Chapter Text
Katarinya Greyfax had been tortured many times in her life, but never quite like this.
For one thing, there were not normally so many witnesses.
She lay immobile, strapped to a raised gurney in a sterile room aboard the strike cruiser Sword of Honour. Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl of the Adeptus Mechanicus hovered nearby, a dim crimson shape in her peripheral vision. Nearly a dozen assistants flitted about his caridine bulk, frenzied icthyids trailing the wake of a gargantuan predator. A Chapter helot stood guard at the door, naval shotgun and pristine brass livery glinting in the corner of her eye: a constant reminder of the precariousness of their standing with the Ultramarines providing transport to Macragge.
Then there was the matter of the pain itself.
It began in her neck, at the point where a central venous catheter drew tainted blood into an esoteric system of pumps and filters: a prickling, itching sensation akin to the one that had marked the moment of infection, combined with dull, unrelenting pressure. It ended nowhere. For the better part of four days, Greyfax had endured gut-rending cramps while alternatingly freezing and overheating, and sweat-drenched nausea worse than several times she had actually been poisoned. It was so agonizing, she had made a mental note to add haemopurgitation to her standard rotation of interrogation tactics.
Whether that mental note would stick was another matter entirely.
Greyfax was Ordos-trained, hardened against even the most brutal and creative forms of torture: there was no pain she could not master by force of will alone. But that particular feat required a mind more or less intact, and hers, formidable though it was, was beginning to crack. Her thoughts jumped randomly from subject to subject, like the nonsensical leaps of a mind succumbing to sleep, or the warp-tainted hallucinations of a flect addict. The chaos built, each moment worse than the last, until she became convinced the mindshackle scarabs were absconding with bits of her brain in tow.
Pain was one thing, loss of control another entirely.
When Cawl had explained the need for her to remain awake during the procedure, he had said it would be “stressful,” but not gone into the particulars. Greyfax was unsure whether that had been an attempt at kindness or a deliberate tactic to ensure she went through with it. She could have demanded details, but they made no difference to her. For someone pushing ten millennia, the archmagos was not, it seemed, an astute judge of character. Greyfax needed no kindness, nor would she balk at any cost to purge herself of the xenos parasites.
Even if it meant entrusting herself to a reckless, geriatric fool hatched in the brackish waters between man and machine.
The archmagos had done nothing to increase her confidence by answering with an all-too-cheerful “Probably!” in response to her query as to whether he had performed the operation before. He had then shattered it by, upon her pressing him as to whether any of those likely past experiences had been successful, simply shrugging multiple arms and going about his business. Cawl had only one true acolyte left—a small, somewhat bumbling techpriest named Qvo-something-or-other. From Greyfax’s limited view, the remainder of his assistants appeared to be hastily dis-armed skitarii with only a vague idea of what they were being mind-slaved to do.
Yet she had endured it all—the pain, the madness, the insouciance—with only the occasional facial twitch as evidence, her eyes and attention never straying from where they had remained for the entirety of this excoriation: on the living saint standing silent vigil before her bed.
For the last hour, Greyfax had been fixated on the shining band of reflected lumen light crowning Celestine’s inkwell hair like a second halo. Before that, it had been the bright line of gold down the middle of her corselet. Before that, the burnt and blood-crusted pile of her red velvet tabard. The rose-clasped garter about her left thigh; the oath paper trailing down her calf; the litter of petals at her feet.
This had been her way; focus always on a part, not the whole. Never look her in the eyes.
And so survive this ordeal.
Greyfax was shrewd enough to know there was not a thing she could do about it if Celestine did suddenly decide to betray them all. She dared not use her powers under the circumstances. Even if she had, she knew better than to court corruption by delving into that particular psyche. The Living Saint’s surface thoughts alone were a stilling wash of pure white noise. They called to her even now like the faraway pound of surf, making her wish only to close her eyes and listen.
All the more reason she should avoid it.
Greyfax had come up with all manner of excuse during their journey through the webway: psychic resonance, lingering trauma, the mindshackle. But now, in what passed for her coherent thoughts, it was clear that her ceaseless vigilance owed very little indeed to justifiable suspicion.
