WIP Title Ask Game: Emelina (yes).
Thanks for the ask :)). You may remember writing a post about how Emelina is sorry she’d forgotten merciful Heinrix, but no such thing for the ultra-dogmatic Heinrix? That post set me off to start writing on the game from the middle of the story and it’s fun 😊. Added some additional cataclysmic activity (I mean, she pushed for the phase transition with all four limbs and the sun already is about to explode when we show up in our ship, so some ceiling crashing is the right thing to do). Also, I was a partition recovery software in my previous life, so I write in patches.
Finally, made her to become a warp ghost after she is dead. That allows her to recover her in-life memories and provide some dramatic commentary!
[[Possibly lengthy not yet written Phton stuff ending with in-game mercy killing]]
Above me the argument lingers.
“But why? I’d given her shelter, we could have saved…”
“And you know a few places that could use a new sun, isn’t that right?”
“I am sparing you the fate of Winterscale. He got lucky—thanks to the faithful sod in his retinue.”
“That’s not what I— You…” Her voice cracks and stumbles.
“She was your… friend. Your teacher. You said—”
“She was an unrepentant, stubborn heretic who defended her pact with the Ruinous Powers till the very end. Giving her shelter was never an option. Or did you want to take part in the interrogation, Lord Captain?”
A key player in the Expanse and still confused about who calls the shots. We never relinquish prisoners. We never consult anyone on what is to be done—be they the Emperor himself. But then, in the Imperium, delusional nobles are more of a rule than an exception. More so when they’re let loose on the fringes of civilization with an Emperor-signed leave note.
“All your Inquisition are just a bunch of sick blood-thirsty freaks. All of you.”
A brief charged stillness follows, broken only by the shuffling of the navis imperialis elder and the Drukhari dog he holds on the leash. The elder fears what the inquisitorial response to the insults might be. The dog is greedy for a bloodbath.
Instead of a rebuke, Heinrix laughs. Stifled and forced at first, but freer and freer as it builds—until nothing holds it back. He laughs and laughs, and the air around him grows leaden.
“You’re so very right, Lord Captain,” he says finally, catching his breath, wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s exactly who we are.”
Of course. Monsters make the best monster-hunters. That’s what it means to keep the Imperium safe from the curse of mutants, xenos, and heretics. And who better to kill a witch… than another witch? What better instrument than one forged from the same filth?
“Well,” she says, voice brittle, turning away to hide her face, “if you’ve filled your murder quota for today, we’re leaving. Abelard—take Marazhai. Clear out the mandrakes. We’ll need the shuttle for survivors. Or do you want to incinerate them too, Heinrix?”
“These are technically your subjects, Lord Captain,” he pretends to ignore the barb. “I know you won’t let me incinerate them. I will have them watched.”
Meaning: they will mysteriously vanish when no one is looking.
“Word of advice,” he murmurs once the navis imperialis and the xenos are out of earshot, his voice like a hand around the throat. “Most inquisitors would not tolerate such speech. Even from a peer of the Imperium. You don’t get to call the Emperor’s servants monsters and freaks. Luckily for you, I am a very patient inquisitor. But you, you should control yourself, lest you commit the worst kind of heresy in public”.
“Of course,” she snaps, seizing the opportunity. “Because calling you what you really are—a bunch of murderous fanatics—is obviously the most horrible thing about this situation.”
“Amanar,” his voice softens, rife with fear now. “I… I want you to survive. I only want you to remain well.”
He steals a glance at what used to be my body. A crooked, broken husk—more metal inlays and cogitator interfaces than flesh. Disfigured by memory banks. A husk, a discarded cocoon.
I want you to remain. For me. With me.
Everything I was denied—I want to keep.
“Survival is not life,” Amanar says simply, and hits a pile of rubble in frustration. “Seems we’ll have to go back to the Webway if we want to live.”
They’ve been places together. She may have once believed him human—seen the spark of sentimentality that hindered his career since the day he came to my tutelage, a broken youth of twenty-something. The same thing that stopped him from ripping out contents of my banks through Eighth’s action.
Whatever he wants to say, there is no time.
The avalanche is a small, quiet thing at first—microcracks running through the stones, the blocks, the carrier wires of the dome. It creeps into the caverns, the archeofactorums, the cemeteries—crashing into the planet’s warped crust.
Catastrophes are as sure as the universe itself.
The diviner witch feels it first. Noradrenaline surges on the crest of insight. Pupils eat up the irises. She looks up in awe, her gaze meeting the falling plinth and stone blocks—and she can’t even scream.
[[some not yet written action here, after which our somewhat stoned heroes and heroines manage to escape to some deep caverns where they need to take some rest and have an adult talk about wtf just happened. There is a cool campsite with an interesting cave bear-proof flaming food storages and wall graffiti by Chaos Banksy]]
“You’re afraid of me”, he says, resigned.
It was inevitable. Expected. Whatever she’d seen in him—a boy who loved riding with his sisters through the Guisornian fields of dandelions, a regicide dork, a battle-brother at her back—all of it would melt away, revealing the terror within, a cursed blade in the hand of the Ordo. A weapon, implacable against the Emperor’s enemies, be they the creatures of the Immaterium or the traitors within. Cold steel and stone, unmoved, unfeeling, striking with precision.
An acolyte of the Holy Ordos is not anyone’s friend, but a friend-shaped surgical tool.
I would know - after all I was the one who brainwashed him, broke him, rebuilt him and made him into this.
In saturnine silence, he dips his hand in the pale copper of her hair, letting the strands run between his fingers. The mind knows itself to be a monster, but the body refuses to surrender the memories of embrace and warmth and comfort. Of acceptance and recognition.
When she speaks into the stifled stillness, it’s but a hushed murmur.
“Of you. For you. For the choices that are dealt you, where mercy killing your mother is your best option.”
That is not fear, but anger she is describing, tired, barely smoldering. Wearing her down.
His mother. Sweet child of whatever pleasure resort for noble debutants you are, his mother was I not. More like his evil step-aunt—the kind that shows up at the door with veritas-laced apples and a warped loom of eternal data-dreams.
[and on, and on this continues, but ends happily (relatively speaking), I promise. All will be well.]
