Did I finished any request or kinktober? No. Did I skip all those to write another series because my ass can't focus on anything too long? Yes.
You die the first time in a mud hut.
The memory is blurry now, a thatch roof, smoke-stung eyes, the weight of fever in your bones, but you remember the way it felt when your heart stopped. The stillness. The quiet. The sharp, clean break between one breath and none.
Then the second breath.
You woke on a cold dirt floor, the same body, the same hands, the same age. Outside, the village wailed like you were still gone. You left that night without saying goodbye, because how do you explain something like that to people who burn their dead?
You walk.
You walk through winters and summers, through tribes that vanish and rivers that change their course. You learn not to form attachments that last longer than a season. It is easier that way. You die from wounds, from sickness, from accidents and each time you wake again, a little more resigned.
By the time you meet him, you have already buried more than one life.
The first time you see Neoth, he is standing on the broken wall of a dead city.
You climb the rubble because there is nowhere else to go, barbarians are burning the plains behind you, the sky is black with smoke and you want higher ground. The old stones are warm under your palms. Plants grow from the cracks, roots chewing through things that used to be sacred.
You pull yourself up over the edge and stop.
There is a man at the top.
Tall, lean, dressed in travel-worn leathers and an old cloak embroidered with symbols you don’t know. Dark hair tied back to keep it out of his face. His skin is sun-browned, his boots dusty. He looks like any other wanderer at first glance.
Then he turns to you.
His eyes are wrong. Too bright. Too focused. Golden, not like metal but like something you can’t look at for too long without feeling exposed.
You freeze. So does he.
For a moment you both just stare, two animals checking each other for scars.
“You climbed the killing wall,” he says at last, voice calm, as if commenting on the weather.
You look down at the ruin of the city beneath you. “Does it still kill?”
“Not today.” He tilts his head, studying you. “You’re not from any of the tribes nearby.”
“Neither are you.” You gesture to his cloak. “No one here can afford that stitching.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile, but close. “You’re observant.”
“I’ve had time to practice,” you say, and then immediately wish you hadn’t. You are usually more careful.
His eyes sharpen. “How much time?”
You shrug, trying to make it sound like nothing. “Enough.”
He doesn’t look away. Most people get uncomfortable under prolonged eye contact. He looks like he’s cataloguing you, detail by detail, and not missing anything.
“What do you call yourself?” he asks.
You give the name you’re using this decade. He repeats it quietly, tasting it like he might keep it. Then he nods toward the broken stone beside him.
“Since the wall is not killing today, you might as well sit.”
You don’t know why you listen. Maybe it’s the exhaustion. Maybe the way his presence feels familiar in a way that makes no sense. You sit anyway, leaving a good arm’s length between you.
Below, the world burns slowly. Smoke rises from the plains where the raiders passed. It smells like charred grain and wet ash.
“Did you come here to watch?” you ask.
“In a way.” He rests his elbows on his knees. “Civilizations die. Others rise. I like to see the pattern.”
“That’s a strange hobby.”
“Stranger than yours?” His gaze flicks to you again. “Running alone into a dead city?”
You don’t answer.
He studies you a moment longer. “You’re not afraid of dying.”
You let out a breath through your nose. “Dying is boring. Waking up after is worse.”
His head turns sharply.
For the first time since you climbed the wall, he looks surprised.
You regret the words as soon as they leave your mouth. You stand up, ready to leave, but his hand closes around your wrist.
Not tight. Not painful. Just…certain.
“Wait.”
You pull, testing his grip. It doesn’t move.
You look at his fingers on your skin, then at his face. His expression has changed, some internal wall dropping. Behind it is intensity, curiosity and something else you recognize with a chill: recognition.
“What did you say?” he asks quietly.
“That dying is boring,” you reply. “Let go.”
“And waking up?” he presses.
You grind your teeth. “Also boring.”
He exhales, a sound that could be a laugh if it had any humor in it.
“I’ve been searching a long time,” he murmurs. “I thought perhaps there were others, but I had never found proof. Until now.”
You go still.
“Others?” you repeat.
“Perpetual,” he says, after a small pause, like he’s weighing whether to tell you the word. “Like me.”
You stare at him.
Then you yank your hand free with more force. His fingers slip away, letting you go. You take three steps back.
“Prove it,” you say.
He shrugs off his cloak.
Before you can ask what he’s doing, he steps off the killing wall.
You lunge forward on instinct. Your hand closes on empty air where his arm was a moment before. Stone scrapes under your boots as you skid to the edge and peer down.
His body is a broken shape on the rubble below.
You swear under your breath. People die all the time; you have watched thousands of deaths. But this one, you caused and that sits badly in your chest. You curse again, harder.
Then the broken shape moves.
Bones grind wetly into place. Limbs twist back to their proper alignment. After a moment, Neoth stands, brushes dust off his clothes and looks up at you.
The fall should have snapped his neck. Sheared vertebrae. Left him twitching at best.
He is already walking back toward the narrow stairs.
You step away from the edge and wait.
When he climbs back up, his gait is smooth, uninjured. He retrieves his cloak, dusts it off and slides it over his shoulders as if he simply slipped.
“Will that suffice?” he asks.
Your chest feels tight. “How old are you?”
He smiles properly now, and it’s a dangerous thing. Less warmth, more promise.
“Old enough,” he says. “Walk with me. I’ll tell you a story.”
You walk.
He tells you about lost empires and hidden cities under the ice. About speaking with kings who thought themselves gods. About being worshipped, hated, forgotten, remembered.
His memory is too detailed to be lying. You recognize some of his “stories” from lives you lived on the edges of those events as a soldier, a scribe, a healer.
“You were there,” you say slowly, interrupting him at one point.
“So were you.” He glances at you. “We must have missed each other by days.”
You think of all the times you died just before a major battle, or left a city before it burned. You wonder if he was on the other side of those events, watching from some high place.
“Why haven’t I seen you before?” you ask.
“I stayed to the shadows,” he says. “I had…other work. Plans. Experiments.” His gaze slides back to the horizon, where the smoke is thinning. “But I always thought there had to be others. I could not be the only defect in the pattern.”
“Defect,” you echo, a little bitter. “Nice word.”
He looks at you again, more sharply. “You don’t like what you are.”
“Do you?”
He thinks about it. Really thinks.
“Sometimes,” he admits. “Sometimes I see farther than others can. I can build on things no one else even remembers. That is useful. That is…satisfying.”
“And the other times?”
His jaw flexes. “The other times, I watch people I care about die while I remain.”
You fall quiet at that. The wind moves across the dead city, pulling at your hair.
“You could care less,” you say softly, because you’ve tried that. “It helps.”
“For a while.” His voice is low. “But I find I am not suited for apathy. When I want something, I want it completely.”
He doesn’t say what he wants.
He doesn’t have to.
You part ways at dusk.
He offers you a place by his fire. You refuse. He doesn’t push.
“Will we see each other again?” he asks, as you shoulder your worn pack.
“Probably,” you say. “The world isn’t as big as it thinks it is.”
He nods like he already knows the roads you’ll take.
“Then until next time,” he says.
You walk into the dark, certain you will forget his name in a decade or two like all the others.
You don’t.
The second time you meet Neoth, it is centuries later and the world has changed its face again.
Stone has become bronze, bronze has become iron. You have been a mercenary, a thief, a physician, a monk. You have worn other names, other clothes. You have watched empires rise and rotten at the core, then fall.
You see him in a market in a desert city, haggling over spice.
You recognize him even before he speaks. The way he stands: balanced, like he never truly relaxes. The tilt of his head when someone lies to him. The faint lines at the corners of his mouth that weren’t there before.
You approach with a basket on your hip. “You’re being overcharged,” you say, in the local tongue.
The spice-seller glares at you. “Mind your own business.”
Neoth’s gaze flicks to you, then to the weight on the seller’s scale, then back.
“They are right,” he says. “You are adding sand to the measure.”
The seller bristles. “I should—”
Neoth’s hand falls lazily to the hilt of his knife. Not a threat. A reminder.
The seller suddenly decides that today, honesty is healthy.
You laugh under your breath as you walk away together.
“You throw yourself into the strangest arguments,” Neoth says.
“You were letting him win,” you reply. “It annoyed me.”
“I was studying local customs,” he counters. “Apparently being cheated is traditional in this district.”
You snort.
He glances at you sideways. “You’re older.”
“So are you.”
“Still bored of dying?” he asks.
“Still jumping off walls?” you shoot back.
His smile is quicker this time, less guarded. “Sometimes. For efficiency.”
You end up sharing a room at a caravanserai that night because there is only one left and you both refuse to sleep in the stable.
“I can leave,” he offers, standing by the door.
“It’s a bed,” you say. “I’m not scared of blankets.”
He hesitates. “Some people are.”
“Well, I’m not some people”
He gives you a look like he’s pleased by that answer.
You lie back on the mat, staring at the ceiling. He sits cross-legged near the shuttered window, knife in hand, whittling some small piece of wood into a shape.
“Do you have a plan?” you ask him.
“Yes,” he says immediately.
You wait.
He doesn’t elaborate.
“Are you going to tell me?” you ask.
“Not yet.” He turns the wooden piece in his fingers, carving carefully. “It is difficult to explain to those who still think in lifetimes.”
You bristle. “And I don’t?”
“You do,” he says. “Better than most. But you still forget how long forever is.”
“Forever is long,” you say. “Everyone knows that.”
“No.” He looks at you, eyes deep and sharp in the lamplight. “They think it’s long. They don’t know. We do. That changes the calculus.”
You roll onto your side.
“You talk like a man building something,” you say. “Not just surviving.”
“I am.” His fingers never stop moving. Chips of wood fall to the floor. “The world is inefficient. Wasteful. I have watched it kill itself in slow motion too many times. I intend to intervene more…directly.”
You study his face.
“Become a king?” you guess. “A priest?”
He laughs quietly. “Too small.”
“Then what?”
He looks back out the window, where the desert wind is tapping at the shutters.
“Something better.”
He will not say more.
But you keep meeting.
Sometimes you find him deliberately, following rumors, chasing whispers of a man who never seems to die, who appears in the background of revolutions and disappearances and sudden leaps in technology.
Sometimes you just stumble across him by chance on a mountain pass or in a messy tavern. At least it feels like chance.
You share bread and wine and stories. You argue about methods.
He intervenes in wars, nudging one side toward victory because it will cause fewer deaths in the long term. You call it playing gods with other people’s lives. He calls it management.
He encourages cities to standardize measurements, alphabets, coinage. You mock him for being obsessed with straight lines and matching weights. He replies that straight lines save time and labor.
Once you find him in a library carved into a cliff, surrounded by clay tablets and scrolls.
“You hoard knowledge like a dragon,” you tell him.
“Knowledge is leverage,” he says. “Leverage is safety.”
“For who?”
“For everyone.” He says it like it’s obvious.
You are not sure you believe that.
The first time you notice his fixation on you hardening into something else, it’s subtle.
You get drunk on cheap wine in a port city after a particularly stupid death. A sailor shoved you off a pier in a brawl and you hit your head on a rock and woke up three days later in a midden heap behind the tavern.
You find Neoth leaning against a wall nearby, arms crossed, watching the harbor.
“So that’s what you do when I’m not around,” he say. “Rot in garbage.”
He doesn’t smile.
“You were lying there for hours,” he doesn't let you answer, voice flat. “Anyone could have found you.”
“I was dead,” you remind him. “It happens.”
“Yes.” His eyes are hard. “And then you get up again, alone, in an alley, with no one watching your back.”
“There wasn’t anyone who could kill me,” you point out.
“There are things worse than dying,” he says quietly.
You stop.
He pushes off the wall and closes the distance between you in three strides.
“You wander through wars and plagues like they’re passing storms,” he says. “You do not take precautions. You do not build defenses. You trust that you will wake up and start over.”
“It’s worked so far,” you say. “Why are you suddenly angry about it?”
“Because now I know you exist,” he snaps. “Before, your carelessness didn’t matter. Now it does.”
You blink. “Why?”
“Because,” he says, slower now, like he’s choosing each word, “there are very few beings in this world who understand what it means to see centuries as steps instead of cliffs. I will not have the only one I’ve found harmed or taken or twisted into someone else’s tool.”
You stare at him.
“You don’t get to decide that,” you say.
He exhales sharply, looks away. For a moment, you see strain in the set of his shoulders, tension pulling at the muscles of his jaw.
“No,” he says at last. “I don’t. Not yet.”
That “yet” sits between you like a placed stone.
After that, he is…around more.
If you stay in a region longer than a decade, he turns up. It stops feeling like coincidence. You start to suspect he is tracking you deliberately.
When bandits target the village where you’re pretending to be a midwife, they mysteriously vanish two nights before their planned attack. You hear rumors of a tall stranger passing through their camp.
When a fever sweeps through the city you’ve grown almost fond of, he appears at the gate with herbs and instructions, coordinating a quarantine like he’s done it a hundred times before. You find him in the temple courtyard handing out boiled water.
“Following me?” you ask.
“Following disease patterns,” he replies. “You just happen to live in very fragile places.”
You squint at him.
He doesn’t look at you when he adds, “It’s fortunate I was nearby.”
The first time you disappear on purpose, he finds you in less than a year.
You change continents. New oceans, new stars. You take work on a ship, break your arm in a storm, drown, wake tangled in seaweed on an unknown shore. You make a new life as a teacher in a small inland town. It feels almost comfortable.
Then one market day you see a familiar profile at a blacksmith’s stall, examining a sword.
You swear under your breath.
“What are you doing here?” you demand, marching up to him.
He looks at you, expression smooth. “Trade route inspection.”
“There is no trade route here,” you snap. “It’s nowhere. I picked it because it’s nowhere.”
His mouth curves very slightly. “You picked it?”
You realize your mistake too late.
“So you were avoiding me,” he says.
“I was…resting,” you say stiffly.
“In the middle of a flood plain with poor infrastructure and no standing army.” He raises an eyebrow. “You have always had questionable taste in resting places.”
“Stop…fixing things around me,” you say, frustration spilling over. “Every time I settle, you show up and start reorganizing reality.”
He studies you for a long moment.
“I like knowing where you are,” he says finally. No embellishment. No apology.
“That’s not a reason.”
“It is for me.”
It’s the honesty that shakes you more than anything else.
Time moves. Ages shift.
He learns to use metal better, then electricity, then things you don’t have names for. His tools change. His clothes change. The way he carries himself does not.
He becomes more deliberate. Less reactive. As if everything he does is part of a long chain of causes leading to a single, distant effect.
“Still building?” you ask once, when you meet in a city humming with new machines.
“Yes,” he says.
“Do I get to know what it is yet?”