She simply could not take her eyes off the Living Saint.
It had to mean something, anything other than that which it seemed most obviously to be. For which was more likely? That her hardened heart had finally been prised open after all her years of solitude, or that Celestine’s spurious aura was potent enough to tempt even her?
She had to redouble her efforts, her suspicions, until there could be no doubt of Celestine's motivations and righteousness—no matter how much she might wish otherwise. The Living Saint was a starburst ray of light in clouded water: an illusion, a false bottom promising safe landing when in fact the depths are fathomless.
If it was a lie, it was an effective one; Greyfax could bear anything, so long as the Living Saint remained by her side.
It meant nothing.
Lies were often more powerful than the truth. The best ones always were. She knew that now all too well. For it had become more than an occasional indulgence, a vice, a necessary evil. Celestine’s presence, and the light that filled Greyfax’s chest whenever she beheld her, were now the only things holding the inquisitor’s shattered psyche together.
There had been far too many such moments of reliance lately, but this would be the last. She only needed to endure a little longer. Very soon now, the archmagos would succeed in purging the necron taint from her blood, and her weakness for Celestine along with it.
Only now, in the final minutes of the procedure, had she come to realize how much she dreaded the prospect.
The machine-whine reached fever-pitch, and her grip on the armrests tightened imperceptibly.
Or so she thought, until Celestine’s focus instantly honed in on the movement. Greyfax forgot her own rules, and had cause to regret it immediately as their gazes met. Celestine’s eyes were green as a toxic algae bloom, a profusion of unbearable emerald compassion spilling out and into her. She shuddered violently, and an impossible yet insistent conviction asserted itself: that Celestine, by some unknown sorcery or psykana, had substituted herself for the mindshackle scarabs in her blood.
She wrenched her gaze away. The moment she did, the machine-noise began to abate, as did the pain. There was soon only the background hum of the ship’s realspace engines and her own shallow breathing. The nerve-memory of pain remained, an omnipresent throbbing sensation that made her body feel as disjointed as her fragile mind.
Greyfax did not feel particularly inclined to overcome her febrile delusions before an audience, least of all the object of her—What? Mania? Obsession? Certainly not those things as alien to her as their newfound Eldar allies, those supposedly universal things that had nonetheless never belonged to her: affection, adoration, love.
She did not wait for Cawl to give the all-clear.
Her bonds snapped under immense psychic force. Various attachments tore from her body as if yanked by invisible hands; IV tubes, sensor patches, and inflow and outflow catheters all fell away, popping and hissing, to dribble weakly onto the floor.
Greyfax rose, supporting herself on an armrest still bearing the crescent marks of her fingernails.
“Ah, Inquisitor…” Cawl began, but was silenced by her glare as she snapped her head around so quickly it made the room spin.
“Are we done?” she forced out, projecting formidability despite her leaden tongue.
“Well, yes, technically, the procedure was a success—an unprecedented one, if I do say so myself—but…”
Greyfax was forcing her legs towards the entryway by the second word. She snatched up the belt that held Tyrantslayer and her micro-flamer from a burnished steel table, and the rest of the archmagos’ sentence was lost in the slam of the door behind her.
She took a moment to rest her forehead against it, the steel blessedly cool against the throbbing behind her eyes. The use of her will had been a mistake, and she would pay for it dearly.
She took one deep breath. Then another. With unsteady hands, she refastened the high collar of her heavy robes, wincing as it pressed against her bruised throat, then set off at a stagger. Several times, she had to flash her hip-slung inquisitorial rosette at helots who took too long to get out of the way. They stared after her, jaw agape. Some made the sign of the aquila in irritatingly obsequious fashion. It took her a moment to recognize the cause: her attire.
