a fraction.
“A princess! How fancy!”
“I’m glad to see you impressed, Lady…?”
Something very faint moved at the corner of the woman’s mouth,
“Lotara Sarrin,” she said. “Commanding officer and shipmistress of the Conqueror.”
Anvitha bowed again, no lower than courtesy required.
“Glad to make your acquaintance, Shipmistress Sarrin.”
Lotara’s gaze moved over her, taking in the pale blue fabric, the waterlily pendant, the braid, the jewelry. Then her eyes flicked to Maia, half hidden behind Anvitha.
“And you brought your nursemaid along. How quaint!”
Maia went still at being perceived. Anvitha let out a breath as she replied, her voice remaining calm.
“She is my attendant. She is part of my household now.”
Lotara smirked as her gaze continued to remain fixed on Maia.
“This ship has a habit of eating the weak. Attendants included.”
Anvitha smiled back, her visage betraying nothing.
“Then, I shall have to be very disagreeable about that, shipmistress.”
Lotara’s almost-smile returned, sharper this time. She then turned to Lorgar who stood beside Anvitha, his face schooled into an expression of serenity.
“Lord Aurelian. You bring us paperwork wrapped in silk once more.”
The Primarch sighed as he replied, “The Emperor has made the decision in this matter, shipmistress. All we can do is obey.”
“Yes. Obey, we must.” Lotara’s eyes flicked to Anvitha for a moment. “And pretend we enjoy it while we are at it.”
For a moment, there was understanding between the two women. For a breath, there was amity. Then, Lotara turned back to her.
“Just so I make myself clear, princess, I run this ship. I have bled for her, I have killed for her. I have kept her moving through madness, void storms, boarding actions and Primarch temper tantrums that would make lesser men and captains throw themselves out an airlock, if only for the quiet.” Her eyes sharpened. “I have also been the only woman with command here for a long time.”
“I shall remember that, shipmistress. I also do not seek command.” Anvitha said.
“No. You seek my Primarch.”
Anvitha’s fingers tightened once against her skirt.
“I am sorry you see it that way. I seek nothing,” she said. “I am here because I was commanded to.”
Lotara didn’t reply immediately and settled to study her for a long moment.
The others around waited and watched. The intent in every gaze was subtly different. Lorgar watched for meaning. Lotara and the world eaters watched for weakness.
At last, the shipmistress gave a short breath through her nose that could almost have been an amused huff.
“We look forward to your presence here, princess.”
And with that, she turned on her heel.
“Follow me. And please keep your wits about you. You will need them here.”
The world eaters around her parted like a tide shifting around stone and as Anvitha proceeded with Lorgar and Maia behind Lotara, she felt their gazes sharpen on her.
She heard one of them laugh softly as she passed, a broken sound full of teeth. Another stared at her pendant as if trying to decide whether it was a charm or an insult. A third looked past her to Maia, and Anvitha felt her own body angle half an inch in response as though to shield her friend from the gaze.
And Lotara saw it all.
“Protective over your people, I see,” the shipmistress asked without turning or breaking her stride.
“I try.”
“Protecting the weak can prove expensive, princess.”
“So, I am beginning to comprehend.”
Lotara threw her an amused glance over the shoulder as they continued to move deeper into the ship.
The corridors of the Conqueror were nothing like those aboard the Fidelitas Lex. Lorgar’s vessel had made every passage feel like a sentence in a holy text. Here, the walls leaned inward with pipes, cables, repair plates, and old damage. The deck bore gouges too deep to be ordinary wear. Twice, Anvitha saw dents in the bulkhead that looked horribly like the marks of fists.
Human crew moved fast along the edges of the corridor. None of them lingered. None of them spoke unless spoken to. When World Eaters passed, the humans lowered their eyes and pressed themselves against the walls with the instinctive obedience of creatures that had learned how not to be noticed by predators.
Anvitha felt Maia’s breathing change behind her. She slowed her pace by an imperceptible amount until the older woman could catch up.
“I have you, Maia.”
Maia smiled at her mistress as she nodded and continued to follow the shipmistress deeper and deeper into the ship.
Then, they heard it.
Somewhere distant, and steadily closing in, something roared.
Anvitha stopped.
The sound had been faint, muffled by walls and distance, and yet it moved through her bones with terrible intimacy. Whatever it was seemed angry… and hurt. As though it were an animal slashing itself in rage and agony.
Lotara merely slowed, her eyes narrowing toward the corridor ahead, while Lorgar’s expression tightened.
The world eaters nearby shifted, not surprised or afraid exactly, but alert in a way that made the air around them sharper.
Another sound followed. Metal slammed into metal. Then another. Then, a long scrape, as if something heavy had been dragged across the deck or thrown against a wall and pulled down by its own ruined weight.
Anvitha’s mouth went dry. Maia whispered from behind, barely audible, “My lady…”
She did not answer immediately, straining to listen instead.
Beneath the cacophony of crashes and the raging roars, Anvitha heard a breath. A broken rhythm. And as she let her training take over, she could almost see a body in pain. A storm with lungs.