He looks at you, gaze steady, and for the first time you feel something in him you would later describe as…possessive. Not the friendly possessiveness of a comrade. Deeper. Sharper.
“It’s a world where beings like us are not at the mercy of chaos,” he says. “Where I do not have to worry about losing the few things that matter.”
You feel your throat go dry. “Things?”
His eyes don’t leave yours. “You.”
The word lands between you like a dropped weapon.
You laugh, too loud. “I’m very break-resistant, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Resistance is not immunity.” He takes a step closer. “You disappear. You reappear. You walk into dangers because they can’t kill you. But they can take you, change you, wear you down. I’ve seen men broken without dying.”
“You can’t watch me forever,” you say.
“I can try,” he answers.
He is not joking.
That’s when you realize his obsession with you is no longer an incidental part of his long plans. It is central. It shapes where he goes, what he does, which wars he starts and which he ends.
You are used to being peripheral to history. A witness. A piece of driftwood in a flood.
For the first time, you have the sinking feeling you have become part of someone else’s design.
And Neoth, the man who will one day call himself Emperor, is not the kind of person who lets go of his designs easily.
...isekai, implied child abuse, reader have system.
You learned the rules of this place before you learned its language well.
Do not stand where a drunk can see you. Do not answer when angry adults call your name. Do not touch food unless you plan to swallow it immediately. Do not cry where anyone can hear you. Do not look like you are hiding anything, because people here notice weakness before they notice blood.
You still got hit, of course.
Everyone got hit by someone. Fathers hit because they lost money. Mothers hit because they were afraid. Older children hit because they could. Neighbors hit because they were bored. Strangers hit because the streets taught them that hurting first was safer than waiting.
You had been in Nostramo long enough to stop thinking that tomorrow might be different.
At first, after you woke in this world, you screamed for help until your throat felt raw. You shouted for police, for neighbors, for anyone normal. You begged whatever god had made this mistake to send you back. The first time you did that, your father in this world slapped you hard enough to make one ear ring for hours. Your mother waited until later, when he slept, and beat you for making noise that might bring trouble to the door.
After that, you learned faster.
Now you knew which floorboards cracked and which ones only groaned. You knew how long it took your father to finish the cheap bottle he hid under the sink. You knew your mother moved more quietly when she was angriest, which meant you had to watch the shadows beneath the basement door instead of listening for footsteps. You knew how to hide bruises when older boys dragged children into alleys to steal, hit, or worse.
You also knew that this city never became morning.
The sky stayed black every hour you had ever seen it. Sometimes the clouds turned lighter where distant fires reflected against them. Sometimes lightning broke open the dark for a second and showed the city exactly as it was: towers like rotten teeth, roofs packed too close together, cables hanging loose, water running black in gutters, and human figures moving quickly whenever there was anything left worth stealing.
Then the darkness closed again, and the city returned to its usual shape.
You stood outside the basement entrance and pressed a piece of broken tile against the wall..
The stone there was already covered with scratches, lines, and crooked marks. Some belonged to you. Some were older. Some might have been made by other children who no longer lived in the basement, or no longer lived at all. You dragged the tile down once more and added another thin white mark to the row.
You had stopped counting what the marks meant.
At the beginning, they were days. Then they became proof. Then they became habit. Now they were only the action of someone who needed to leave something behind, even if it was meaningless.
Rain tapped the back of your neck and slid under your shirt.
The basement door behind you remained half open, and the smell from inside drifted around you in waves. Wet fabric. Mold. old oil. Human waste. Cheap disinfectant. Rotting food. The basement held all of it and never let anything out except people worse than when they entered.
You glanced over your shoulder before stepping away from the wall.
No one called after you. No one cared enough to ask where you were going.
That suited you perfectly.
You withdrew a little farther into the narrow yard between buildings, keeping close to the wall where the broken drainpipe dripped. If your father woke early and noticed you were gone, he might come looking. If your mother reached for you and found empty air instead, she might decide you had stolen something. Either way, getting caught outside without a reason meant getting beaten. Getting caught too far away might mean not being allowed back in at all.
Being abandoned in Nostramo was not freedom.
It only meant that everyone could do whatever they wanted to you.
You moved through the back passages instead of the street. The alleys behind the housing blocks were narrower, filthier, and safer than the open road. People preferred places where they had room to chase, trap, or drag. These passages were clogged with pipes, rusted bins, broken furniture, dead vermin, and puddles that could have been water. Nobody wanted to move through them unless they had to. You did, so you used them.
Your bare soles knew where the sharp glass usually lay.
Your hands knew which walls would cut skin if you touched them.
Your ears stayed open for footsteps, voices, and the scrape of metal. Guns existed here, though you had only seen them from a distance. Knives were more common. Hands were cheapest. You had seen enough children come back missing teeth, fingers, or speech to understand how little it took for a body to become damaged beyond repair.
You turned the next corner and let yourself breathe again.
This part of the district backed onto a dumping ground that the city pretended was organized. Trucks came at irregular hours. Men unloaded crates, machine parts, spoiled food, chemical drums, medical waste, broken furniture, and things wrapped in sheets. The sheets did not always stay closed. Dogs came when there was meat. Children came when there was wire, cloth, bottles, or anything that could be sold. Gangs came when there were children.
You came because no one in your household followed you there.
The garbage yard had corners even the desperate disliked. Pools of standing water collected in pits. Sharp rebar pushed out of concrete. Steam rose from cracks in the earth. The smell could force tears from your eyes if the wind changed too quickly. It was private by the standards of Nostramo, which meant only a few people passed through each hour.
You slipped behind a collapsed fence panel and stepped into your corner.
Someone had once burned something large there. The ground was blackened, the wall nearby had peeled, and the heap of trash around it had sunk into itself. Broken containers surrounded the place like dead shells. A cracked pipe above you dripped rainwater into a metal basin turned on its side. Nothing valuable ever landed here. That was why you loved it.
You crouched and looked around one last time.
No voices. No footsteps. No breathing except your own.
Good.
You closed your eyes and said the words inside your head.
A burger and a bottle of cola appeared in your hands.
Even after all this time, the sudden weight still gave you a small shock.
It had happened by accident the first week, when you were hungry enough to hallucinate. You had thought about hot food from your old life with such desperate focus that a warm paper-wrapped sandwich had simply appeared in your lap. You had stared at it for a full minute before devouring it. The next day, it happened again. After enough testing, usually while half starving and hiding, you discovered the rule.
If you asked in your mind for a simple food you knew well, it appeared.
Not always. Not endlessly. You could not summon money, tools, medicine, or clean clothes. You could not ask for ten things at once. You could not make large meals or impossible items. But you could get enough to stay alive and keep the worst hunger off you. You had laughed the day you understood it. Then you cried, because a power useful enough to stop you dying slowly was still not useful enough to get you home.
You unwrapped the burger and took the first bite.
The bread was soft. The meat was greasy. The cheese had that artificial taste you used to ignore. The onions were sharp. The sauce was too sweet. It was perfect. It was disgusting. It was ordinary. It was the best thing you touched all week.
You swallowed another bite and listened to the rain strike metal.
Somewhere beyond the wall, men shouted over the hiss of machinery. Farther away, a siren rose and then cut off abruptly. Not ended. Cut off. That was different. You had learned that difference as well. Sounds in this city did not always stop because the event ended. Sometimes the sound source was destroyed first.
You finished the burger and tipped the cola back.
The cold fizz burned your throat and made your eyes sting. You drank every drop. Once, in your old life, you would have called the drink unhealthy and too sugary. Now it tasted like something almost sacred. When the bottle was empty, you crushed it flat with both hands and tucked it deep beneath the blackened trash.
Then you crawled under the broken pipe and opened your mouth to the rain.
You rinsed carefully. Swished, spat, and repeated the process until the taste of salt, grease, and sugar faded. Then you rubbed your fingers with mud, rinsed them too, and scrubbed at your lips. No smell. No shine. No trace.
That part mattered as much as eating.
You had never forget.
You stood, wiped the water from your eyes, and prepared to return.
You had stayed outside just long enough to quiet your stomach and your mind. The basement would still be there. The people inside it would still be cruel. The city would still be waiting to cut your throat if you stumbled at the wrong moment. Nothing improved while you hid in your corner, but at least you could survive until the next day and the day after that.
Your right foot had just shifted toward the gap in the fence when the world changed.
Something screamed overhead.
It was not an engine sound you recognized. It was sharper, heavier, and too sudden. Instinct made you drop and cover your head before your thoughts caught up. A second later, impact hit nearby with a force that punched the breath out of your chest. The ground jumped. Metal shrieked. Fire flashed white through your eyelids. Then sound arrived all at once and turned everything into pain.
Something struck your shoulder.
Something else hit the side of your head.
You were thrown forward and slammed face down into wet filth.
For a few seconds, you heard nothing except a high, piercing ring. Your mouth was full of grit. Your nose burned. Heat washed over your back, then faded enough for the cold rain to cut through it. You coughed, pushed up on shaking arms, and felt blood run down from your hairline past your ear.
“Damn it,” you muttered, then said it again louder.
Your own voice sounded thin and distant.
You rolled onto one knee and turned around.
Where part of the garbage yard had been, there was now a crater.
It had torn open the ground between heaps of waste, broken concrete, and stacked drums. Twisted sheets of metal burned around the edges. Fragments still fell from above in slow, hissing arcs. A nearby support post leaned and then collapsed into the hole with a burst of sparks. Rain met fire and became steam. The steam mixed with smoke and rising dust until the whole scene looked blurred and unreal.
Then a sound cut through all of it.
A child was crying.
You froze.
The cry came again, thin but strong, somewhere near the center of the pit.
Every part of you reacted badly at once. Panic tightened your lungs. Your stomach turned cold. Your legs tried to step backward before you even chose anything. This was exactly how people died here. Things fell from the sky. Fires brought witnesses. Witnesses brought gangs, scavengers, patrols, or killers. If someone saw you near the impact, they could blame you for anything. If you touched the wrong person, you might be accused of stealing from them. If powerful people wanted whatever had landed, then being nearby would get you shot, beaten, or disappeared.
Nothing in Nostramo was more valuable than your own life.
The crying continued.
You stared at the pit and thought of the basement.
If you delayed too long, your father might notice. If he noticed and you were not there, you might lose your place inside. That place was filth and pain, but it had a door, walls, and a corner where you could sleep if you made yourself small enough. If you lost that, then the city itself became your household. Plenty of children lived that way. Most of them did not live long.
You took one step backward.
Then another.
The child cried again, and this time there was a wet choking sound mixed into it. Very young. Very alone. Not old enough to crawl out. Not old enough to understand fire, falling debris, or the type of men who would come investigate.
Your jaw tightened hard enough to hurt.
You did not want this. You did not want responsibility, danger, or a reason to stay. You did not want a stranger's problem in your hands. You were already using all your strength to remain alive. The correct decision was obvious, ugly, and practical.
Run now.
Get beaten later.
Choose the beating.
You actually turned your body toward the alley.
Then something flickered in front of your face.
You jerked so hard you nearly fell again.
A pale rectangle hung in the air before you, bright and clean in a way nothing in Nostramo had ever been. It was translucent around the edges and perfectly still despite the rain. Letters formed across it in neat lines, sharp enough to read even through the drifting steam.
For a second, your mind went completely blank.
Then you read the text.
Welcome, host, to your journey to save Konrad Curze.
Your first mission: Rescue the infant Konrad Curze and ensure his safety.
Reward: +2 points to any attribute, +1 random dish to the menu.
Leman Russ ran in a tight circle around the two bodies on the ground, paws churning dead leaves into the dirt. Fulgrim lay twisted beside a root, his purple scales slick and dark with blood. Corvus lay only a few feet away, one wing spread wrong, black feathers torn and wet. Neither of them moved much. Fulgrim did not move at all now unless the weak pull of breath counted. Corvus gave one raw, ugly twitch every so often, then went still again.
Magnus stood over them, feathers puffed, one eye wide and sharp. He had tried three times already.
The first time he had hooked his claws under Fulgrim’s middle and pulled until his own wings shook. Fulgrim had slid half an inch through the leaves and then bled harder. Magnus had stopped at once.
The second time he had tried to drag Corvus by one wing and earned a weak, savage snap of the raven’s beak for it.
The third time he had simply stared at both of them and hated the shape of his own body.
Leman kept spinning. «We cannot leave them. We cannot leave them. We cannot leave them.»
«Stop going in circles,» Magnus said, voice dry even now. «It is making me want to break my own neck.»
«Then think of something better.»
Magnus had. He had gone hopping through the brush looking for anything useful. Moss. Broad leaves. A length of dead vine. Mud that might press against an open wound. Nothing was enough. Nothing was hands. Nothing was bandages. Nothing was a medicae kit. Nothing was what they had lost.
He returned with a clump of damp leaves in his claws anyway and pressed them against the worst tear along Fulgrim’s side. Blood soaked through at once.
Fulgrim did not even flinch.
Magnus went very still.
«He is losing too much.»
Leman stopped spinning.
Both of them heard it then.
Far off at first. A low rattle over the yard stones. The heavy familiar roll of an engine coming up the drive.
Leman’s head snapped toward the farm.
«They're home.»
Magnus lifted his head. The sound came clearer through the trees. Truck tires. Doors. A shift of weight. Metal against metal.
You were back.
Leman did not waste another second. He tore through the underbrush so fast branches whipped behind him. Magnus launched himself upward at once, beating hard for height to follow and watch. Below him Leman crashed through the trees like a thing being chased by fire.
At the yard, you had just climbed out of the truck and opened the back.
You were unloading groceries one bag at a time. A sack of feed sat by your boot. A carton of eggs was balanced against your hip. You looked tired. Dust on your jeans. Sweat on your neck. Nothing unusual. Just a normal noon.
Then Leman hit you at full speed.
You staggered with a curse as eighty pounds of muddy dog smashed into your legs. One of the grocery bags swung and thumped against the truck. A can rolled out onto the dirt. Leman barked in your face, frantic and loud, then caught the hem of your pants in his mouth and pulled.
“Hey! Hey, what the hell—”
He barked again, more desperate this time. His muzzle was streaked with fresh blood, not all of it his own.
You froze.
Leman pulled harder.
The cloth of your pants stretched so tight you thought it would tear. His strength was unreal when he wanted something. He backed away, pulling, whining, barking, dragging you toward the tree line.
“Leman. Stop. Stop.” You took two stumbling steps after him just to save your pants. “What happened?”
He did not stop.
You looked once at the groceries, once at the dog, once at the blood on his mouth.
Then you dropped everything and ran after him.
Magnus circled overhead, heart pounding. He saw you force through the bushes, swearing under your breath as branches caught your sleeves. Leman led you straight to the clearing and skidded to a halt beside Fulgrim.
You saw the snake first.