She wore robes of scarlet and gold-accented black velvet, adorned with the fleur-de-lis iconography of the Adepta Sororitas. They were unfamiliar, and frustratingly comfortable. One of Celestine’s twin acolytes had delivered them on the eve of the procedure, giving Greyfax a look of cold, restrained fury when she initially declined in a manner evidently less reverent than the Gemini Superior was accustomed to. The battle sister had insisted, and Greyfax finally relented upon remembering she possessed no clothes beyond an armoured bodyglove that felt nearly all of its two centuries old, stasis notwithstanding.
If she had any doubts as to whom the robes belonged, they vanished the moment she put them on. They smelled like Celestine: not the usual mix of blood and powerpack exhaust, but instead the gentle fragrance of incense and fading rose petals.
It was a scent she had caught on more than one occasion in the webway.
She did not like to think of that journey. A disgraced former colleague of the Ordo Xenos had once told her the Aeldari psycho-architecture responded to your intentions; that if you were not careful, it would take you to an unconscious destination, rather than your intended one. This factoid had proclaimed itself loudly the first time Greyfax found herself perilously close to Celestine. It mocked her every time she distanced herself, only to invariably drift back to her side.
Bodily betrayals were nothing new; but Greyfax had always thought of her mind as an unassailable fortress. A foolish belief, perhaps, but until now, one anecdotally supported by fact. But even her remarkable will had been overrun by the mindshackle, to say nothing of the sucking void of the Cadian pylons.
And now? What would remain of her psykana in the wake of infection and Cawl’s tinkering?
Desperately, Greyfax reached out—for something, anything—only to be subjected to a blowback of nausea that halted her in her tracks. She dropped to the ground, head between her knees. Blood surged uneasily in her veins, as though through pathways no longer familiar. She stretched her jaw, and a series of sticky, clicking pops pinged in her skull like munitions cooking off inside a burnt-out Leman Russ. Her thoughts were no better, a swirling cesspool drawing her ever downward into darkness.
Her body and mind were rebelling at the loss of the fragile homeostasis they had achieved with the parasitic scarabs.
A parting gift from the mindshackle—and the late Inquisitor Helynna Valeria.
The moment she thought the name, Greyfax heard Valeria’s voice, clear as if the woman herself stood beside her.
You will drown.
She gritted her teeth, battened the hatches of her mind, and continued on.
It was a valiant, but pointless exercise.
Pain stalked Greyfax like a carnadon. It was a shadow looming over every malice-laden word spat at a lagging servitor, a tremor of agony radiating out from her jaw into the bones of her ear and skull. It would come after a twitch or a word or with no warning at all, sending her off-balance and shrinking in on herself. It steadily drained her will, until she could no more control the flow of her thoughts than cease to put a hand to the wall every few seconds to steady herself.
Still, she trudged on, right past the corridor that led to the billets.
She could not remain standing much longer, but nor could she abide the thought of returning to her tiny room to confront the proof of her failures. Thousands of communiques detailing the growing warp rift Cadia’s destruction had wrought. Mountains of dataslates and other detritus of her frantic attempts to get up to speed with a much-changed galaxy. Innumerable discarded draft reports, all bearing the same word, over and over again.
Celestine.
Whether by quill or auto-scribe, her hand, her mouth, her mind, once fixated, would cease to stray. The result was the same every time: another failed attempt imprinted with the Living Saint’s name ad infinitum, like some tacky shrineworld souvenir.
Cawl’s summons to the medicae, when it came, had been a welcome relief.
Limerance.
To name a thing was to have power over it, both here and in the Warp. And so, Greyfax named what was happening to her. But perhaps that was the folly of the inquisitor: to assume everything is controllable once broken down into explicable parts.
Some things could never be explained or controlled, regardless of how ruthlessly one interrogated their nature.
For how could it be that Celestine was the source of her every agony and yet the only mode of relief? The exception to every rule, and living proof such rules were inviolate, now more than ever?
There was no escape from this violent contradiction, but Greyfax sought to outrun it anyway.
Her flight was hindered by a glut of cleaning servitors: rudimentary things, slow to move. Changing her path only induced more nausea, so instead, with increasing violence, she began to shove them aside. Lashing out felt cathartic, though in truth it hurt her far worse than the mindless drones that had once been men. Dead, milky eyes stared back at her uncomprehendingly, and the sight made her empty stomach churn as wildly as her malfunctioning mind.