Lotara looked back at them, and for the first time since they had met, the shipmistress was not mocking.
“He’s in one of his moods,” she said.
Lorgar closed his eyes for the briefest moment. When he opened them, the gentleness had not vanished, but it looked pierced by grief.
“Take me to him,” he said.
Lotara’s jaw tightened, “He will not recognize you.”
“He is my brother.”
“He may not care, my lord.”
Lorgar’s response was a low sigh before he added, “I know. But he is still my brother.”
Lotara held his gaze a heartbeat longer, then turned.
“This way, then.”
The corridor ahead seemed to darken as they followed her. Or perhaps it was that Anvitha’s mind had begun to gather shadows in preparation for what lay ahead. The heat thickened in the recycled air around as even fewer humans moved around, the deeper they went.
Another crash sounded… closer, so much closer now.
Then, a long mechanical shriek that made Anvitha’s skin crawl. It rose and rose, damaged vox and human panic braided into one thin, awful sound, and then it cut off with such suddenness that the silence that followed it seemed ominous.
Maia’s hand brushed Anvitha’s sleeve, and this time, she reached back without looking and found her serf’s trembling fingers.
Only for a second. Only long enough to say, ‘I know’. Then, she let go.
Ahead, at the end of the long corridor, reinforced blast doors awaited them. And in front of those doors stood a lone warrior.
Even among the World Eaters, he seemed to possess a gravity that drew the eye and held it. He wore his helm, its lenses dark and unreadable. Chain links were wrapped around one forearm like a vow. His posture was still, painfully so, as though the violence on the other side of the door could be held in check if he stood guard still enough.
Lotara stopped in front of the Astartes.
“Equerry.”
The warrior inclined his helm slightly.
“Shipmistress.”
His accent was thick and decidedly different from those Anvitha had been around since leaving her world. The man’s gaze moved to Lorgar next and he bowed.
“Lord Lorgar Aurelian.”
Finally, he looked down at Anvitha. The help gave nothing away and yet, Anvitha felt, with immediate certainty, that he was measuring her more honestly in that single moment than most courtiers back home had managed in their entire lifetimes.
“This is Khârn,” Lotara said. “Equerry to the Primarch Angron.”
Anvitha inclined her head in greeting.
“Lord Khârn.”
“He is not a lord, princess,” Lotara chuckled. Khârn on the other hand, did not react.
“I am Anvitha…previously of Veylorn’s Crown. Now, of the Conqueror.”
Something shifted in the air between them. Nothing warm like approval. It was more akin to recognition, of a subtle acknowledgement.
From beyond the doors behind Khârn, something or someone struck metal hard enough to make the entire deck frame shudder, making the sound roll through the corridor.
Khârn stood still as always.
Then, with the same heavy voice that reminded Anvitha of mountains, he said,
“You cannot enter.”
For a blessed moment, Anvitha wished to turn around and walk back to the shuttle. Maybe she could even beg one of them to drop her back home. Maybe she might even wake up and find this all a dream.
But then, Lorgar stepped forward. “Khârn.”
The equerry did not move from before the doors. The reinforced steel behind him shuddered as something heavy struck it from the other side. The impact rang through the corridor and trembled under Anvitha’s feet.
“He is in an episode, my lord,” Khârn said. “He will not know you.”
“He is my brother.”
“That will matter not at all, at the moment.”
The simplicity of that declaration silence even Lorgar for a breath,
Another crash came from within, followed by shrieking metal and a vast and ragged roar, so full of pain that Anvitha had to dig her fingers into a tight fist to not cower where she stood.
Lotara’s jaw was tight as she said, “We keep him contained until the worst of the episodes have passed.”
There was silence from the other side.
Until the worst of the episodes have passed.
They spoke of pain as though it were weather to be endured. As though one merely waited for the sky to clear while the thing beneath it destroyed everything within reach.
Lorgar’s voice lowered as he demanded once more, “Open the door, Khârn.”
Khârn’s helm shook in response, “No, lord Primarch.”
The two Word Bearers behind Lorgar shifted, and the World Eaters behind them shifted in response. For a moment, the air became crowded with imagined slights and old griefs.
Lorgar calmed his men down with a simple gesture before he turned to Khârn.
“I will not leave him like this.”
Khârn’s reply was just as calm. “Then we wait until we can be sure nobody else will be hurt.”
Nobody else.
That meant someone was already either hurt or was actively being hurt at this very moment.
As though to confirm her fears, Anvitha heard a mechanical whine rise from beyond, thin and desperate, like a dying machine trying to pray for mercy. It stuttered into binharic static. Then came a wet, brutal impact.
The whine topped.
For a moment, Anvitha thought of Tomas.
How his eyes had shown terror and pain. How his pain had leeched into her own mind until she tried washing it all off, almost bloodying her hands.
This was so much worse… so much worse.
Her fingers curled around her waterlily pendant until the metal bit her palm.