The sound that came out of you was small and shocked and full of horror.
“Oh my God.”
Then your gaze shifted to the raven.
For one second you simply stood there, taking both of them in. Purple scales torn open. Black feathers broken. Blood on the ground. Leaves stuck to both bodies. Signs of a violent struggle everywhere.
Then you moved.
You went to your knees in the dirt. One hand slid under Fulgrim as carefully as you could manage. The other caught Corvus against your chest before the raven’s wing could drag. Corvus gave a harsh, broken croak and tried weakly to peck at you. You tucked his head away from your face without even thinking.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck—”
Leman danced at your heels while you rose. Magnus dropped lower, keeping above you.
Fulgrim was limp across your forearm. His body felt wrong in your grip, too light and too warm. Corvus was worse in a different way. All bone and feather and anger even half senseless. Blood soaked into your shirt from both of them before you even cleared the bushes.
You ran back to the truck.
Leman ran beside you, barking anyone’s emergency into the empty yard.
You yanked the passenger door open and laid both injured animals across the front seat. Fulgrim went first, curled on an old blanket. Corvus went beside him, one wing hanging until you shoved your jacket under it for support.
The raven opened one eye.
He saw you.
He tried again to strike.
You caught his beak with two fingers before he could reach your wrist. “Don’t even start,” you snapped, breathless. “You’re dying in my truck. Behave.”
Corvus made a low, hateful sound.
Leman launched himself into the back as soon as you pointed. Magnus followed, beating up into the air and dropping in after him just before you slammed the door.
You threw yourself into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and the truck jumped alive.
The yard vanished behind you in a spray of dust.
For the first stretch of road, there was nothing in the cab except engine noise, your rough breathing and the occasional weak scrape from the front seat when Corvus twitched.
In the back, Leman sat braced wide against every turn. Magnus gripped the torn bench cover with both claws, feathers blown backward by the rush of hot air through the half-open window.
Leman glanced toward the front. «He is still alive.»
«Which one?» Magnus asked.
«Both.»
Magnus looked through the gap between the seats. Fulgrim was a dim coil now, too still. Corvus had his head low, eye open in a thin black slit.
«I am not concerned about Corvus remaining alive,» Magnus said.
«Liar.»
«I did not say I wanted him dead. I said I am not concerned.»
Leman’s ears flicked. «You should tell the handler to keep him.»
Magnus stared at him. «Have you lost what little wits you possess? He nearly tore Fulgrim apart.»
«And?»
«And he is violent and hostile and unstable and evidently willing to attack anything in reach.»
Leman tilted his head like this was simple. «So were you two.»
Magnus went silent for a beat.
Leman pressed on, utterly sincere. «You screamed at the handler. Fulgrim bite. I bite too. The handler kept us.»
«That is not the same.»
«It is exactly the same.»
«No. We were not trying to kill one another in the yard.»
Leman seemed to think about that. «Not in the yard.»
Magnus made a low noise of disgust. «You are impossible.»
«The handler keeps strays,» Leman said with complete confidence. «That is the pattern. Hurt thing appears. Hurt thing hisses or bites or scream really loud. Handler says bad words. Then handler feeds it and makes nest and worries.»
«Scream really loud?»
Leman looked offended. «You have done this.»
Magnus chose not to answer.
The truck hit a rut. In the front seat Corvus jerked and gave a rasping croak. Your hand left the wheel just long enough to steady him, then touched Fulgrim too, quick and checking, fingertips barely brushing the blood on his side.
“Stay with me,” you muttered, not even seeming aware you said it out loud.
Magnus heard it. So did Leman.
The dog’s tail gave one hard thump against the seat.
«You see?» Leman said quietly.
Magnus looked away.
He did it to end the conversation. To avoid admitting Leman might be right. To stop thinking about the absurd possibility of Corvus under the same roof as the rest of them, glaring murder from a cage while the handler changed his bandages and complained and fed him anyway.
He turned toward the window.
At first it was only road.
A narrow country lane. Fields. Tree lines. Ditches. Utility poles. A world of soil and distance and practical use. Not a city. Not a civilized world by Imperial measure. Not anything that should have stirred old memory.
Then the road curved.
On the far rise stood a crumbling stone marker half swallowed by weeds. Beyond it, for one strange instant between the trees, Magnus saw the line of an old road cut, too straight to be accidental and too worn to be recent. He saw the shape of low hills worn soft with age. He saw terraces that were not current farmland but the bones of something older beneath it. Not Imperial. Not xenos. Human.
His feathers tightened against his body.
He leaned closer to the glass.
Another marker flashed past, broken but carved. The script was gone, weathered into almost nothing, but the style of it struck him like a blow to the skull. Deep memory rose at once. Fragmented lessons. Lost maps. The birthplace of mankind before the long climb to the stars. Before Unity. Before the Imperium. Before the Legiones Astartes. Before his father had gathered sons from the ends of the galaxy.
Magnus stopped breathing for a second.
Outside the truck, the light spread gold over the fields and fences and old earth.
Magnus stared at the passing land and felt something cold move through him.
«Leman,» he said.
The dog looked over. «What?»
Magnus did not take his eye from the window.
«I think,» he said slowly, «that this is Terra.»
Leman blinked.
«What Terra?»
Magnus turned and looked at him then, stunned into speechlessness by that answer, while the truck raced on into the falling light.
1. Leman 100% howls from the top of the Fang when he thinks no one’s watching.
2. One time Konrad accidentally scared himself with his own reflection at 4 AM and terrorized the entire flagship for three days straight.
3. Mortarion is secretly addicted to those disgustingly artificial "fruit-flavored nutrient paste" rations that Roboute keeps trying to phase out. Claims it's "building resistance to poison." Everyone knows he's just hoarding the strawberry ones like a dragon with gold.
4. Perturabo keeps a list titled “People Who Annoy Me” that is longer than most Imperial archives.
5. Konrad knows everyone’s darkest secrets but uses them mostly to deliver extremely uncomfortable small talk.
6. Rogal Dorn has favorite walls. Like, emotionally. If someone damages it, he’ll stand there in silence for 30 seconds like he’s at a funeral.
7. Roboute secretly loves trashy romance holovids but gets visibly offended when the plot breaks internal logic.
8. Angron is weirdly good at remembering personal grudges for other people: “YOU WRONGED MY SPOUSE THREE YEARS AGO IN A MEETING AT 1600 STANDARD.”
9. Vulkan laughs at his own jokes before finishing them.
10. Corvus Corax always appears when someone says “Where’s Corax?” like a cursed version of Beetlejuice.
11. Alpharius Omegon has 100% attended other legions’ meetings in disguise, asked annoying questions, and left.
12. Vulkan makes gifts by hand, and they’re always slightly too heavy because he forgets humans don’t casually carry 40kg trinkets.
13. Sanguinius wings knock stuff over constantly and he pretends it wasn’t him. “Strange breeze in here today…”
14. Mortarion has resting “I hate everything” face. Sometimes he’s fine; that’s just his default.
15. Ferrus tried to fix a machine once by “talking nicely” to it because someone said that worked for techmarines. It did not work but he will deny this story until the heat death of the universe.
16. Horus has “evil villain laugh” practice sessions alone, purely for brand reasons. Accidentally made it too good.
17. Lion reads chivalric romances in private and then tries to act like that in public but it comes out threatening.
18. Jaghatai has definitely tried to joust with jetbikes. Multiple times.
19. Lorgar has a “quotes notebook” full of dramatic lines he intends to say at opportune moments. Gets upset when reality doesn’t set them up perfectly.
20. Fulgrim keeps an art critique journal of his brothers’ armor and wargear designs. He assigns grades. They don’t know this exists.
21. Every single one of them insists they are the normal one in the family.
22. Angron is in a constant state of “I woke up and chose violence” but also “I didn’t choose to wake up in the first place.”
23. Magnus will absent-mindedly levitate things instead of picking them up. Has 100% tried to phase through a door while distracted and just walked into it.
You stared at the floating screen with rain in your eyes and dirt in your mouth.
The words stayed there, bright and clean, while sparks still snapped around the crater. The crying had not stopped. Fire hissed under the rain. Somewhere beyond the yard, people were already shouting.
You felt anger before fear.
That surprised you more than the screen itself.
Maybe you were too tired. Maybe hunger, cold, and pain had finally worn some part of you thin enough that shock could not settle properly. Maybe this city had already taken too much from you, and there was nothing left inside except a hard little knot that hated being ordered around.
“Then do it yourself,” you muttered.
Your shoulder hurt from the blast. Blood kept slipping down past your jaw. Your hands shook when you pushed yourself upright. Still, you glared at the words as if they were another adult demanding something from you while offering nothing real in return.
The crying came again.
You clenched your teeth, stepped around the smoking debris, and walked away from the screen.
You had taken only three limping steps when pain tore through your whole body.
It was not like being hit. It was not like cold, hunger, or the ache left by old bruises. It felt sharp first, then heavy. It punched through your muscles and locked them. Your back arched without permission. Your jaw snapped shut hard enough that you tasted blood again. Your legs gave way, and you hit the ground face-first in black water.
For a moment, you could not breathe at all.
The pain vanished as suddenly as it had arrived, but your body still twitched. Your fingers clawed uselessly at the mud. The dirty water around your face smelled like rot and metal. You coughed, rolled onto your side, and felt your stomach turn.
The screen drifted in front of you again.
Please pay attention and complete the mission, host.
You stared at it with wet hair plastered against your face.
Then you laughed once.
The sound that came out was thin, broken, and ugly. It did not sound amused. It sounded like something had split inside you and let a little air out.
“Then do it,” you whispered. “At least then maybe I get to go home.”
The screen did not answer.
Of course it did not answer.
Nothing in your life ever answered the questions you actually asked.
You pushed yourself up onto hands and knees. Your limbs still trembled without rhythm. There was a sour taste at the back of your throat, and your chest hurt every time you pulled in air. The electric pain had left something behind. It felt like your nerves had been scraped raw.
The child in the crater cried again.
You hated the sound immediately.
It was not the child’s fault. That did not matter. You hated the screen, the city, the crater, the pain still jumping through your hands, and the fact that your body had already started turning back toward the noise before your mind agreed. You hated having no choice. You hated how quickly fear became obedience when enough pain was attached.
You crawled forward at first, because your legs did not trust themselves yet.
The ground near the crater had become slick with mud and ash. Metal fragments lay half-buried in pooled water. One piece had gone through a crate. Another still glowed faintly red. The air smelled burned. It scraped the back of your throat every time you inhaled.
The child was down in the pit, tangled among torn cloth and broken rubble.
You reached the edge and looked down properly for the first time.
It was a baby.
Very young. Smaller than you expected. Bigger than a newborn, though not by much. It lay in the dirty hollow where the impact had thrown it, wrapped in blackened fabric that had once been white. There was soot across its face, but no blood that you could see. The crying was weaker now. That frightened you more than the noise had.
The baby’s skin looked too pale in this city.
Its hair was dark and wet. Its eyes were open, wide, and fixed upward. They did not look like a normal infant’s eyes. You knew almost nothing about children that small, but even you could tell there was something wrong, or different. There was awareness there. Not understanding, maybe, but attention. It stared at the rain, the steam, the fire, and then at you.
You looked away first.
“Fine,” you said through clenched teeth. “Fine. I’m doing it.”
The baby did not answer.
You slid down into the pit and nearly lost your balance halfway.
The mud there was deeper than it looked. Your knee sank to the shin. Dirty water splashed up your side. You caught yourself on a slab of broken concrete and sliced your palm open on something sharp. Pain flashed, hot and clean compared to the rest of the yard. You hissed and kept moving.
Every second spent here felt stolen.
People would come. Scavengers first, if you were lucky. Men with gangs behind them if you were not. Maybe patrols. Maybe no one official at all, which could be worse. In Nostramo, a disaster drew attention the way blood drew flies. If something fell from the sky, then someone powerful might want it, and everyone nearby would try to profit.
That included children.
Especially children.
If anyone found you in this crater with a baby in your arms, then you would not be allowed to keep either your silence or your life.
You reached for the child.
It was warmer than you expected.
That jolted you more than the screen had.
Everything in this city was cold most of the time. Cold walls. Cold rain. Cold hands. Cold metal. Even bodies were usually cold by the time children found them. The heat from the baby’s small body pressed suddenly into your palms and made something tighten under your ribs.
You did not like that feeling.
You hooked one arm under the child’s back and another beneath its legs, imitating what you had seen women do in alleys. The movement was clumsy. The baby felt dense, heavy for its size, and slippery with rain. Its head lolled against your wrist. You nearly swore out loud and adjusted your grip before it fell.
Then the baby stopped crying.
That was worse than before.
It simply stared at you with those open, strange eyes.
“Don't do that,” you said immediately, as if the child had chosen it.
The baby remained silent.
A large piece of smoking debris shifted somewhere above you and slid deeper into the crater. That finally forced your body into motion. You held the child close to your chest, braced your foot against a broken slab, and started climbing back out.
It was harder than you expected.
The baby was nearly half your size, and you were not strong. Hunger had narrowed your arms into thin cords. Your legs ached most days from malnutrition, cold, and old bruises. Now one knee kept slipping in the mud while the other shook hard from the shock. You rose two handspans and slid back one.
Rain ran into your eyes.
The child’s fabric dragged wetly against your chest.
Your shoulder screamed each time you tried to lift yourself higher. You think about pretending to drop the child and letting it suffocate in the mud.
Not because the baby had done anything wrong. Not because you wanted it dead, though part of you did want this problem gone. Mostly, you thought about dropping it because your body was reaching its limit, and when bodies reached their limits in Nostramo, they chose survival over morality without discussion.
If you let go now, you could crawl away.
If the screen shocked you again, you could still crawl away afterward.
If someone found you, maybe they would beat you and let you live.
Maybe.
The word hung there, ugly and useless.
You hooked your elbow over the crater edge and pushed again.
This time you made it.
You dragged yourself onto the black ground and lay there for two seconds with the baby crushed between your chest and forearm, both of you soaked and shaking. Smoke drifted past your face. Something nearby crackled as fire ate at wet trash. The baby made a small sound against your shirt.
Not a cry. Not quite.
More like a low complaint from a throat that had already grown tired.
You forced yourself upright.
Nothing in the yard was dry, not really. You settled instead for a patch beneath a bent sheet of metal where the rain came through more slowly and the fire could not reach. There you crouched, pressing your back to the cold wall of a broken container, and shifted the baby in your arms so you could look at it properly.
Its face was smeared with soot and dirt. There was a scrape near one temple. Otherwise it looked untouched. Its breathing was steady. Its mouth moved once, then again. The little hands were open. One of them touched the front of your shirt and stayed there.
You felt a stupid wave of relief.
Then anger came back and covered it.
