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The human mind is a fascinating thing. Especially the mind of a psyker.
Granted, Lumen has not always had this... proclivity for setting things on fire by staring at them. Not since childhood anyway. Throne, no; she's nothing like the poor little souls on the Black Ships.
Something shifted in her, something sharp and agonizing like exposed bone in a wound, when she was well into her adulthood (though a lady never tells her age). That odd, ever-hungry, ever-thrashing part of her likely never would have woken up at all, if her old smuggler crew hadn't messed with a xenos artefact that one time.
But psyker or not, she has always been quite brilliant, if she says so herself. Her mind has held fast through whatever the void decided to throw at her.
She’s always been able to think on her feet. She’s always had quick retort on her tongue, and a Plan B, Plan C, Plan D ceaselessly weaving itself at the back of her mind — just in case her bullets or her brand-new witchcraft ever failed her. And she has survived it all. Her men's betrayal. The vice grip of the Inquisition agents they'd ratted her out to. The searing whirlwind of lashings, mental and physical, before her sanctioning. The viper's den she was tossed in, when the blood samples the Inquisition had collected from her revealed she was a long-lost von Valancius. Heiress to a dynasty of cosmic proportions; bearer of a Warrant that, by will of the Emperor Himself, entrusted her with the fate of entire planets.
She’ll be the first to admit that it’s taken quite a bit of mental fortitude — deciding how to run colonies inhabited by billions of souls. She needs even more plans now — Plan E, Plan F, Plan G — because at a moment’s notice, at a drop of an Imperial officer’s hat, she might be asked to decide which lives to spare and which to sacrifice for the supposed greater good. And she’ll be expected to smile all the while. To remain ever graceful, ever charming, gliding among her adoring subjects with a gentle rustle of the finest shimmering, gilded fabric. Back straight as a rod. Gaze unflinching. Fingers — cast in metal over the upper phalanx, radiant with gilding — resting in an elegant half-gesture over the steel-boned slope of her frock.
Abelard's etiquette lessons did not go to waste. She absorbed them all.
And in the process, she only allowed herself to be... a little distracted — oh, merely a couple of times — by how adorable he looked when he was reciting all those rules. Which, of course, he had to be informed of, in her sweetest, most playful tone. If there is one thing she cannot resist (aside from tiny pastries), it's being playful with her darling, deliciously prim Seneschal.
Still. The little giggle at the soft bloom of pink on his cheeks and throat was but a momentary diversion. Her mind remained hard at work all the while. Yes, even when she was making a flower arrangement in her new quarters and tapped a rose bud softly against Abelard's nose. She never stopped going over what he told her, in between the (rather weak) protestations of "Lord Captain!". She never stopped memorizing what a perfect Rogue Trader should be like.
Once a pallid, grubby child from a hive world's lowest sunless pits, she may not have enjoyed a noble upbringing, not like the other Cold Trade princess they have on board, the ever-delightful Jae Heydari — but she’s rectified that quickly. Her mind was her buoy in the murky waters of intergalactic politics and righteous Imperial service; and she emerged from every whirlpool on her path. Untouched — on the surface at least — by the muck at the whirlpool's bottom. Radiant, regal, a living statuette of gold.
She kept her wits about her even when the consequences of all her past choices loomed large over her — quite literally.
Oh, how her heart hammered for a moment, retreating into her ribcage's burrow like some trembling, twitchy thing that would scurry about among the refuse heaps on her childhood streets — when the first dance at her Magnae Accessio came to an end, and she had to switch partners.
Her first chosen companion was, of course, Abelard. She'd had him stand beside her at the preceding ceremony, and summoned him once more when the grand ball began. She'd researched the colors of House Werserian (Cassia helped; Lumen had never seen her so giddy) and, despite her usual preference for reds and golds, commissioned a dress in cooler shades. To match the liveries of the "upstart lowborns". Thus announcing, to anyone and everyone who paid attention to such things, that Abelard's kin — not quite former street rats like her, but still not good enough for the Mundus Valancius elite — had her favor. What are you going to do about it, Master Sauerback?