Greyfax wandered ever deeper into the ship, away from any chance of human contact. She found and narrowly managed to descend a steep set of grated stairs. Upon reaching the bottom, she found herself in the bowels of the cruiser. The running-lumens along the floor were dimmed, and condensation beaded the walls and leaked from the ceiling. She took a moment to catch her breath, then trudged onward into the gloom.
Alone at last, she began to hear things.
Far ahead, leading the way, footsteps belonging to no one.
From around the corner, faint, echoing laughter.
Just behind her, a voice whispering her name.
She did not turn. She did not react.
She recognized the voice. How could she not? It was one of the last she had heard before her centuries-long imprisonment. The familiar symphony of a voidship in realspace transit faded away, until only the voice remained. Now it turned sing-song, repeating from alternating directions a prophecy long ago unwillingly etched into Greyfax’s memory.
Xenos gods…
Prophets you call heretics…
An apostate lord…
And those final words, delivered like a killing blow—
Greyfax slammed her fist against the wall, and a dull, metallic thud obscured the sounds that had never really been there.
—you will drown.
The voice fell silent after that, as if satisfied with her loss of composure.
Typical Helynna. Always poking, always prodding, always thinking she knew you better than you knew yourself.
She caught herself.
Regardless of how the late inquisitor’s words haunted her, and how true they had become, they were just that. Greyfax had seen the bolt round pierce her chest. She doubted even the most advanced xenos tech could rebuild an atomized torso.
Valeria was dead, by her hand.
“I pulled the trigger myself,” she said aloud, her voice incongruously hollow and rasping in the damp air.
It was little comfort. The seeds of doubt Valeria had sown lingered on, multiplying like some cancerous infection from beyond the grave.
Greyfax was lost, in more ways than one. Rationality and pragmatism had led her straight into the clutches of Trazyn the Infinite, baited by the impossible lure of closing the Eye of Terror itself. How fanciful that hope seemed now, in the bale shadow of the galaxy-spanning Cicatrix Maledictum.
It was Trazyn’s odd, scratching facsimile of a chuckle Greyfax heard now, drifting in and out of vents and behind the ceiling panels.
All the rationalization in the galaxy had not stopped Helynna from betraying her, nor would it close the newly-dubbed Great Rift. Greyfax could no longer trust her own judgment. Her mind. Her will.
What else was there?
A fleeting memory of absolute warmth assailed her.
Her desire to trust Celestine owed nothing to logic. It was driven instead by a perverse attraction she could no less give into than explain. Greyfax feared she would bear this curse in perpetuity: the witch-hunter, trammeled by the witch’s snare. Even should they part, she was certain Celestine would haunt her as Helynna did now: that already she was doomed to dream of her face forever.
The walls darkened around her, from burnished steel to flawless onyx. Glints of green darted like silvery fish in their depths. Greyfax had to bodily resist the urge to brush invisible spider silk threads from her face, to itch where sudden grains of sands seemed to have entered her robes. The data feed of her psyocculum was a screed of objectivity superimposed on her waking nightmare: the last tether mooring her to reality.
Another memory frayed the cord: a blurred view of Helynna’s shackled hands, lightly touching her arm, feigning concern. A prick she dismissed as mere disgust before shoving her away. The warp-dreams she saw that night, dark and twisting.
Kindness was as effective a lure as logic, and a crueler killer.
Greyfax had returned from stasis to a galaxy beset on all sides, making the Living Saint’s existence all the more suspect. For how could something so pure and beautiful endure, undying, amidst such grim and pervading darkness? She could not let slip her vigilance, not for a single moment, but the maintenance of this bitter watch proved too great for a body and mind already beyond their limits.
The dissonance between duty and desire set her failing mind ablaze; the single, tenuous lifeline anchoring her to reality snapped taut. She grew unable to distinguish her own thoughts from the phantom sounds and sensations that had now grown to a distorted cacophony.