You were covered in mud. Your clothes clung to your skin. Your fingers hurt. Your whole body still jumped sometimes from the memory of the shock. Somewhere behind your eyes a headache had started, hard and steady. And now this child, this impossible stranger, had become your responsibility because some floating screen had decided to punish disobedience.
You wanted to throw something.
Instead, you tightened your hold and crawled.
You did not dare stand fully until you were farther from the crater. Crawling kept you low, quiet, and less likely to fall. It also made you filthy from chest to knee, but that hardly mattered now. The baby’s weight dug into your forearms. Your elbow slipped twice. Each time, you clutched harder and kept moving.
You were afraid of the electric shock.
That truth was simple.
You were also afraid of the others.
The city outside the garbage yard had rules, but none of them protected children. A child with a baby might be ignored by some people. By others, it would look like opportunity. They might assume you had stolen it. They might take it and ask questions later. They might take you too. There were buyers for everything here. Workers, beggars, bodies, body parts, information, children. Especially children.
Rainwater dripped from the end of its dark hair onto your wrist.
You hated how aware of it you were.
The route back to the basement felt three times longer than before.
You didn't take the direct path. That would have put you near the wider roads, where people already moved toward the explosion. Instead you cut between leaning fences, behind machine sheds, and through narrow service passages choked with pipes. The baby made sneaking harder. It was difficult to stay balanced while ducking beneath loose cables or climbing over collapsed barriers.
Twice you had to stop and listen.
The first time, a group of men ran past at the far end of an alley, shouting to each other about the impact. One of them laughed the whole time, sharp and excited. You crouched behind a rusted barrel with the baby tucked under your coat and did not breathe until they were gone.
The second time, a woman came limping out of a side door carrying a sack. She saw you, saw the bundle against your chest, and narrowed her eyes. For one horrible second you thought she would ask something or follow. Then a louder shout came from the street, and greed pulled her attention away from you. She spat near the drain and moved toward the noise.
That was Nostramo.
Disaster was always more interesting than pity.
As your body slowly recovered from the shock, strength returned in ugly pieces. First your hands steadied. Then your knees stopped buckling every third step. By the time you reached the block where your basement waited, your breathing had become more even, though every muscle still ached. You were limping now. Something in your ankle or hip had twisted during the blast. You could manage it, but only by putting less weight on one side.
The baby noticed.
At least, that was what it looked like.
Its eyes followed your face, then dropped briefly toward your bad leg, then lifted again. That attention crawled unpleasantly under your skin. Babies were supposed to cry, squirm, sleep, or stare without meaning. This one seemed to watch.
“Stop that,” you whispered.
It went on looking.
You reached the basement building and paused in the lee of the wall.
Rain struck the street behind you in a fine gray sheet. Above, the windows of the building glowed weakly through grime. Voices drifted from somewhere higher up, followed by the thud of an argument hitting a wall. A bottle shattered. Someone laughed. Somewhere else a child cried, was slapped, and went quiet.
Normal sounds.
You hated that they were normal now.
The basement entrance sat half below ground level, hidden behind a leaning stack of crates and a rusted stair rail. Water always gathered on the steps. Mold thickened around the frame no matter the season. Tonight the door stood shut.
That was good.
If it had been open, then someone inside would still be awake.
You crouched in the shadow and listened with your ear near the wood. No movement close by. No footsteps approaching. No breathing pressed against the other side. Only the usual background sounds of a crowded building settling around rot, pipes, and rage.
Slowly, carefully, you shifted the baby into one arm and tried the handle.
It gave.
You slipped inside and shut the door behind you at once.
The basement smell hit like a physical thing.
Wet concrete. mildew. urine. old blood. stale smoke. cheap alcohol. unwashed bodies. something dead in the wall, maybe, or just forgotten. After the smoke of the crater and the cold rain outside, the air below felt thick enough to chew.
Darkness pressed in around you.
Your parents were asleep.
You stopped and listened long enough to make sure.
Your father snored in short, ugly bursts. Your mother breathed more quietly, but there was a whistle at the end of every third breath. You knew both sounds. They meant you had a small margin for error and nothing more.
You crossed the basement one careful step at a time.
The baby felt heavier indoors.
Maybe that was only because fear had room to change shape once you were not running. Outside, the danger was immediate and simple. Indoors, new dangers arrived. Noise. Discovery. Questions. The shock if the mission somehow was not over. The reality of having brought a baby into a basement where even adults were not safe.
You reached your mat at the back wall.
Calling it a mat was generous. It was a layered nest of torn stuffing, flattened cloth, and one old blanket that stayed damp half the week. You slept there curled on your side to keep warm. Sometimes rats crossed the far edge at night. Sometimes they crossed closer. The corner smelled less strongly than the others, which counted as luxury.
You bent and almost tossed the baby down onto it.
You stopped at the last second.
Not out of kindness. The motion itself looked too rough, and some alarm inside you warned that if the child screamed now, everything would end immediately. So you lowered it fast but not carelessly, one hand still on its chest until it settled.
Then you sat down hard beside the mat and started shaking.
It happened without permission.
Your teeth clicked together. Your hands would not unclench. The pain from the shock, the blast, the dragging, the fear, the climb, the sneaking, and the return all rose at once now that you were no longer moving. Tears came too. That embarrassed you, even alone. You wiped at them angrily and only smeared more soot across your cheek.
No one comforted crying children in this basement.
You had learned to do it soundlessly.
So you pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes and cried without making much noise, shoulders jerking, breath hitching, trying not to let anything out that could wake the people behind the hanging sheet. You were not crying for the baby. You were not even crying for yourself in any clear, noble way. It was only too much. The city, the screen, the shock, the impossible task, and the sight of that clean floating text hanging over garbage and blood had all forced something loose.
When you finally lowered your hands, the baby was still looking at you.
That was wrong.
Very wrong.
A child that young should have been exhausted, hungry, frightened, or screaming. Instead it lay on the ruined mat with one fist tucked near its face, watching you with a blank, steady stare. There was nothing soft in it. Nothing helpless, except the obvious reality that it could not stand or feed itself. The eyes were too intent.
You wiped your face again.
“What are you looking at?”
The baby said nothing. Of course it said nothing.
Still, your pulse jumped harder.
In the old world, babies had made you awkward. You never knew how to hold them or what to say around them. Here, in this place, the discomfort turned sharper. An ordinary infant would have been bad enough. This one had fallen from the sky, survived a blast, gone quiet in your arms, and then looked at you like it had taken note of something.
You hated it more for that. It was not fair.
Nothing had been fair since you woke in this world in a stranger’s body with bruises on your arms and a woman hissing at you to stop staring and fetch water. Fairness had ended then, if it had ever existed here. This child was simply another unfair thing added to the pile.
Your breathing finally evened.
Your tears stopped.
Then the anger came back, colder now.
You looked at the baby and imagined how easy it would be.
One hand over the mouth. Another around the throat. Or a pillow, if there had been one worth using. It was small. Weak. Silent. You could end the problem here, and maybe the screen would disappear afterward if it had only wanted the rescue. Or maybe it would punish you again. But maybe not. Systems in stories always had rules. Maybe you could work around them. Maybe the mission only required saving the baby from the crater, not keeping it alive forever.
You leaned forward.
Your hand reached out before the rest of you agreed.
The baby did not flinch.
That made it worse.
Your fingers hovered above the small throat. You could see the pulse there, thin and quick. The skin looked fragile. Too fragile. One squeeze from even your weak hands might be enough. You imagined silence. You imagined the relief of not having to think about food, hiding, crying, diapers, or whatever else babies needed. You imagined wrapping the tiny body and leaving it in an alley before dawn.
You jerked your hand back so hard you hit the wall behind you.
“No,” you whispered, though you were not sure whether you were speaking to the child, the screen, or yourself.
The baby continued to watch.
You swallowed hard, scooted backward until your spine hit the damp wall, and sat as far from the mat as the basement allowed. Your heart still pounded fast. The urge to solve the problem with violence had not fully vanished, and that frightened you in a way the city itself no longer did. Nostramo changed people fast. Maybe it had already changed you more than you realized.
You shut your eyes and shouted in your head.
System.
Nothing happened.
You clenched your jaw harder.
System. Screen. Whatever you are. Show up.
A pale light appeared in front of you at once.
You nearly cursed out loud and had to slap a hand over your mouth. After a second, when the snoring behind the hanging sheet did not stop, you lowered your hand and glared at the floating panel instead.
The text had changed.
Mission complete.
Rescue the infant Konrad Curze and ensure his safety.
Reward available.
Your throat went dry.
It was real.
Even after the crater, the shock, and the impossible text, some part of you had still wanted this to be a fever, a head injury, or a dream that ended with you back in your old life staring at a ceiling you actually recognized. But the screen hung there without flicker. The baby remained on your mat. Your body still remembered the electricity with horrible clarity.
This was real.
You reached out with trembling fingers and touched the light.
The panel widened.
Another screen opened over the first, cleaner and denser, full of lines and numbers arranged in neat order. You read slowly, sounding the words in your head to make sure you understood them.
Name: [Unavailable]
Current identity: [Unavailable]
Age: 8
Strength: 3
Agility: 4
Endurance: 3
Perception: 5
Intelligence: 5
Unassigned points: 2
You stared for a long time.
Eight.
Of course this body was eight. You had known you were a child here, but seeing the number fixed it in a way bruises and short limbs had not. Eight years old, living in a basement, avoiding beatings like a small animal, and now somehow responsible for a baby named Konrad Curze, a name that meant absolutely nothing to you.
You looked again at the numbers.
Strength: 3.
That sounded right.
The two unused points pulsed faintly.
You hesitated.
What if this was a trap? What if choosing wrong made things worse? What if you needed endurance instead, or agility, or something else to survive tomorrow? The city outside certainly rewarded speed. It rewarded stubborn bodies too. Intelligence had been the one thing that let you adapt at all.
Then you looked at the baby again.
It lay on your mat like a dropped burden and a future problem.
You remembered hauling it through mud with shaking arms. You remembered nearly dropping it on the climb. You remembered how even now your shoulders burned and your wrists trembled from the effort. If you were going to keep this thing alive long enough not to be electrocuted again, then you needed to be able to carry it, move it, hide it, and maybe defend it.
You reached out and tapped Strength once.
The number changed from three to 4. The point counter dropped to 1.
You hesitated only a second longer before tapping Strength again.
5.
The moment the second point settled, something moved through your body.
It was not pain. It was not exactly warmth either. It felt like pressure traveling under your skin, slow and thorough. Your muscles tightened, then loosened. The ache in your arms shifted. Your back straightened without you telling it to. Even your breathing changed. The basement still smelled foul. Your wounds still hurt. You were still hungry, frightened, and exhausted. Yet beneath all of that, there was a new firmness in your limbs.
You flexed your fingers.
They felt steadier.
You pushed against the wall and rose to your feet in one motion.
That should have taken more effort than it did.
You tested your weight on the bad leg. It still hurt, but less. Or perhaps you simply had more strength to support it. Either way, the difference was obvious enough to make your stomach tighten with another round of disbelief.
The screen dimmed slightly.
Stat points assigned successfully.
You held your breath and looked at your hands.
They did not look different. Still small. Still dirty. Still scraped and bruised. But when you clenched them, there was more behind the motion. Not much. Not enough to fight adults or gangs or the city itself. Yet real. Very real.
Your eyes moved to the child again.
Slowly, cautiously, you stepped closer and bent.
The baby’s gaze followed you the entire way.
“Just checking something,” you whispered, though there was no reason to explain.
You slid your hands under the baby and lifted.
This time the weight did not drag at you the same way.
It was still heavy. It was still awkward. Babies were shaped badly for carrying, all unstable head and dense little limbs. But it no longer felt like a struggle to do the simple act of picking him up. You could keep one arm under his back and shift his legs with the other without fear that your wrists would fail.
That almost made you angry again.
Because if the screen could do this, then the screen had power. Enough power to change your body in seconds. Enough power to punish. Enough power to reward. Which meant it also had power to withhold. It could have helped before and chose not to. It could likely help again later and might still choose not to. Like everything else in this place, it gave only what it needed to keep you moving.
You lowered the baby back onto the mat more carefully than before.
Then you turned to the screen.
“Menu,” you said under your breath.
Nothing happened.
You frowned and tried touching the edge. That made a faint row of symbols appear along one side, too small to read at first. You swiped your finger through them experimentally. Most vanished when touched. One opened a blank panel. Another showed the same stat page again. A third pulsed and produced a new window with three icon slots.
Two were lit.
The first showed a wrapped burger.
The second showed a bottle.
The third showed a simple container marked with a pale liquid.
Written beneath them in neat text were the words: Burger, Cola, and Milk.
Above the icons, smaller text displayed the line: Remaining usage count: 0/2
You stared.
Then you understood.
A slow chill ran across your scalp.
The food.
Of course.
The burger and cola had not simply been some random isekai gift floating around without rules. They belonged here, to this system, in this menu. The miracle you had clung to as your only private advantage had already been counted, categorized, and limited by something watching you.
You did not know whether that made you safer or more trapped.
Probably more trapped.
Your finger hovered over the word Milk.
Fresh milk. Clean. Drinkable. For the baby, obviously. Also perhaps for you, if you were desperate enough. But the sounds of two adults in the room made you hesitate.
So you did not press it.
Not yet.
Instead you looked more closely at the baby and tried to think.
His name still felt strange inside your head. Konrad Curze. The system had called him that with complete certainty. It clearly expected the name to mean something. It did not. To you, he was only a silent infant with dark hair and wrong eyes who had fallen from the sky and ruined your evening.
Yet he was also alive.
That fact sat there stubbornly.
You had completed the mission. The system itself had confirmed it. Whatever “ensure his safety” meant, you had apparently done enough for now. That suggested either the standard was temporary, or the system was generous in a way the city never was. You did not trust either possibility.
You crouched and studied him again.
The grime on his face had dried in thin streaks. His clothes, if they could still be called that, were ruined beyond use. The cloth wrapping him smelled of smoke and rain. He should have been crying from hunger by now, shouldn’t he? Or from cold. Or shock. Or being carried through filth by a half-feral child stranger.
Instead he only watched.
You sat back on your heels.
“Are you broken?” you whispered.
The baby’s mouth moved but no sound came out at first.
Then there was a faint, rough little grumble from deep in his throat.
Also I'm making a taglist for every warhammerxreader works from now on. If you like to be on the list pls cmt 'tag' below.
Fulgrim dreamed of fire and song.
The crash of bolter fire, the heavy rhythm of marching feet, the roar of engines. His old body moved with perfect control. Every step of his warplate shook the ground. Every order he gave carried across vox. Palaces of marble and gold rose around him. Statues of his face stared down from high walls. Perfect, flawless, without a crack.