She did not get a good look at Abelard's face during her coronation, as she was too busy waving at the ecstatic masses and smiling the most impeccably measured smile in response to all the outraged glares from the "proper" aristocratic families. But she knew how much it meant to him. To be acknowledged for his service. To be brought forth before the whole planet, entrusted to guard her — not just amid roaring fires and screeching bullets and gurgling fountains of blood, but at a time of (relatively) peaceful celebration.
When she finally turned to meet his gaze, it was at the ball. As the master of ceremonies announced that the illustrious Lady Von Valancius was to lead the first dance, she chose her Seneschal again. With no hesitation, no pause in her ever-racing mind.
He looked more... lost than she had ever seen him, out of his armor, drowning in the honeyed glow of lumens — her little namesakes — that reflected off the polished marble floors. But one little shake of his head at her softly purred compliments ("Why, darling Seneschal, here I thought you couldn't get more handsome and distinguished!"), and he was back to his usual composed self. Hand on the small of her back. Feet moving to the rhythm of the music with an officer's resolve. Eyes tactfully averted from the rise and fall of Lumen's most flatteringly accentuated bosom.
This, too, was his duty, and when called to it, he did not fail to... perform. Yes, Lumen did make multiple jokes about that — until she didn't.
She sighs to herself, recollecting how her voice trailed off, and her very surroundings stood still, when she caught a glimpse of something most curious in her Seneschal's face. His features had softened — almost to the point of smiling.
"I do want you to enjoy yourself, Abelard," she said — chirped — to him. Meaning every word.
But before he could reply, the melody ended, and in the lull between the dances, another guest swooped in. A colossal shadow of flesh and metal, moving with the noiseless grace of a prowling predator. The consequences looming large indeed.
Lord Inquisitor Xavier Calcazar had arrived earlier than Lumen could have deduced from Heinrix's cryptic warnings. She'd imagined she'd find him lurking in her study once the festivities were over. Maybe even sitting at her desk like it was his. But there he was. Interrogating her about her travels through the Expanse, her so-called heretical inclinations — during a dance.
As he spoke, in an even, courteous voice that hid as many coiling wires as his augmented arm — he never stopped guiding her motions with his metal grip, twirling her in time with the music with even more precision than Abelard had... Until she stopped feeling like a person, and began to picture herself as a regicide piece that he was directing across the board. All part of an icy calculated strategy her mind had to strain to keep pace with.
But she did. Even as, internally, she was a hair's breadth from panicking, from dissolving into a screeching warpstorm of memories from her sanctioning — she did. She responded to all his questions with a cool politeness to match his own.
She survived her second brush with the Inquisition.
And even if the Lord Inquisitor had rattled her, that could be easily masked by accepting Calligos Winterscale's late-night challenge to a friendly drinking contest. Which she, incidentally, won.
All part of the plan.
Her mind has served her well. As a street urchin, a smuggler, an awakened psyker, a Rogue Trader. And now, too, it is doing its best, turning its finest cogs, to keep her shielded; keep her safe.
Obviously, she is still in Commorragh, probably stretched out, till her ligaments are about to snap, on that many-armed xenos' lab table, a cold sticky pool of her own blood clinging to her bare back and quickly drying into a slimy crust.
Soon, the creature will be back again, every hand bristling with saws, pincers, little curving knives.
Her skin will be grated into red-soaked sawdust and regrown again.
Her bones will be broken and healed, broken and healed, crackling like driftwood under xenos fingertips.
Her stomach will be carved into an opening and closing flap, like it's a chest of drawers with a pulsing mass of organs inside, for the creature to rummage in as if it had lost a sock (see, even now, her mind supplants her with humor; to keep her alive; to keep her defiant).
Her hair — her glossy strands of Aquila gold, her pride and joy (and, if combed sufficiently tall, an excellent place to hide a small gun) — will be torn out in soggy clumps, not as much for any specific experiments as for humiliation.
And so it shall continue, for infinity.