“My lady,” Maia whispered.
Anvitha did not look back.
She merely took a step towards the door. Khârn immediately angled down at her. “Don’t.”
“I need you to open it.”
“That would not be wise.”
“I will still need you to open the door, lord Khârn.”
“You’ll die, princess.”
The words should have frightened her more. Perhaps they did. Or perhaps the fear had simply reached a size too large for her body to hold.
Anvitha lifted her eyes to his dark lenses where his eyes probably were behind, staring into her soul.
“Then I die.”
She heard Maia let out a small whimper, and Lotara draw in a breath.
Lorgar stepped closer to her by half a step.
“Anvitha,” he said, and his voice held a warning and a plea.
She turned to him, her lips parting in a smile that did nothing to hide her trembling.
“Was this not what was decided for me, my lord? That I go and be with my lord husband? That I give him understanding that the galaxy denies him?”
His face changed as he attempted to dissuade her once more. But she turned to look at Khârn once more.
“I am the Lady Wife of the Primarch of the Twelfth Legion,” her voice stayed steady and low, even if the words tasted like iron and ash. “I demand that you, Khârn of the Twelfth, open the door.”
The corridor went very still. Lotara let out a curse before she chuckled mirthlessly.
Khârn, however, stood as steadily as ever, regarding her from behind blank lenses.
Behind the doors, Angron roared again. And this time, Anvitha heard the breath behind it. It was torn, uneven… As though whatever let that breath out was drowning in its own agony.
She took another step closer.
“I am deathly afraid,” she said quietly. “I am not foolish enough to deny that. But I also know pain when I hear it.”
Khârn flexed his hand once.
“This is not a pain you can heal, princess.” And this time, there was no mockery in the way he addressed her.
“Regardless…. I need you to open the door.” She looked up at him, keeping her gaze steady. “Please.”
Then Lotara spoke.
“If he kills you in there,” her voice held a sliver of genuine concern now, “we will all be guilty of that.”
Lorgar’s eyes closed briefly and moved to place a hand on her shoulder. Maia whispered again from behind, trembling with a fear that surpassed mere dread in the presence of transhuman demigods.
“My lady, please…”
Anvitha looked back.
The older woman’s composure had cracked. Only slightly. Only around the eyes. But Anvitha saw the grief waiting there, already formed, already bracing itself.
Anvitha reached back and touched Maia’s hand once.
Not in reassurance, for she had none to give. Only in gratitude. Then she let go.
After a long moment, Khârn pressed his gauntlet to the panel and watched the runes flare red.
The locks released one by one, each sound heavy enough to feel like a verdict.
Lorgar stepped near her. “Stay behind me, Anvitha.”
Anvitha shook her head.
“No.”
His expression tightened. “This is madness! He will strike you before you’ve even spoken your first word.”
“Then he must see me first.”
“Anvitha…”
“My lord… if I die tonight,” she said softly, “please tell my sister I tried until my last breath.”
The doors parted and heat poured out through the widening seam. Then the smell came: sweat, blood, burned wiring, oil and something bitter beneath it all.
Anvitha felt her eyes water as the gap continued to widen. When it was wide enough for her to step in, she lifted her chin, touched the pendant to her throat once, and walked through the doors alone.
There we go!! I'm so sorry for the cliffhanger once more! But I promise you'll all be vindicated this Friday! *ducks away from incoming sharp objects*
As always, I would LOVE to hear what you think on this! (please be kind! I am sensitive af!)
I love how when you first peek into Warhammer and catch a glimpse of Roboute Guilliman (who will likely be the first Primarch you see) you think ok well this is some boring staid stiff-upper lip male fantasy. I bet he's never cried in his life and grouses about ~honor~ all the time. He's just some ultra-masc roman empire (pejorative) jerkbait. Get the fuck outta here, cardboard ass character.
And then you get into it and yeah he is staid and uptight as hell, but he's also a nerd none of the Primarchs particularly like? People in the books are like "shut up, Roboute, don't you have some homework to do somewhere" and he goes "Actually yes thank you for reminding me".
He'll try to be funny but then it doesn't land.
When Ferrus Manus, one of the only guys MORE staid and stoic than him, finds out from Fulgrim that Guilliman admires him greatly, he responds "It is not reciprocated"
They think he's a lame annoying doopfuck. I don't think he has a single friend amongst his brothers beyond Sanguinius and that's because Sanguinius is your default friend. He comes included when you're born as a Primarch.
With the Lion, he's agonizing over how perfectly organized his legion is, it makes him insecure. It's like watching the straight A+ honor roll student find out his classmate got an A++ and then laying his head down on his desk in class to hide the fact he's trying not to cry.
He's a dork. It's kind of great. To have this guy who looks like a male power fantasy, but he's the least fuckable man in the galaxy. If you tried to seduce him, he'd go "The color of your hair reminds me of a wheat field on a warm summer day. I need to configurate grain transport logistics. I have to go"
It's actually quite endearing, as far as fascist bureaucrats go