He stood in a grand hall. Columns lined the sides. Banners of the Emperor’s Children hung in precise order. Warriors in purple and gold armour knelt at his feet. Their eyes shone with devotion. Their voices rose in a unified chant of his name.
“Fulgrim.”
He turned.
The Emperor walked toward him. Tall. Radiant, in a way no living being could match. His golden armour was polished. His gaze cut through distances. It landed on Fulgrim with approval.
Pride rose in Fulgrim’s chest. He had done everything right. Worlds pacified. Cultures perfected. Flaws removed. Weakness cut out at the root. He smiled and stepped forward.
The hall flickered.
The chant twisted. Voices went sharp, off-key. The warriors’ armour changed. Gold warped to brass. Purple to pink and wet red. Helmets split, revealing tongues that stretched too far, teeth that never ended. The banners on the walls writhed. Flesh grew across stone.
The Emperor’s eyes darkened. His face blurred and became another.
Slaanesh stood before Fulgrim. Every colour too bright. Every detail too sharp. Every sound too loud. The daemon’s fingers reached out and touched his chin.
“You asked for perfection,” the Prince of Excess said. The voice echoed in a dozen octaves. “You received it.”
The warriors on the floor began to scream. Armour split. Flesh tore open. Something inside them forced its way out.
“Stop,” Fulgrim said.
They did not stop.
He knew them. First Captain. Company commanders. Artists and killers. They looked up at him while their bodies broke. Their eyes asked why.
He had no answer.
The hall cracked. Marble fell from the ceiling. Gold melted. Screams layered over one another. The floor dissolved under his boots and became a river of bodies and blades.
On the far side, another Primarch stood.
Ferrus Manus.
His head was intact. His eyes were bright. The metal of his hands reflected the fire. He lifted one of them, reaching out as if they could still bridge the distance between them.
“Brother,” Ferrus said.
Fulgrim moved toward him.
The ground opened.
Blades, hooks, and chains shot up and wrapped around Fulgrim’s wrists, his legs, his throat. They pulled. His armour tore. His flesh gave way. His bones snapped. His Legion’s cries filled his ears.
He reached for Ferrus with a blood-slick hand that no longer had fingers.
“Do you regret it?” Slaanesh asked.
Fulgrim opened his mouth to answer.
No sound came out.
Only a long, drawn-out hiss.
The hall, the Emperor, Slaanesh, Ferrus, the screaming Legion—all of it shattered.
He woke in a glass box.
His head shot up. Scales rasped against fake rock. He moved too fast, misjudging the low ceiling. His skull hit the glass lid with a dull thump.
The world flashed white for a second.
“Ghhh—!”
The hiss that escaped was angry and high.
His tongue flicked out, tasting only warm air and the faint tang of his own panic. His body coiled tight on the bedding. His heart hammered fast in his narrow chest.
Not a dream.
The terrarium. The farm. The human. The macaw.
Snake.
He stared at his reflection in the glass above him. A narrow purple head. Bright eyes. A forked tongue that darted in and out without his consent.
I'm still a snake, he thought. This insult continues.
His head throbbed from the impact. A faint smear marked the glass where he had hit it. He glared at it, as if the mark itself offended him.
Memory arranged itself in order. Waking in dirt. The barn. The human’s hands. The fight with Magnus. The loss of dinner.
His stomach twisted.
Across the aisle, the macaw shifted on his perch in his sleep, feathers rustling. Magnus mumbled under his breath and tucked his head deeper into his wing. In the dim red glow of the heat lamps, the bird’s colours looked dark and heavy.
Fulgrim hissed again, quieter this time, and lowered himself back to the bedding.
He tried to order his thoughts.
Trapped. Reduced. Stripped of his body, his Legion, his tools. A captive in some backwater. No warp-sense. No daemons. No palaces. Only glass, wood, and the smell of hay.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
The images from the dream lingered. Ferrus’s face. The Emperor’s changing features. The soundless question in the eyes of his sons.
He pushed them away with effort.
Dwelling on it would not change his current situation. It would only give the dream more strength.
Fine, he thought. New problem first. Old failures later.
A shadow fell over the front of the terrarium.
Fulgrim snapped his eyes open.
A large golden head stared back at him through the glass.
Pale blue eyes. Mud on the muzzle. Fur pressed against the glass, fogging it with breath. Two front teeth showed a little where the lips parted.
A dog.
Fulgrim’s body jerked in surprise. He raised his head high, hooding up along his neck. His tongue tasted dog, dirt, chicken, something that smelled like old blood and pond water.
He hissed on reflex. Loud. Sharp.
«Get back, beast,» he said in his mind, anger flaring. «I am not your plaything.»
The dog’s eyes widened. His ears pricked forward. He pulled his nose back a little, then leaned in again.
«…Ja?»
Fulgrim froze. It came straight into his skull. Rough, puzzled, with the cadence of a tongue used to howling orders in frozen air.
«Who is yelling in my head so early in morning?» the voice added. «You sound like angry eel.»
The dog’s mouth closed and opened. From the outside, only a muffled, curious whuff came through. Tail wagged slowly, thumping against the wooden frame.
Fulgrim stared.
«Leman Russ?»
«No, I'm Malcador,» the voice shot back at once, dry. «Of course I'm Leman.» A mental snort. «Who else would end up as mutt on some farm in nowhere?»
The dog drew back a little and tilted his head, studying Fulgrim with one eye, then the other. Up close, his fur was a mess of tangles and dried mud. His nose had a small scar across it.
«What in all cold seas happened to you?» Leman added. «You are… very small.»
Fulgrim’s brain stuttered between relief and outrage.
«I am not small, you shaggy imbecile,» he snapped. «This body is constrained. Temporarily.»
«You are purple noodle,» Leman said. «With head.» His mental tone shifted into satisfaction. «Is good. Easier to swallow.»
Fulgrim puffed his body up again, scales lifting in a thin ridge.
«Try it and choke,» he hissed.
Across the aisle, the macaw stirred. One eye opened, then closed again. Magnus muttered something sleepy and academic into his feathers and sank back into his dreams.
Leman’s tail wagged harder. He pressed his nose against the glass again, smearing it further.
«You hiss very well,» he said. «I woke up as this thing two moons ago. No hands. No axe. Only teeth and digging claws.» His mental tone carried irritation and something like grudging amusement. «Human yells when I chase chickens. Says I am ‘problem.’»
Fulgrim’s anger cooled a fraction.
«How did you get here?» he asked. «What do you remember?»
Leman’s brow furrowed. The dog squinted. From outside, he gave a low, thoughtful whine.
«Campaign,» he said slowly. «Long one. Far from Fenris. There was… storm. Warp-light. Then nothing. I wake up in mud. Body wrong. No armour. No wolf-brothers. Only human yelling about ‘truck’ and ‘what idiot left you on road.’» He snorted. «I bit his tyre.»
Fulgrim blinked. The picture formed easily enough. A Fenrisian warlord thrown into the body of a dog, attacking whoever tried to pick him up, then ending up in the care of this strange human.
«You do not remember the Heresy?» Fulgrim pressed.
«The what now?» Leman’s confusion was sharp and genuine. «I remember Crusade. Brothers. Father. Fights. Then storm. Then this.» A pause. «Why? Did I miss something important?»
Fulgrim stared at the dog. The golden fur. The hopeful eyes.
His mind skated over images he did not want to hand to Leman. Burning Prospero. Fang falling. Wolves and Thousand Sons tearing each other apart. Russ driven to murder, then regret. Names carved into memorial stones.
«Nothing you need now,» Fulgrim said at last. «You were… on a long hunt. It went wrong. We are paying the price.»
Leman’s gaze sharpened.
«‘We’?»
Fulgrim flicked his tongue toward the macaw.
«Magnus is here,» he said.
Leman’s hackles lifted at once. His tail stopped wagging. A growl rumbled in his chest.
«The red sorcerer,» he said.
His ears flattened. His eyes cut to the bird cage.
«I knew I smelled something wrong on wind,» he added. «Felt itch in teeth.»
«He is in that body,» Fulgrim said. «He is as trapped as we are.»
«Good,» Leman muttered. Then, reluctantly: «Maybe not good. But… useful.»
The dog pressed his paw against the terrarium stand, testing its strength. The glass rattled faintly.
«We speak more when I chew through this box,» he decided.
«You will do no such thing,» Fulgrim snapped. «If you break it, the human will build something worse. She already confiscated our dinner for one fight.»
«Dinner?» Leman’s ears pricked up again. «I have dinner. Two dinners. She says I am ‘growing boy.’» Pride touched his mental voice. «Meat. Kibble. Bones. Sometimes cheese.»
Fulgrim’s stomach twisted again, loud enough that he almost heard it over the faint hum of the heat lamp.
He glared at Leman.
«Then you can share,» he said.
Leman opened his mouth to reply.
The barn door banged open.
You strode in, hair messy, boots on, eyes already half narrowed.
“Leman!” you snapped. “You get away from the quarantine pens right now!”
The dog spun around on the spot. His tail, which had been moving, went stiff. He looked back at Fulgrim, eyes wide.
«Ah,» he said. «Handler is awake.»
You stormed across the barn, hands already reaching. Leman tried to dodge, but the floor was straw and concrete, not ice or rock. His paws slid. Your fingers hooked into the loose fur around his neck from long practice and hauled him back.
“Out,” you ordered. “Out, right now. I told you, no pestering the new guys.”
Leman whined, legs splaying. He dug his claws into the dirt, trying to get one last look at Fulgrim.
«We talk later,» he threw into Fulgrim’s head, hurried and distorted by the pull on his neck. «Do not go anywhere.»
Fulgrim stared pointedly around at the glass walls.
«Where do you think I would go?» he snarled.
Magnus finally woke fully at the noise. The macaw lifted his head and shook his feathers out. His one good eye took in the scene quickly: you dragging a large golden dog toward the house, Leman trying to plant all four paws and failing, barking over his shoulder.
«Of course,» Magnus said dryly into their shared space. «Russ. As a dog.»
«Ja,» Leman agreed proudly. «Best dog.»
You wrestled him toward the door. His barking echoed through the barn, then the yard.
“If you do not stop wriggling,” you told him in a sharp voice, “you're going to be the first hairless golden retriever in the world. I swear I will shave you bald. No more digging in the compost bin, no more rolling in chicken shit, and no more raiding the trash. Bath. Now.”
Leman’s mental voice rose into horror.
«She threatens my fur,» he gasped. «Barbarian.»
His actual howl sounded wounded enough to make the sheep in the next pen shift nervously.
Fulgrim and Magnus listened as the noise grew fainter, swallowed by the walls of the farmhouse.
Fulgrim shivered on his bedding.
«I do not wish to know what she does to misbehaving animals in that place,» he said.
Across from him, Magnus fluffed his feathers and shook off the last of his sleep.
«At least we are clean,» he replied. «For now.»
Hours passed.
Morning brightened into full day. The heat lamps kept the terrarium and the bird cage warm, but there was no sunbeam inside the barn. Other animals made their own noises. Cows lowed. Chickens clucked. Somewhere a goat headbutted something hollow.
The door to the farmhouse stayed closed.
Fulgrim lay coiled under his hide for a while, then came out and tested the glass again. The latch did not budge. His skull ached faintly from his earlier headbutt. His patience frayed.
Magnus paced along his perch, claws clicking lightly on the smooth wood. Now and then, he nibbled at the toys hanging from the cage roof, more to test their texture than to play. His mind remained fixed on Russ.
«He did not remember Prospero,» he said. «He did not remember anything after the Crusade.»
«You heard the same things I did,» Fulgrim replied.
«Yes,» Magnus said. «I'm trying to decide whether this is a mercy for him or not.»
Fulgrim stretched his body to its full length across the terrarium.
«We are trapped in the bodies of animals on a minor agri-world,» he said. «Mercy does not seem to be the theme of the day.»
Magnus made a low, annoyed croak.
«Do not underestimate safety,» he said. «There is no warp-storm here. No daemons. No Black Legion. No hunting packs. No Inquisition. Only one human with decent instincts and poor boundary enforcement.»
«She denied us dinner,» Fulgrim reminded him.
«She also pulled us apart before we tore each other open,» Magnus shot back.
Fulgrim flicked his tongue in the macaw’s direction, unimpressed.
The barn door remained closed.
Time stretched.
Eventually, even Fulgrim’s anger ran low enough to turn into boredom. He coiled and uncoiled. He rearranged his bedding. He drank from his water dish. He refused to look toward the farmhouse windows, as if that gave the building power.
Magnus preened his remaining feathers, then hopped from perch to perch. With nothing else to do, he named every object in the barn to himself, in every language he remembered. Hay. Water bucket. Shovel. Hose. Lamp. Gate. It was a pointless exercise, but it kept his mind from circling the same thoughts.
The sun had shifted by the time something changed.
Leman lay on his back in the living room, feet in the air, chewing on a rubber bone. His fur shone. His paws were clean. His collar smelled of soap. A faint citrus scent clung to his coat from the shampoo you had used.
He gnawed at the toy with gusto, hind leg twitching when he hit the right spot. A cartoon animal on the muted television waved its arms. Somewhere in the kitchen, a clock ticked.
Then a thought dropped into his head.
Brothers.
He froze.
The bone slipped from his mouth and bounced on the floor. He stared at it for a second, then scrambled upright, ears pricked, tail already starting to wag.
«Storms take me,» he muttered to himself. «I forgot them.»
He shook his head hard, as if he could jolt the distraction out. It did not leave. Guilt pressed in.
Two of his brothers were trapped in boxes in the barn. He had meant to talk to them. To question them. To demand answers. Instead, he had allowed himself to be lured away by warm water and toys.
«I am worst Jarl,» he told himself, appalled.
He glanced toward the front door.
You were not there.
The house smelled of your absence. No movement. No footsteps. No voice. You had left a little while earlier with your keys and a shopping list, telling Leman he was on “guard duty” and not to get into trouble.
He had nodded solemnly, then immediately gone for the toy basket.
Now he bolted for the back door instead.
His claws clicked on the floor. He skidded around the corner, just avoiding the table. The back door was closed. The handle was too high for him to reach directly, but the lower latch on the screen door was not.
He stood on his hind legs and scratched at the wood to test it.
The latch rattled.
He had seen you use it many times. He had watched, head tilted, as your fingers flipped it up and pulled.
He pressed his paw under the loose metal and yanked upward.
It gave.
The screen door creaked open a hand’s width, then more as he wedged his head into the gap and pushed.
Cold air hit his face. The smells of the yard rushed in—earth, animals, distant rain.
«Ha,» he said, pleased. «Still clever as ever.»
He squeezed through the gap and tore across the yard toward the barn.