She will, of course, keep searching for ways to escape; to assemble blood-splattered puzzle pieces into a Plan H, Plan I, Plan J, all the way to Plan X, Y, Z. Her mind will strain as much, burn as much, as her mutilated limbs.
But that is yet to come. For now, for just a few hours of indulgence, her hardworking brain has decided to grant her a little reprieve. It has conjured an illusion for her; a haven to gather her strength in, before her torment begins anew.
In her mind, she is already back home — in realspace. She has even given herself false memories: a whole grand adventure; a chase after a dancing, leering shade in a theater mask. An explosion, a tumble through the rippling, surreal maze of the Webway... And a reunion with her subjects on Janus, where the xenos dimensional gate is still standing.
Quite a backstory for the theater of her mind to play out!
Right now, the scene is set on one of the white Janusian beaches. She imagines herself laying back on the glinting boundary between the dry sand and the lapping waves, underneath the gently swaying jungle trees. Relaxed and carefree. Idly leafing through her old memories like they were pages of a book.
The review she'd leave on the little volume would be mostly mixed — but the chapters with Abelard in them are her favorites... Could use a few more paragraphs about his scars, though. Maybe also a mention of how Lumen's heart would flutter whenever he’d speak of his family, with such affection and pride; such warmth — quite rare to see in him, and all the more precious for it. Or would that be too serious, too private for a light beach read?
Suddenly embarrassed, Lumen forcibly shifts her focus back to the pict-perfect landscape in her vision.
She is wearing nothing but a nightgown, her mind tells her, and the warm waves are washing over her body, pushing gently against her, making her slide to and fro in the shallows. A drowsy, serene bit of flotsam basking in the light of a sun that's properly affixed to a completely normal, soothingly (deceptively) blue sky.
There's a figure perched on a nearby rock. Wiry, long-limbed, with a sharp pale face and flowing crimson hair.
Oh, it’s *her*, is it?
To be quite honest, Lumen would rather not think of Yrliet right now: the pain from Drukhari torture is bad enough without trying to disentangle the spool of barbed wire that the xenos has spun in Lumen's mind.
Lumen von Valancius does not suffer traitors. But Yrliet is nothing like the men who sold her out. Lumen’s heart (for when she ascended on her throne, she decided she should still have one, under all the gilding) breaks for her friend's pain and guilt. But are they truly friends... Were they ever?
So yes. Yrliet's presence in Lumen’s daydreams rather disrupts her supposed bliss... Maybe her mind did not conjure her up; maybe the crafty xenos slipped in of her own accord. She knows how to do that.
She... She seems to be talking to her.
"Elantach, listen to me! This is no illusion! We did escape Commorragh, and we are now on Lilaethan. You must come to your senses!"
Lumen fixes her inner gaze upon Yrliet. Slowly, blearily, with a vague sensation that they have had this conversation before.
Interesting. "Come to her senses"? So, delve deeper into the illusion? Lose herself in it entirely? Tempting, but she cannot afford to do that. She has escape plans to work on.
She tells Yrliet as much.
"Oh, come now! You know it's just my own mind taking a little rest, before I blink and we are back in Commorragh again!"
Yrliet's response is a long, frustrated intake of air. Why exactly is she here? What is her goal? She hates Drukhari machinations, doesn't she? So why would she push so hard against Lumen waking up?
"There she is, sir! The retinue is mostly... recovering at the governor's palace, but Her Ladyship has, uh, wandered off."
"Watch your tongue! The Lord Captain would not just wander off! I am certain she had a perfectly good reason!"
Yrliet winces at the crackle of undergrowth under clumsy mon-keigh feet. Lumen, though, grins from ear to ear.
She knows that voice.
And naturally, her illusion of being home would not be complete without it. Hearing it again *is* being home.
"The reason is, elantach's mind is fractured," Yrliet says bluntly.