The jingle of a coffin-shaped amulet on a silver chain, a thousand pinpricks on her damp skin.
Helynna’s bitter, mocking laughter, and the scent of her hair.
Celestine calling her name, in the way only she could.
Greyfax was a descending flare in an ocean of noise, sinking and burning all the while.
Cawl—that arrogant, heretical bastard—had failed. That was the only explanation. Greyfax’s very marrow crawled with the crick-clack of jointed metal. Panic stole her breath. The edges of her vision faded to black as her heart hammered a ruffle of impending catastrophe.
In her narrowing field of view, a bulkhead loomed large, gratifyingly solid and real. She fell upon it, barely managing to grab hold. The sudden stability undid her, as the land heaves a sailor too long at sea. The darkening world spun around her, whorls of onyx and sable collapsing and colliding behind her now-closed eyes.
Her body screamed to be rid of the things, once and for all. She leaned forward and dry-heaved, breathing only in the fitful gasps allowed by her spasming diaphragm. After what seemed like an eternity, there was a curious sense of relaxation as the muscles of her throat finally permitted the non-existent contents of her stomach to empty onto the floor.
Nothing moved in the foamy pile before her; no bodily invaders skittered away in a desperate escape attempt.
Despair and nausea warred equally within her. She made herself retch again, harder this time, though there was even less to come up. Only acid and bile. Her body contorted violently, trying to finish the job Cawl had started; her throes were now so desperate that her psyocculum implant detached from her face, hitting the decking and rolling away out of sight.
Loosed from her moorings, Greyfax shrank into herself. She hunched, trembling, hyperventilating over her own sick. She clung to the studded bulkhead with whitened knuckles as if it were the only thing holding her up—which in truth, it was. Bare-faced and bleary-eyed, she reached one shaking hand up to wipe her mouth with the sleeve of her robe, then stopped.
It seemed wrong to sully it so.
Spittle flecked her stinging lips, yet her only coherent thought was of Celestine’s own wine-dark ones.
Would one kiss be enough to replace the ammonia tang in her mouth? Would the Living Saint taste of blood and ash, fire and brimstone, or like her robe, would she conjure incense, flowers, and fine things? Or might she taste of something unimaginable, warped and exquisite and all-consuming?
Would her kiss leave a stain on her soul, as indelibly as her lips?
Greyfax could almost sense the answer to these questions and more, like a half-remembered dream just before it fades, but she dared not reach out to snatch the answer. More things she was better off not knowing.
A heavy tread drew her gaze, though the effort cost her. The approaching figure filled the corridor, gleaming silver ensconced in a living darkness that pulsed in and out of existence.
Just another servitor, she told herself, willing her vision to conform.
The darkness expanded, became outstretched wings of gleaming blackstone. Dread lay in the pit of her stomach like an ancient wreck.
It had been human, once, but no more.
High-cheekbones and an imperious countenance were now reflected in a deathmask facsimile, the storm-grey eyes she had always found irritatingly piercing stoked to a sickly green tempest. Loose golden chains of overlapping scales framed the face, floating effortlessly as if underwater. Silvered necrodermis replaced the skin and organs of the chest, arrayed in a starburst ray perfectly mirroring the pattern of a boltround detonation. Scarabs cascaded down the arms like living coil bracelets, pooling in hands that remained eerily human. Above it all was set a jagged blackstone halo, wreathed in crackling emerald energy.
It was an abomination beyond imagining, yet instantly recognizable: the late Helynna Valeria, avenging angel of the Infinite Empire.
Her darkling wings expanded ever outwards, smothering Greyfax’s senses with the oppressive silence of a tomb. Valeria held out her hand, and the glittering scarabs writhed.
Tyrantslayer hung in its scabbard mere inches away, but Greyfax’s trembling hands refused to bring it to bear no less surely than they had against the necron overlord. All she could do was hold out a single, pitiful warding arm in a futile attempt to forestall her fate.
In a twinned voice that was both death-knell and saving grace, the angel spoke her name.
Greyfax fell to her knees, and surrendered to the embrace of darkness.