Fulgrim felt the change before he heard anything. Some old instinct pricked the back of his awareness. A familiar presence. A familiar pattern.
He lifted his head.
«He comes,» Magnus observed from his perch. «Fast.»
The barn door had not been latched tightly enough. Leman’s shoulder hit it at speed. It slammed open and banged against the inside wall. Dust drifted down from the rafters.
The dog burst in with his tongue hanging out and his tail beating a sharp rhythm against any surface it came near.
«Brothers!» he called, mentally and with a loud bark. «You are still alive. Good. I thought maybe human boiled you.»
Fulgrim recoiled at the volume.
«We are still here,» he snapped. «We are not stew.»
Magnus shook his feathers into order and narrowed his good eye.
«You took your time,» he said. «Did the bath include brain replacement?»
Leman trotted straight to Fulgrim’s terrarium, sniffed it once, then moved to Magnus’s cage.
«You are red,» he said helpfully. «And higher than me. This is unfair.»
«You can jump,» Magnus replied. «Do not blame the furniture for your shorter legs.»
Leman snorted. Then his expression turned serious. He walked back to the terrarium and stared Fulgrim straight in the eyes.
«Tell me,» he said. «What happened after the Crusade?»
Fulgrim considered lying.
But Russ’s mind, even in a dog’s brain, held stubborn honesty. If he gave him scraps, Leman would only worry them apart until something broke.
«There was a civil war,» Fulgrim said. He kept his mental voice flat. «Horus rebelled. Half the Legions followed him. The rest fought to stop him.»
Leman’s ears flattened.
«Horus?» he repeated. «The Warmaster?»
«Yes.»
«He would not.» Leman’s tail slowed. «You are lying.»
«I gain nothing from lying about this,» Fulgrim said. «He fell. We all fell, in one way or another. You hunted Magnus. I murdered Ferrus Manus. Another brother was lost. Our father was wounded. The Imperium shattered and hardened. Ten thousand years passed in war.»
Leman stared at him.
The dog’s eyes were dark. The fur on his back rose, then smoothed as he wrestled with the information.
Magnus watched silently from his perch, mind held tight. The mention of their old wounds pressed against memories he did not want, but he kept them in place.
«I do not remember any of this,» Leman said finally. «I remember… tension. Horus distant. Whispered things. Then… campaign. Storm. Then here.»
«Your memory may have been cut,» Magnus said quietly. «Or this place took you from an earlier point in your timeline.»
«Or it is some prank by gods,» Leman growled.
He paced away a few steps, then back, nails clicking on the floor.
«You fought for which side?» he asked Fulgrim, suddenly sharp.
Fulgrim held his gaze.
«Not the right one,» he said.
The answer hung in the air between them.
Leman’s lips curled back from his teeth, just a fraction. A growl rumbled in his throat.
«Then why are you here with me?» he said. «Why do I not bite your head off and spit it into field?»
«Because you would upset the human,» Magnus cut in. «And we need her. She is the only one feeding us.»
«And because you do not remember killing our brother,» Fulgrim added. «I do. I remember every detail. My punishment started long before this.»
Leman huffed out a breath. The sound came out as a sharp snort through his nose.
«I do not like this,» he said.
«No one does,» Magnus replied.
Silence settled for a few heartbeats.
Outside, a crow cawed. The wind moved the high grass in the field. The barn smelled of hay and animals and recently used shampoo.
Leman shook himself all over, sending small droplets of water from his still-damp fur onto the floor.
«Fine,» he said. «We are all cursed. Again. But we are cursed together. We are still brothers.» His mental tone shifted into something stubborn and fierce. «We will make new pack rules. New oaths. No one touches my humans without my say. Understood?»
Fulgrim snorted.
«You have known this human for how long?» he asked.
«Many sleeps,» Leman said. «She gives food. She scratches ears. She yells but does not hit. She trusts me to chase off foxes and strangers. This is enough to be mine.»
Magnus’s claws tightened on the perch.
«She does not know what we are,» he reminded Leman. «We are animals to her. Dangerous ones, in our own way.»
«Good,» Leman said. «Then we can start over.»
He turned and looked toward the barn door.
«Come,» he said. «I can get you out of these cages.»
Fulgrim’s head snapped up.
«Explain,» he demanded.
Leman grinned, tongue lolling.
«I watched her open them,» he said. «Many times. She thinks I am only staring at her hands. But I am learning.»
He jumped up, front paws braced against Fulgrim’s terrarium stand. His claws scratched along the wood until they caught the small metal latch that locked the glass front.
Fulgrim moved closer, heart beating faster.
«Careful,» Magnus warned.
«I am always careful,» Leman said, which was not entirely true.
He hooked his paw under the latch and pulled upward.
It did not move.
He growled and tried again. His claws slipped. The metal scraped without giving.
«This is wrong way,» he muttered. He shifted his position and pressed his nose against the latch, pushing instead of pulling.
This time the metal shifted a hair’s breadth.
Fulgrim could see the small gap.
«Again,» he urged.
Leman pushed, harder. The latch clicked up and out of its slot. The glass door swung inward a little.
Fulgrim stared at the opening.
«I'm free,» he said.
«You are welcome,» Leman replied, smug.
Magnus clicked his beak.
«Do'nt forget me,» he said pointedly.
«Ja, ja,» Leman said. «Bird first, then snake. Or other way around. I am not sure of order of operations.»
He trotted over to Magnus’s cage. The door latch on this one was lower. He reached up and nudged it with his nose, then his paw.
The metal levered up. The door swung open.
Magnus did not waste a second.
He spread his wings wide and dropped from the highest perch in a controlled glide. The air under his feathers felt good. He beat his wings once, twice, and landed on the barn floor, claws digging into the dirt.
He shook himself all over, feathers fluffing out.
«Better,» he said.
Fulgrim pushed his head through his own opening and slid out of the terrarium. His scales rasped softly on the glass.
The world felt different from the outside. Larger. Less constrained. He lifted his head as high as he could and tasted the air with a long flick of his tongue.
Hay. Dust. Leman’s shampoo. Magnus’s feathers. A faint trace of your scent from earlier.
«We should move before she returns,» Magnus said. «We do'nt know her full reaction to escaped animals yet.»
«Probably loud,» Leman said.
He trotted to the barn door and pushed it open again with his shoulder.
«Come,» he said. «I show you house.»
The farmhouse was not large by Imperial standards, but to a macaw, a snake, and a dog, it held more than enough to explore.
The back door opened into a mudroom. Hooks on the wall held coats. Boots lined the floor, some upright, some kicked off. Leman’s water bowl sat in the corner, half full. A towel hung over a chair, still damp from his earlier bath.
Magnus flew straight for the doorway after Leman. He misjudged the narrow space once and had to brake hard, claws scraping the doorframe, but he adjusted quickly. He hopped onto the top of the coat rack and clung there, eyes bright.
Fulgrim slid in along the baseboard, hugging the wall. The floor was smooth and cool under his belly. He could feel every small vibration through it.
«This is undignified,» he muttered. «But preferable to glass.»
Leman pushed the inner door open with his nose. The living room lay beyond.
A couch sat against one wall. A low table in front of it. A television opposite. Shelves on the side held books, small decorations, and a few framed photos. A basket of dog toys lay by the couch, several already scattered.
The air smelled of fabric, old coffee, dust, and faintly of your shampoo.
Leman trotted straight to the toy basket, then seemed to remember himself and veered away.
«Living den,» he announced. «This is where we sleep when she watches the TV.»
Magnus ignored the couch. His attention went straight to the bookshelves. He launched himself from the coat rack and flapped across the room, landing on the top of one tall shelf.
Books lined the rows. Some upright, some stacked, their spines showing titles and authors. None of them belonged to the Librarius of a Legion, but some names tugged faint recognition from human history and culture lessons.
Magnus bent down and read a few.
“Animal Behavior,” he murmured. “Crop Yield Management. Veterinary Basics. Folk Tales of the North.”
He snorted softly.
«She educates herself properly,» he said. «Practical knowledge.»
Fulgrim ignored the books.
His gaze had locked onto the doorway that led to a small hall and, beyond that, another room. He tasted the air and found your scent there, stronger.
«Bedroom,» Leman said, noticing his focus. «Pack alpha nest. Not for dogs. Usually.»
Fulgrim headed that way at once.
«Hey,» Leman objected, trotting after him. «Rules say—»
«You just broke us out of confinement,» Magnus pointed out from his shelf. «I think house rules are already in question.»
Leman grumbled but followed.
The bedroom door stood half open. You had pulled it almost closed when you left, but not enough to latch. Fulgrim pushed his head against the gap and slipped through. Leman shouldered it wider. Magnus swooped in behind them.
The room was simple. A bed against one wall. A dresser. A small table with a lamp. Clothes on a chair. The curtains were partly open, letting in afternoon light.
The bed drew Fulgrim’s attention at once.
Blankets. Sheets. Pillows. All rumpled from your morning.
Your scent soaked into the fabric.
Warm. Human. Soap, sweat, something faintly sweet from whatever you had eaten last night. Underneath, a steady, familiar smell of your skin.
Fulgrim’s tongue flicked, unbidden.
His body moved toward the bed of its own accord. He reared up, hooked his head over the edge, and pulled himself up. It took effort; his snake muscles were strong but not built for climbing fabric. The blanket bunched under his coils.
He finally gained the surface and stretched out.
It was soft in a way the terrarium bedding was not. It gave under his weight, spreading evenly.
He sank down into it and exhaled in a slow, involuntary hiss.
This was better.
«You're shameless,» Magnus said from the dresser, where he had landed to examine a small pile of folded shirts. «You go straight for her sleeping place.»
«It is the only thing in this wretched situation that suits my standards,» Fulgrim replied. «I will not apologise for having taste.»
He pushed his head into the pillow and rubbed his chin along it, marking it with his scent as much as he took in yours.
Leman stood at the doorway, torn between outrage and envy.
«She told me no dogs on bed,» he said. «Many times.»
«She told us no fighting,» Magnus said. «We broke that rule on day one.»
«You broke that rule on day one,» Leman said.
Magnus clicked his beak.
«You will get your chance,» he said. «For now, let him have his nest. You have the entire couch.»
Leman brightened at that reminder.
«Ja,» he said. «Couch is good. Smells of snacks. Many crumbs.»
He turned and trotted back to the living room, claws clicking.
Magnus hopped from the dresser to the curtain rod and pulled himself along it until he reached the top. From there he could see out the window toward the road, the barn, and the fields.
No sign of your return yet.
He settled there, balancing easily, one claw flexed for grip.
«We should agree on a story,» he said. «For when she comes back and finds us loose.»
«We are animals,» Fulgrim said lazily from the bed. «We will hiss and flutter and pretend innocence.»
Magnus sighed.
«For each other, Fulgrim,» he clarified. «We need to decide how much to tell Russ about the Heresy and its aftermath. About our own… fates.»
Fulgrim went quiet.
He looked at the ceiling, unblinking.
«We can drip it slowly,» he said at last. «He is not ready for all of it. Not yet.»
«Agreed,» Magnus said.
Leman, chewing on a rubber ring in the living room, sent a half-formed thought back.
«I can hear you,» he grumbled. «You are talking about me.»
«Of course,» Fulgrim replied. «You are loud even when you are quiet.»
Leman snorted.
The house settled around them.
Time passed. The clock in the kitchen ticked on. A car passed by on the road outside, tires crunching gravel. Somewhere behind the house, a bird sang a short, repetitive call.
Magnus kept watch through the window.
Fulgrim half-dozed on the bed, body stretched along the warm spot you had left behind.
He imagined, for a foolish second, how it would feel to lie there in his original body. Hands behind his head. Hair spread across the pillow. You tangled against his side, breathing slow and even.
He pushed the thought away.
He was a snake. He was on a farm. The rest belonged to a set of choices that could not be undone.
The sound of your truck in the driveway snapped everything back into sharp focus.
Magnus saw it first. Dust rose from the tires. You climbed out, bags in hand, expression tired but calm. You closed the door with your hip and headed for the back entrance.
«Handler returns,» he reported.
Leman spat out his toy and scrambled to his feet.
«Positions,» he barked.
He rushed back to the mudroom, hoping to intercept you and distract you from anything out of place. His tail already started wagging at maximum speed.
Fulgrim lifted his head from the pillow.
«We are discovered either way,» he said. «I am not giving up this bed.»
«You cannot fight a broom and win,» Magnus warned, but there was a faint amusement in his tone.
He launched himself from the curtain rod and glided back into the living room, aiming for the top of the bookshelf again. He landed, claws gripping wood, and tried to arrange himself into the least suspicious posture a large macaw could manage.
The back door opened.
You stepped in, juggling bags, keys, and a stack of mail.
“Leman, I’m home,” you called. “You better not have—”
You saw him.
The golden dog sat perfectly in the middle of the mudroom, tongue hanging out, eyes bright, tail sweeping the floor. He looked innocent enough to sell.
You narrowed your eyes.
“What did you do?” you asked, instantly suspicious.
Leman’s tail thumped harder. He gave a small, hopeful woof.
«Be cute,» he told himself. «Be cloud. She likes cloud.»
You stepped past him into the living room.
Your gaze swept the space without much thought at first. Couch. Table. Television. Dog toys. Floor.
Macaw.
You stopped.
Magnus resisted the urge to preen. He stared back, one eye wide, feathers fluffed just enough to look birdlike.
“…How,” you said slowly, “are you in here.”
He gave a soft squawk and tilted his head.
In your mind, you ran through the facts.
You had left him in a locked cage in the barn. With a latch. A proper one. The snake, too. In his terrarium. Also latched. You had closed the barn door.
Now a very large parrot sat on your bookshelf.
You turned.
“Leman,” you said.
The dog froze.
He knew that tone.
He padded into the living room with the slow, guilty walk of a child who had been caught near a broken vase.
Magnus watched him from above with thin satisfaction.
«She is not stupid,» he remarked.
«Shut up, bird,» Leman muttered.
You put your hands on your hips.
“Leman Russ,” you said, full-name voice. “Did you open the barn door?”
He whined.
“Did you open the barn door,” you repeated, “and get the new guys out?”
He dropped his gaze to the floor.
You blew out a hard breath through your nose.
“I swear,” you said, “if you get any smarter, you’re going to start doing your own taxes. No way the snake and the bird opened those latches from the inside. You’re the only one here with enough brains and stupid to try.”
Leman’s tail tucked a little between his legs. He gave a small, ashamed woof.
«She is unfair,» he said mentally. «I am pure genius.»
«You are very caught,» Magnus pointed out.
You set the bags down with a thump.
“All right,” you said. “Snake first, then bird. Leman, stay.”
You pointed at the floor.
He sat.
You marched back toward the mudroom, then out to the yard, heading for the barn with quick, irritated steps.