Her gaze is as burning, as intense, as unshakable as the laser point of her sniper rifle. It pierces, unblinking, through the two humans that have just stepped onto the beach out of the waist-high ferns — a panting, frantically apologetic enforcer, and Abelard, whose hand flies to his chainsword's hilt the instant he locks eyes with Yrliet.
"Explain," he barks.
His tone is almost as firm as Lumen remembers it... But something in the illusion seems to have gone wrong. Abelard's voice sounds thinner... Shakier somehow. Like he's a pale imitation of her Seneschal, drawn in an unsteady hand.
Lumen lifts herself up on her elbows, frowning. Abelard looks just as... off as he sounds. His unaugmented eye is sunken, rimmed with red, and the weathered, beautifully scarred skin seems to hang looser off his face, as if he had lost weight.
Even his trusty coat — whose warm, comforting weight Lumen felt on her bare shoulders on more than one occasion — is notably worse for wear. Like he'd neglected to wash it.
He has, however, kept the little lily brooch she made for him, in another life, far, far away from Commorragh... When her biggest concern was how to best stun her admirers and make her enemies squirm at the Magnae Accessio.
When doing research for an ecosystem revival project on Janus — seated in front of a cogitator in a frilly layered gown, surrounded by plush cushions, because a lady remains ladylike even when browsing old records with a tech priest’s help — Lumen found a most gorgeous pict of a local flower. The priest duly informed her that the entire species had been driven to extinction decades ago by farmland expansion. Enamored with the delicate flow of its silhouette, she reached out to the best jeweler that Jae's galaxy-spanning network of contacts could provide, and he brought the lost lily back to eternal life, crafting a pair of bespoke jewelry pieces. For her and her Seneschal to wear at her coronation… As another way for them to match: her in his house's colors, him with her lily. And another way to remind the highborn that this filthy commoner was her right hand.
She still remembers the look he gave her when she first presented him with the brooch. A gasp of air escaped his lungs, like she'd speared him straight through his heart; and there was... a glimmer of recognition in his eye. She was quick to realize that an old echo from his past was coming back to haunt him. For a moment, her pict-perfect display of queenly grace nearly dissolved into messy blotches, into leaking, muddled colors of panic, straight from under Cassia's brush. She wondered if she'd committed a faux pas, if she'd inadvertently reminded him of something best left buried.
But when he spoke to her, his voice — for the fleeting few seconds before he collected himself — was trembling with quiet awe.
"Truly," he said breathlessly, "The Emperor works in mysterious ways... Thank you, Lord Captain. I serve at your pleasure."
She was so struck by his tone, she completely forgot to make a quip about there being all kinds of pleasure he was surely not too old for... And he has never parted with the lily brooch since.
Even now, in her vision of him on the beach, it glimmers ruby and gold against the dark grime on his coat. While his sword hand tightens, white-knuckled, around his weapon, his other hand keeps travelling to the metal lily. Feeling its contours. Adjusting it. Again and again and again. The motion is so persistent, so repetitive, that it has all but turned into a nervous tic.
In fact, as she squints and cranes her neck forward, Lumen realizes that fiddling with the brooch has dug raw, reddish grooves into Abelard's fingertips.
Her blood runs cold — in a way that has nothing to do with the sea water splashing around her, or the breeze on her skin.
Why would she imagine this little detail? Or the deep, bruised half-moon under his eye? The new lines of exhaustion on his forehead and around his mouth? Why would her own mind be so... uncharitable to Abelard? To the man whose face she summoned from the heaving marshes of delirium, to guide her, to ground her, when she was stumbling through the Commorragh streets, fresh from the corpse pile?
Meanwhile, the little illusory scene continues. Yrliet has deigned to give Abelard an explanation.
"Your Lord Captain believes that we are still trapped. That our return to Lilaethan — to Janus —" Yrliet chokes out the planet's human name like a cat wheezing on a ball of fur. "... is just a pretty story her own brain is telling her, as a defense mechanism against my dark cousins' torture."
Distracted from her worries for... definitely-not-real Abelard, Lumen has to roll her eyes at this. What a droll little debate to have within her mind!