The barn door stood open.
You groaned.
“Of course,” you muttered. “Of course I forgot to double-check that after dragging your muddy butt in.”
Inside, the empty cages greeted you with innocent stillness.
The terrarium door was ajar. The bird cage hung open.
You stood there for a second, pinching the bridge of your nose.
“Great,” you said. “Just great. Escape artists.”
You checked the corners of the barn, the beams, the feed sacks, the hay bales. No sign of purple scales. The only sounds were the animals you actually expected.
“All right,” you said at last, talking half to yourself. “They can’t have gone far. We’re on a farm, not in the middle of a city. No predators near the house. I’ll put them back tonight or tomorrow.”
You closed the terrarium and the cage properly this time, out of habit more than anything, then shut the barn door and checked the latch twice.
Back in the house, Magnus had moved higher on the shelf, watching the window. Leman had not moved from his “stay” spot but was vibrating with tension.
Fulgrim, hearing your footsteps approach, made a different choice.
He slipped off the bed, moved to the corner of the room, and searched the baseboard with his snout. Old houses had gaps. Pipes. Wires. Space.
He found one. A small hole where a pipe entered the wall. Something had chewed around it once. He pushed his head in.
It was tight. Dusty. Smelled of old wood and spiders.
He forced his body after his head, inch by inch, muscles working.
By the time you stepped into the bedroom, only the tip of his tail was visible. It disappeared into the wall just as your shadow fell across the floor.
You stared at the empty bed.
The sheets were a little disturbed, but that could have been from this morning. Or from your imagination. There was no snake in sight.
You exhaled, long.
“Okay,” you said to the empty room. “One problem at a time.”
You backed out and went to confront the visible escapee instead.
The macaw watched you approach with his one eye open wide.
“You,” you said, pointing. “You are not supposed to be in here.”
He made a low, questioning squawk.
You fetched a spare perch from where you had stored it and held it up in front of him.
“Step up,” you ordered.
He considered the command. He had no interest in being trained. But the perch was a route back to the barn that did not involve you grabbing him around the middle.
He lifted one foot and stepped onto the perch. His weight sagged the stick, but you adjusted your grip.
“Good boy,” you said, softer. “We’re going back to your room.”
You carried him out.
Leman watched, guilt all over his face.
You stopped by him on the way.
“If you so much as breathe on the barn latch again,” you told him, “you’re losing couch privileges, mister.”
His ears drooped. Couch privileges were sacred. He whined low.
«No couch?» he said, horrified.
Magnus’s feathers shook with silent laughter.
«You brought this on yourself,» he told him.
You took Magnus back to the barn, locked him in again with extra care, and checked the terrarium. Empty, as expected. You frowned.
“Where did you go, you little bastard,” you murmured.
You looked around once more, then shook your head.
“Fine. Be that way. I’ll find you when you want food.”
You topped up the bird’s water and seed, slid a bowl of fruit into his cage, and left.
The sun dropped lower. Evening crept in.
You fed the rest of the animals, including Leman, who ate his dinner quickly, tail thumping against the floor in relief at keeping the couch. You checked the barn one more time, talked to Magnus in a calm voice about “no more jailbreaks,” and called out into the yard for the snake, in case he decided to slither back.
No purple body appeared.
Eventually, you locked up for the night, turned off the main lights, and went to bed.
The house fell quiet.
The television off. The kitchen dark. The only sounds were the ticking clock and Leman’s breathing from the living room rug.
In the wall, Fulgrim waited.
He had stayed still while you moved around, listening to your footsteps, learning the sound of each step. The space was narrow. Dust clung to his scales. He could feel the vibrations of your movements even when he could not see you.
Now the weight on the mattress changed. You lay down. The springs creaked softly. Blankets rustled.
Your breathing slowed.
Fulgrim counted the beats.
When he was sure you were asleep, he began to move.
He backed out of the wall slowly, inch by inch, until his head emerged into the dark bedroom. The curtains were mostly closed. Moonlight edged the furniture in faint outlines.
He tasted the air.
You.
He slid across the floor, silent, body moving in smooth waves. He reached the bed and lifted his head to find the edge. He pushed up, hooked his chin on the blanket, and pulled. The fabric bunched. He gained a little height, then more. He climbed.
You did not stir. Your breathing stayed steady and slow.
He reached the top and paused.
You lay on your side, facing away from him, one arm under the pillow, the other tucked close to your chest. Your hair spread across the pillow in a messy fan. In the darkness, your face was relaxed. No lines of worry. No narrowed eyes. No frown.666
You smelled warm and alive.
Fulgrim lowered his body beside you, moving carefully so as not to disturb the mattress too much. He coiled along the curve of your spine, not tightly, just enough to feel your heat.
Your back was warm against his scales. Each breath expanded your ribs and pressed lightly into him. He could feel your heartbeat through the thin barrier of shirt and skin.
He rested his head near your shoulder.
He closed his eyes.
This, he thought, is better.
Not the palace he once ruled. Not the halls of victory. Not the roar of a Legion chanting his name.
A bed in a small farmhouse room. A human who thought he was a difficult animal. The quiet sounds of night.
In another life, he might have brought you to his flagship. Given you a studio, a gallery, a private wing of marble and silk. He would have shown you the stars beyond your small world.
That life was gone.
This one was here.
He took a slow breath, tasting the faint salt of your skin, the simple soap on your hair.
If I ever get out of this, he thought, I will steal you from this place and show you something better.
There is a moment after every death where you hang in it, somewhere between the last burning itch in your lungs and the first shocked inhale. A blank place. No pain. No sound. Just black.
This time, there is a chair.
You don’t see it arrive. You blink and there is a shape in front of you. Seated. Legs crossed at the ankle. Hands folded.
“How long,” they say, “do you want to wait?”
Their voice is ordinary. Not echoing, not booming. Just…there. Familiar in a way that makes your teeth ache.
You don’t answer.
Words feel pointless. You have screamed them hoarse against tubes and restraints and water. None of that changed anything. Silence is easier.
They laugh.
It’s soft and amused, edged with something you recognize far too well: old irritation.
“You are sulking,” they say. “I suppose that's fair. This is not a pleasant arrangement, even by my generous standards.”
You stare at them.
They are more outline than flesh. Every time you try to focus, the edges blur, like looking at a face through warped glass. You know there is a mouth. You know there are eyes. You cannot make yourself remember their exact shape.
“I liked you better when you were crying over fever,” they continue. “Mud roof, smoke in your lungs, little hands clinging to the blanket. You were very polite then.”
Memory stirs.
Thatch. Flickering light. The smell of sickness. The weight in your chest that would not lift.
You remember a voice in the dark, sitting by your pallet after everyone else had gone. You remember being too tired to be afraid.
“…you,” you say slowly. “From the hut.”
“Oh, good. You do recall.” They lean back, satisfied. “I worried all that drowning had knocked loose something important.”
You should not be able to chuckle; you’re not breathing. But your chest shakes anyway, the ghost of a laugh.
“You still holding a grudge?” you ask. “It’s been a while.”
They make a thoughtful sound.
“You tricked me,” they say. “Once. You were supposed to give something, and instead you took. You clawed your way up my sleeve and stole a little…adjustment. And then you ran off and spent it everywhere.”
Their hand flicks vaguely. “Very rude.”
“You offered,” you say. “You said I could live.”
“I said you could live long enough to be interesting,” they correct. “You took more. You always did have a talent for that.”
You smirk, or the idea of a smirk passes through you.
“And now?” you ask. “Here to repossess?”
“Oh, I already did that,” they say lightly. “Every time you died, I could have let you fall off the line. Do you have any idea how easy that would have been? Just…cut.” Their fingers mime a small snapping motion. “But I didn’t. I’m sentimental.”
“Sure,” you say dryly. “That’s what I’ve always thought about you.”
They laugh again.
“For all your boredom, you’re still very sharp,” they say. “Which brings us back to my question: how long do you want to wait?”
“For what?” You already know. You want to hear them say it.
“For him,” they say. “For your little architect.”
Heat flares in your chest in a place that shouldn’t exist right now.
You say nothing.
“You sit in that bathtub and die and wake and die again,” they go on, almost conversational. “You know he knows. You know he chooses not to move. He stands over his little globe and decides that your suffering is within acceptable parameters. All very rational. All very efficient.”
Their head tilts.
“How long do you want to keep trusting that calculus?” they ask. “How long until you admit that if you wait for him to move by himself, you will be very, very pruned by the time he arrives?”
“I’m not waiting,” you say. “I’m stuck.”
“Same thing,” they say. “Different angle.”
Silence stretches. It is easier here than in the cage. No water in your lungs. No pressure on your ribs. Just their voice and your irritation.
“So,” they say at last. “I will make you an offer. Again.”
You snort.
“Last time you ‘offered,’ I woke up with a problem I have not been able to get rid of for centuries,” you say. “Forgive me if I don’t leap at the chance for a sequel.”
“Oh, you love your problem,” they say. “You follow it all over the planet. You die near it. You shout at it on mountaintops. Don’t pretend you are innocent in this entanglement.”
You grimace.
“What’s the offer?” you ask.
They lean forward. You still can’t see their face properly, but you feel their attention sharpen, like a hand closing.
“I will help you get out of here,” they say. “Not by breaking your cage. That would be vulgar. By nudging.”
“Nudging,” you repeat.
“Pulling a string,” they say. “Tugging a few threads. Adjusting a handful of very small probabilities so that a certain person arrives earlier than his grand schedule requires. Sooner instead of later. You stop drowning in obscurity, he gets his dramatic entrance, and I can continue the play without have to watch this boring part.”
There is real pleasure in their voice at that last part.
You eye them.
“And in return?” you ask. “Because you never do anything for free. You did not the first time. You definitely won’t now.”
“In return,” they say, “I take something from you. Like the old arrangement. Although, to be clear, that first one was not supposed to be a gift. You cheated me out of payment. I intend to rectify that.”
You feel a cold line slide down your spine.
“What something?” you ask.
They wag a finger.
“Specifics spoil the fun,” they say. “And you would just argue. Think of it as…settling accounts. Principal and interest. You have lived a very long time on that first little theft. You owe.”
“You’re not afraid,” you say slowly, “of being cheated again?”
They are quiet for a heartbeat.
When they answer, their voice has changed. Still amused. But there is steel running through it now.
“Oh, this time,” they say, “I will get everything that is mine. And I will make sure he sees exactly who signed the note.”
You hate that that sends a small thrill of alarm through you.
You cross your arms over your chest out of habit, even though there is nothing there to cross.
“This is forced buying and selling,” you snap. “There’s no consent if my options are ‘drown forever’ or ‘sign up for mystery consequences from a petty bastard.’”
They laugh so hard they almost double over.
“Oh,” they say. “You still make me happy.”
The darkness around you starts to thin.
You feel weight creep back into your limbs, the slow drag of gravity returning. The faint itch at the back of your throat that means lungs are forming.
“Decision time,” they say. “Not that it matters. You have already made it.”
“I didn’t say yes,” you say.
“You never do,” they answer. “And yet, somehow, you keep ending up on my side of the ledger.”
You shout something after them—“I didn’t agree,” or “this is extortion,” or maybe just “fuck you”—but the words dissolve as the black rips open.
---
You wake in fire and gold.
Your chest convulses. Water floods out of your mouth in a choking rush. Your back arches. Hands hold you in place.
You cough until your vision clears.
The first thing you see is the ceiling, and it is wrong. Not white. Not smooth. Bent metal, half-melted, covered in a thin film of steam.
The second thing you see is blood.
It spatters the floor. It runs down the wall in a streak where something heavy hit and slid. The air is thick with the smell of burned insulation and cooked flesh.
The third thing is him.
He’s a silhouette at first, standing in the broken threshold where a reinforced door used to be. Light pours in behind him, gold and white and ugly bright. His armor is scorched. Something that was once a containment rig is hanging off his left pauldron, cut in half.
He steps forward.
The glow catches his face.
“Hello,” Emperor says.
His voice is the same. Your situation is not.
You are half-sitting in a metal cradle that used to be your cage, now cracked open like an egg. Thick, wet cables hang around you. Beyond him, through the hole in the bulkhead, you see water pressing against a failing force field, held back by flickering arcs of light. The whole facility shudders every few seconds.
Behind Emperor, giants move. Not Thunder Warriors. Taller. Cleaner lines. Their armor gleams even under the grime, each plate a precise shape. They move with a discipline that is almost unnatural.
The scientists are screaming.
Some are already dead, pinned to walls or floors by weapons that cut too cleanly. Others are on their knees, hands over their heads, as gene-wrought giants strip data-slates from consoles.
You start laughing.
It comes out raw, cracked by too much drowning, but there is genuine amusement under it. All that posturing, all that strategic restraint, and he is here anyway, tearing a laboratory apart with his new toys.
The corner of his mouth twitches.
He is at your side in three long strides. One gauntleted hand braces the back of your neck, steadying you. The other hovers over your ribs as he checks you for injuries that matter in the short term, not the long.
“You’re hurt,” he says.
“I get better,” you cough. “You know that.”
“I prefer you unhurt,” he says.
One of the not-Thunder Warriors approaches, visor spattered with something dark that is not his. “My lord,” he says. “The core is destabilizing. We have minutes at best.”
Neoth doesn’t look away from you.
“Clear the lower labs,” he says. “Take all physical records and anything that looks like a prototype. Destroy the rest. No survivors among the staff.”
“Yes, my lord.” The warrior turns, barking orders.
Neoth’s fingers move to your face.
His hand is still gloved, but the touch is gentle as he covers your eyes.
“Stop that,” you say. “I want to see the fireworks.”
“You have seen enough,” he says.
You try to bat his hand away. Your arm shakes. You don’t have much strength left, even with your little trick. Too many cycles. Too much taken and put back.
Light flares brighter through the cracks around his fingers. You smell ozone and burning circuitry. Somewhere in the distance, metal tears.
“I can walk,” you start.
He murmurs something you can’t hear properly, low and even. It vibrates in your skull in a way that feels like pressure on a bruise.
Your body betrays you.
Your limbs go heavy. Your breath slows. Your protest fades mid-word.
The last thing you are aware of is the warmth of his hand over your eyes and the faint, furious satisfaction in his voice when he says, to someone else, “I have them. We are leaving.”
The world drops away.
---
You wake to softness.
No straps. No water. No metal beneath your spine.
Fabric.
You blink up at a ceiling painted with geometric patterns. No cracks. No stains. Just clean, careful lines in muted colors. The air is cool and smells faintly of incense and something sharper, like antiseptic.
Your body hurts, but in the dull, background way it always does after a bad sequence. Ribs knit. Bruises fade. A long line down your leg itches where something took a slice; when you peer under the blankets, there is only a faint pink seam.
There is a chair next to the bed.
He is in it.
Neoth sits with one ankle resting on his opposite knee, a stack of paper balanced on a board across his lap. His armor is gone. He wears dark robes, simple in cut, the kind that would look humble on anyone else and does not on him.
A pen moves in his hand. Ink glistens wet across the page.
You watch him for a moment.
“Fancy,” you say at last. Your voice is hoarse but workable. “Real paper. Didn’t know you still wasted trees on that.”
He does not look up immediately. He finishes the line he is writing, sets a small weight on the corner of the sheet, and only then lifts his gaze.
“You are awake,” he says.
“Unfortunately,” you say. “I was enjoying the lack of drowning.”
His mouth moves, almost a smile.
“There was some concern you might experience…disorientation,” he says. “Extended cycles under stress can damage even a regenerating mind.”
“So you sedated me again,” you say. “Big surprise.”
“Only long enough for your nervous system to stabilize,” he says.
You snort.
His hand lifts, almost absently, and slides into your hair. His fingers are warm. He strokes once, slow, thumb tracing the line of your temple.
The touch prickles.
You frown and turn your head away, shifting enough that his hand falls.
He freezes.
For a heartbeat, his palm hangs in the air where your head used to be. Then, deliberately, he lowers it to the edge of the bed.
“Still angry,” he says quietly.
“Still breathing,” you reply. “For now.”
You expect him to argue. To launch into explanations about logistics and scale and acceptable sacrifice. To justify how long he left you in that box.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he reaches into his coat and takes something out.
“For now,” he says, “this is yours.”
He holds out a folded strip of material.
Your breath catches.
It is small. Old. The edges are frayed where fingers worried at them while they worked. The dried brown smear sealing it is cracked but intact.
The letter.
You look from it to him.
“Where did you get that?” you ask.
“In the remains of the facility,” he says. “Your cell block collapsed. Most of the contents were destroyed. This was wedged between two plates in the floor.”
Of course it was. You’d shoved it under the bunk as far as your fingers could reach. When the world caved in, it must have been pinned and spared the worst.
“I remember this,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “From one of the reports. A description of you receiving contraband from another subject. You promised delivery.”
He places the letter gently on the blanket near your hand.
You stare at it.
“You kept the surveillance reports,” you say. “On me.”
“Of course,” he says. “I read all data pertaining to you.”
There is no shame in it. No apology. Just fact.
Your fingers twitch.
You pick up the letter.
The material is rough against your skin. The seal cracks a little more but does not break. The cramped writing on the outside lists coordinates in a script you half-recognize, a hive-name, a symbol for a bloodline.
You swallow.
“Thought you’d lost this,” you admit.
“I don’t like losing things that matter,” he says.
You don’t ask if he means the letter or you.
He shifts the papers on his lap, aligning their corners.
“I am needed in the strategium,” he says. “There are fronts that require adjustment. I will return later to discuss…several topics with you.”
“Threat noted,” you mumble.
He stands and look at you for a long moment.
“I’m glad you are awake,” he says finally.
You roll your eyes. “Don’t get sentimental on me.”
He leaves without answering that.
The door slides closed behind him with a soft hiss.
You stare at the ceiling for a while, the letter clutched in your hand. The room is quiet. The bed is obscene in its comfort. The weight of stone and machinery above you is different from the weight of water, but it is still a weight.
Sleep pulls at you again, slow and heavy.
You let it.
Outside, the Emperor lower his voice.
“Double the watch,” he says. “No one enters without my direct authorization. No one speaks to them without my knowledge. If any irregularity occurs—any—inform me at once.”
“Yes, my lord,” they answer.
He looks at the sealed door a moment longer, expression unreadable, then turns and walks back into the endless corridors of his palace, where golden giants drill and star maps burn on the walls.
Inside the room, you sleep, one hand curled under your pillow around a dead stranger’s letter, unaware that the map of your cage has simply changed shape, from roads and dirt to stone walls and watchful gold.
He finds you again on a grey plateau above the Great Ocean.
Centuries have passed. The once-wide Pacific is shrunken and scarred, ringed by dead coastal cities and patchwork fortresses. The air tastes of ash and old radiation. You climb a path you remember from another lifetime, a thin line of stone that leads toward the Himalazian heights where you and Neoth once met to trade stories.
You expect another wanderer’s cloak. Maybe a staff. Maybe the same quiet man with calloused hands and dust on his boots.
You do not expect the armor.
He stands at the edge of the plateau with a small formation of warriors behind him. His armor is gold and crimson, heavy, plated, built to stop weapons that can tear tanks apart. It covers him from neck to heel, marked with the two-headed eagle you recognized from his drawings at some point.
His bare head turns when your boots crunch on gravel.
“Hello,” he says.
His voice is the same. Calm. Level. Yours is not.
“What are you wearing?” you ask.
He looks down at himself, then back at you. “Progress.”
The warriors behind him stand in a disciplined block. They are large. Larger than any unmodified human you have seen. Their eyes track you without moving their heads. Their armor is simpler than his, rougher, more functional. Thunder Warriors, You've heard about them in recent pub gossip. You didn't think they had anything to do with him back then.
“You built an army,” you say.
“I built several,” Neoth answers. “This one is mine alone.”
You walk closer until you can see details. Reinforced joints. Fine work on the breastplate. The gold finish has a functional purpose; it shrugs off corrosion from the poisoned air. He has always thought in layers.
“You said you were not ready to reveal yourself,” you remind him. “You said Terra was not ready.”
“It is now,” he says. “The Age of Strife continues, but the pattern has reached a point where inaction only produces waste. It is time to act openly.”
“Openly as what?” you ask. “A warlord? Another techno-barbarian with better toys?”
His gaze does not waver. “As Emperor.”
The word lands between you with clear meaning. Not a village chief. Not a regional prince. A single ruler.
“Emperor of what?” you ask.
“Terra,” he says. “Then more.”
You stare at him. Behind him, his warriors remain still.
“You always had plans,” you say slowly. “You talked about standardizing weights, alphabets, trade routes. You talked about ending the worst of the wars. I listened to that. I did not hear total control of everything.”
“Control is how you end the wars,” he replies. “The techno-barbarian states will not negotiate permanent peace. Ursh will not stop on its own. The Panpacific tyrants will not step down because someone asks nicely. The Yndonesic Bloc operates death camps. The Nordafrik Conclaves sell weapons to whoever can pay.”
He lists them like items in a ledger.
“I know what they are,” you say. “I have seen them.”
“Then you know they require force.” He gestures toward the horizon. “Unity through conquest. It is the only stable solution.”
Your jaw tightens. “And where do I fit in that solution?”
He looks at you as if this should be obvious.
“At my side,” he says. “Where else.”
You laugh once, without humor. “I walk. That is what I do. I stay in a place for a while, then I move on. I help where I can. I leave when they start carving statues. I am not part of anyone’s court.”
“I will not build a court,” he says. “I will build a system. You misunderstand.”
“I understand that you are standing in power armor with engineered killers behind you,” you say. “I understand that you just called yourself Emperor. That sounds like a court.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “You sound offended.”
“I am,” you snap. “I liked the version of you who argued philosophy in roadside inns. Not the one who thinks he has the right to own the planet.”
“I do not intend to own it,” he says. “I intend to fix it.”
“And me?” Your voice is sharp. “Do you intend to fix me too?”
He studies you. You see calculation, but also something rawer under it.
“You are part of the set of variables,” he says. “There are very few beings with our condition. Most are unstable, or compromised, or already aligned with forces that oppose my goal. You are not. You are the only one I trust to understand the scale of this.”
“I understand the scale,” you say. “I do not agree with the method. There is a difference.”
“You disagree with conquest?” he asks. “You have seen what these regimes do. The mass butcheries, the slave-pits, the psyker burnings. You have watched Ursh raise skull towers. You have walked through Yndonesic camps. You know what inaction costs.”
“I disagree with replacing one absolute with another,” you say. “You talk about Imperial Truth and reason and all those nice words, but you mean obedience to you.”
“Yes,” he says, without hesitating. “Because I am the only one with the perspective and tools to do this correctly.”
You stare at him. His certainty is not loud. It is steady, dense.
“This is exactly what all those tyrants say,” you tell him.
“They are short-lived, parochial and often mad,” he replies. “I am not.”
“That is what they say too.”
Silence stretches.
The wind carries dust over the plateau. Thin scrub brushes shake against black rock. In the distance, you see the faint line of the Great Ocean, where its reduced waters still pool between continents.
You fold your arms.
“Where do you want me, exactly?” you ask. “Be precise.”
“At my side,” he says again. “In the heart of my center of power. I am preparing a complex beneath these mountains. Laboratories. Archives. Command structures.” He nods toward the Himalazian range behind you. “When the wars begin in earnest, I will need a constant reference. Someone who remembers older patterns. Someone who does not age, who cannot be easily removed.”
You process that.
“A…constant,” you echo.
“Yes.”
“Not an advisor,” you say. “Not a friend. A fixed point.”
“Both,” he says. “All. You underestimate your own importance. You are the only anchor that exists outside the normal span of human time that is not bound to hostile powers. If I lose you, I lose an entire category of perspective.”
You feel something cold settle in your stomach.
“I am not a tool,” you say quietly. “I am not a fixed point you get to place where it makes your equations neat.”
His expression tightens. “I did not say you were only that.”
“You did not have to,” you answer.
The first serious fight begins there.
“You want to unify Terra?” you say. “Fine. You have always been heading in that direction. But you do not get to assign me a position in your structure. I will help when and where I choose, not stand next to your throne so you can look at me and feel better.”
His eyes flash for a moment. Not with visible light. With focus.
“This is not about feeling better,” he says. “This is about reducing variables. I cannot waste time wondering where you are. You attract danger. You walk into it. You are a weak point if left unguarded. Enemies could target you, corrupt you, use you as leverage.”
“Then let them try,” you say. “I have existed through more regimes than you have names for. I know how to disappear.”
“I can no longer accept that risk,” he says.
You take a step back. “Accept it or not, it is mine.”
He shifts his weight. His warriors behind him remain motionless, but you see some of them glance at each other. They are not used to anyone talking to him like this.
“I will ask clearly,” Neoth says. “Walk with me. Stay in the center. Help build what comes next. I will give you access to everything: the laboratories, the archives, the models. I will listen. I will adjust where adjustment is rational. But I will not allow you to remain exposed.”
“You mean free,” you say.
“I mean exposed,” he repeats.
You feel the old impulse to walk. To choose a direction and go until this conversation is a dot behind you.
“I don’t want this,” you say. “I don’t want to watch you turn into another Kalagann or Dume with better numbers.”
His jaw clenches. “Do not compare me to them.”
“Why not?” you ask. “They also thought only they had the right plan. They also built armies and prisons and said it was for the greater good.”
He steps closer. His armor is very solid at this distance. Up close, you see small scars and repairs. He has already fought some battles in it.
“I know you fear cages,” he says. “I will not put you in one.”
“You just told me you will not allow me to remain free,” you say. “That is a cage.”
“There are…degrees,” he says.
You shake your head. “No. There are not.”
You turn away.
You start walking back down the path.
Behind you, you hear one of the gene-soldiers shift his stance. Metallic joints click. You wait for Neoth to order them to block you.
He does not.
“Stop,” he says.
You keep walking.
“Stop,” he repeats, louder.
You pause on the path. You do not turn yet.
“I will not join your empire,” you say. “I will not be your constant. I will not stand next to your throne while you turn humanity into a single shape that fits your plan.”
“This is not about shape,” he says. “This is about survival.”
“Then survive without me,” you say.
The path drops steeply. Loose stones roll under your boots.
“You will regret this,” he warns.
“Maybe,” you say. “That will still be my decision.”
You feel his attention press on your back. Not psychic, not yet. Just focus. Then, slowly, it eases.
“You may go,” he says.
You snort. “I was going anyway.”
You walk down out of sight. You expect armored feet following, hands grabbing.
None come.
When you reach the lower slopes, you look back once. He stands on the plateau, a tall figure in gold, watching.
You raise a hand, a small, rude gesture. Then you turn and disappear into the broken lands.
For a time, it feels like you escaped.
You go south into the ruins of old India, where fractured city-states huddle under monsoon storms and local warlords argue over river control. You work as a healer in a fortified town built on the bones of an ancient metropolis. You patch bullet wounds and treat rad-burns. You keep your head down when scouts bring news of strange banners in the north.
Reports spread.
A warlord with an army that does not break.
Gene-bred soldiers in heavy armor.
Precision strikes against Ursh outposts, against Panpacific raiders, against Yndonesic death squads.
No one in your town says “Emperor” yet, but the word “conqueror” hangs in the air.
You know who it is. Your stomach knots every time a caravan mentions a gold-armored leader with strange eyes.
You move on before his forces reach the region. You cross the Great Ocean on a rusted ship whose engine coughs for hours at a time. You spend a decade in Hy Brasil’s shadow, then slip away before Imperial agents arrive.
No matter where you go, rumors of him follow, a few years behind.
At first you think it is coincidence. He is expanding in all directions. Any place you go will eventually touch his influence.
Then you start noticing patterns.
A courier turns up in a small village two days after you arrive, carrying maps from “northern patrons.” The maps are too good, with detail that suggests orbital survey.
A merchant caravan offers you free passage “courtesy of a benefactor” and just happens to drop you off near a secure, defensible enclave, not in the random waste you asked for.
Bandit gangs that usually plague the roads of a certain region suddenly vanish when you settle there. Later you hear they were wiped out by “unknown forces” weeks before your arrival.
You put it together.
You are not escaping his notice. You are walking through routes he has already adjusted.
He let you go from the plateau. He did not stop you. He did not drag you back in chains.
But he started tracking you.
Agents carry your description. Some of them probably do not know who they serve. They just know they should send reports whenever they see someone who does not age.
Supply lines shift to remove certain dangers from regions you pass through. He covers your flanks without telling you. He filters which threats you meet.
You understand the nature of the cage when you overhear two Imperial scouts talking in a half-built fortress in the Caucasus Wastes.
“The old man wants regular updates,” one says, cleaning his rifle. “If the wanderer dies, you mark the time and place.”
“What’s so special about them?” the other asks.
“Don’t ask,” the first says. “Just obey. Emperor’s orders.”
You leave that fortress the same night. You move faster. You change names more often. You die several times in inconvenient places just to break patterns.
It does not matter.
He does not stand in front of you and forbid your movement. He does not issue a decree that binds you to his side.
He simply wraps the world around you in invisible lines. Supply, protection, surveillance. Gentle, constant pressure that pushes you away from true randomness.
He is patient. He has time.
You do too.
For now, you walk. He conquers. Both of you pretend the distance between those facts is larger than it is.