"Well, what else could it be?" she tells Yrliet. "If we were not all inside my head, why would Abelard just... appear so soon after I started thinking of him?"
Yrliet snaps her eyes to Lumen, her face unreadable.
"That is not sound logic, elantach. You think of him all the time, regardless of where your body resides."
Now, at this point Yrliet's impassive porcelain mask cracks. She looks utterly distraught. Disgusted even.
"Your mind was... swarming with images of him when I taught you how to explore your thoughts, long before Commorragh. Some of those images, I would rather not dwell on. Ever again."
Lumen bites her lip.
Well, in her defense, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation behind all the silvery apparitions of Abelard in various states of undress, which stepped out of the fog as she and Yrliet chased down her hopes and fears during that Eldar mind ritual. They were merely the result of her trying to figure out how far down his scars extended! And whether his body hair had gone grey too! Surely, that is not such an outlandish thing to wonder about?
The current Abelard apparition — less see-through, more clothed, feet planted firmly into the imaginary white sand — draws himself up to his full height. His fingers clasp the lily brooch so tightly that the sharper parts of the flower break skin, drawing blood.
"Did you do this to her, xenos?" he demands. "Did you... twist the Lord Captain's mind?"
Yrliet's face freezes again, but her eyes cloud over with an unspoken sadness.
"The answer to that is… complicated, mon-keigh," she says quietly. "I trust elantach to tell it all, however she sees fit. When she is ready. For now, you must tend to her. Maybe one of her own kind will reach her in a way a child of Asuryan could not."
With that, she leaps gracefully from the rock onto the sand and takes off, up the overgrown path that, in realspace, would have led back to the palace. The enforcer soon scrambles off after her. Maybe he's decided that the xenos is being particularly suspicious right now, and needs to be tailed — or maybe he is not too keen of lingering under Abelard's glare. Either explanation could work in the theater of Lumen's mind.
And thus, the Rogue Trader and her Seneschal are left on their own. Like during their dance, the rest of the world falls back, stilling. Except this time, none of this is real. It can't be.
Yet, the instant both Yrliet and the enforcer vanish among the trees, Abelard drops heavily to his knees... As if he were a hollow, deceptively solid statue of a steadfast warrior, held together only flimsy, rotting scaffolding — which has finally fallen apart. Lumen would never imagine him like this! Except... Except in her worst nightmares. Is that it? Is her perfect little dream world twisting into something darker? Have the bastards shoved another brain-eating maggot up her nose?!
Like some pathetic, flopping beached sea animal, she claws uselessly at the wet sand. Struggling desperately to reshape her dream back into a sunny idyll. Wanting, above all else, to remain in control. For just a little longer. Before she wakes up and is a specimen again.
"Lord Captain," Abelard says to her hoarsely. His fingers, too, have sunk into the sand. Grasping for purchase, but finding only clumps of tiny grains.
"You were gone for so long, I — the people almost lost hope. Please, come back to — with me."
His eye lingers on her brine-soaked form; not lustfully, like she'd expect from one of her fantasies — but with concern. Well. She supposes that can be a fantasy as well. A longing for comfort. How many times, when the barbed xenos whips fell upon her, did she imagine Abelard with his trusty medkit, tending to her wounds?
"You will catch a cold," he blurts out.
After he stuns himself into silence, she laughs. And laughs and laughs. Until her chest begins to ache.
"Of course you'd say that, you darling man," she says... And the scaffolding that was supporting her own statuette, all curves and glitter and gold, rots away into nothing as well.
"I miss you..."
With a poorly stifled sob — no, no, no; this was meant to be a kind dream, an escape! — Lumen reaches up to wrap her... so realistically damp, goosebump-covered arms around Abelard.
"I miss... glancing back and finding you there. I miss your voice. Your shadow overlaying mine. Even the sound of your gun at my flank..."
Emperor's balls, that came off dubious. But she has no cheeky jokes left in her.
"I don't know how long I have been here," she mumbles, pressing herself against him, with only a layer of waterlogged linen between his body and her own... Suddenly shivering. Suddenly so, so utterly small.
"Sometimes I'm afraid that time has unraveled... Broken… Like everything else in the warp... And that back in the realspace, it's been centuries... And you are long dead..."
She finds the sleeves of his coat, hanging empty off his shoulders, and tugs them around herself. Diving into the familiar, slightly musty warmth. At least... At least the dream world has gifted her a new shelter. A new place to be at home in, for the time being.
"I hope you lived a good life, my darling Seneschal," she tells the apparition that cannot hear her. She knows it's not really him, she does, she does, but the words keep spilling out.
"I hope you raised your great grandchildren, and their children, to do your house proud. I hope you found another Rogue Trader that finished what I — we — started. I hope... Some day, some place, out there... where I might never return... You remembered me, and thought of me fondly."
"I thought of you every waking moment," a voice whispers into her hair. Does it look like her old golden tresses in this dream space, she wonders, or like the mangy mess her captors turned it into? She does not know; she never looked at her face in the water... But regardless, there are fingers weaving through it now. And their tender, reverent touch feels so terribly real that she begins to sob faintly again.
"I neglected my other duties to give more and more orders to the astropaths... I had them scry every system thrice over, I forbade them to rest until they found any trace of you... I was ready to pitch a tent in the Chapel and keep watch… Terrified that I might miss urgent news of you if I stepped away, if I closed my eyes even for a moment... I — "
Abelard cuts himself short. Lumen feels him shudder. That could be the water she's splashed all over him... Or...
"Lord Captain, did you believe a single word I just said?"
She peeks out from the little nest she's made in his coat.
"It's very... gratifying to imagine that you cared for me that much," she admits, looking up at him. "To pretend that you found me. Even if I have to face reality..."
"You do, Lord Captain," he says, with a sudden surge of fortitude in his voice. An emphasis on every word, like a strike of a blade.
And as the final strike, he kisses her.
In all her fantasies, she has always been the one to kiss him first. To leap over the boundaries of propriety with her usual elegant mischief; to turn their dancing into something more.
But here, now... His tongue is against hers; his hands are clawing the fabric of his own coat, reaching for her, clutching her tight. Even as she feels she might melt. Slip through his fingers in a trickle of gold-flaked water.
Never, not in her wildest dreams, has she imagined him drinking of her with such unabashed thirst — what feels like months and months of it, all pent up under his armor.
Which must mean...
"Abelard," she chokes, breaking contact with one final, tiny hurried bite at his lower lip. "You are here... You are really here! We... We made it out of Commorragh! It was not a dream!"
He nods, giddy and out of breath, almost all heavy markings of his restless vigil erased from his features. He even has the strength to get up from his knees while still holding on to Lumen. Something tells her he is intending to carry her like this all the way back to the palace.
But after he takes the first few steps, he stumbles to a halt. His face falls.
"Forgive me, Lord Captain. I acted inappropriately. Exceedingly so. If you dole out punishment for my transgressions, I shall accept it."
She clicks her tongue, clinging on to him — refusing to ever be let down.
"Whatever happened to serving at my pleasure?"
He turns an absolutely impossible shade of magenta... Then, relaxes, exhales — and laughs. A breathy, almost inaudible sound that makes her heart race.
"I missed you as well."
"First Theodora, now me," Lumen muses with a highly affected, faux philosophical tone.
Now, she can breathe again. Can banter again.
"Do you get hopelessly infatuated with every Rogue Trader you serve?"
No. That might have been too far. That will not do in the real world.
"Oh! I apologize, darling. I overstepped."
Abelard tilts his head to study her face. He does not appear angry — but his jaw tightens ever so slightly.
"Let me put it this way, Lord Captain... And I trust this will stay between us. In my past, I've had a tendency to get... infatuated with people I'd later lose. I intend to end that pattern."
Neither of them speaks up again until they reach the palace. But Lumen is content to make the journey in silence, resting her head against Abelard's chest.
He has given her much to mull over, in this brilliant mind of hers.