Chapter Text
A distress call from a resource rich planet in a remote star system, which was then quickly followed up by an urgent command of requisition issued by none other than Lord Inquisitor Xavier Calcazar, brought the might of the Imperial Guard down on this far off corner in the Koronus Expanse. What they found were the ransacked remains of a human settlement and its inhabitants massacred. Later it would be found that the Xenos had swept in without so much as a forewarning, were met with paper thin resistance and not before too long were crawling all over the planet’s surface. The ensuing battle was brutal, marked by the mountains of corpses, the blood soaking the ground and running in little rivers between trenches. A razor thin victory was won over the enemies of humanity. During the battle’s twilight, a warp rift had rippled over the field plunging the last waning hours into a maddened frenzy. It was over quickly just as the von Valancius Flagship arrived, with the Lord Captain personally coming down to assist in finalizing the victory. Official reports credited it to the Rogue Trader. Not as much was written about the warp disturbance since the Lord Inquisitor decreed the corresponding report as classified making it only accessible to his immediate entourage and the higher ranking Imperial Guard officers who were wise enough to remain tight lipped about the incident.
In one of the many trenches still not combed through for survivors laid Helena blinking into the low hanging sun. Blood stuck to her eyebrows, dried and coagulated on her temples and crusting over her eyelashes even. It was everywhere, under her nails having soaked through the gloves and in the grooves of her armour. She even wondered if the iron taste in her mouth was even that of her own blood. Pain radiated out from her ribs and hip, having certainly broken a few bones. Vicious teeth gnawed at the space behind her eyes from the sun’s light. Yet, she clutched tightly to her las rifle even despite her fingers having grown numb what felt like an eternity ago. If she were to be found and deemed worthy of recovery, she would not risk her Commissar’s wrath for having let go of her weapon.
The sounds of fighting had stopped, with only silence and the occasional dull shout in the distance indicating that there even was a search for survivors. Though, she knew she was the only one alive where she was. Somewhere off to her side laid the body of her regiment’s psyker, or what was left of him. No one had ever said his name, only ever referring to him as the “psyker” as if he wasn’t another soul duty bound to the Imperium but just a mere nuisance. The night before they were tossed in the trenches of their first battle together, she had sat with him by his lonely fire. After an hour of sitting in silence, she had dared to ask his name. Fredrik he was… had been called. In a flight of what she had only filed away as a flight of whimsy, he had talked about the visible star constellations and the ones seen from Holy Terra. And she had listened, hearing him talk she wondered how he had to have wished to have someone just sit there and listen without any sneering or ridicule.
Now… now… she could feel the presence of his mercy blade, caked in his blood and gore, in the little space that felt like a world apart between them. The merciless sun beat down on them, shining upon the betrayal she had been forced to commit. She didn’t know when exactly but he had lost control as something slipped into him, wormed its way under his skin. After that… it had all gone to the void. By the time she had dug her way through to him, he had already started to mutate rapidly. Skin turned translucent, eyes opening all over his body, and in this entire time he begged her… begged her to end him while he was still somewhat human. In between another voice screamed through. Otherworldly, echoing around in her skull as it first mocked and then raged at her. Its sheer malice had the hair on her neck stand on end as her skin crawled as everything in her screamed to run, to hide and to submit.
So she did the only thing she could have done: to honour Fredrik’s last wish. And she did, many times over until nothing remained of his face and throat and the voice was silenced at last. Chaos ceased when Fredrik finally remained dead. A scream of rage had heralded it, blasting her off the corpse until she crashed into a collapsed trench. Bones had cracked, her ribs not moving as they should as she drew in gulps of blood drenched air.
Despite chaos ceasing, the last remnants of the xenos forces rallied for one more desperate assault on their tired out forces. Throughout she had to grit her teeth to endure the blinding pain threatening to explode behind her eyelids. An eternity later, where at one point Helena thought she had died along the way and in hell where she was doomed to keep fighting and fighting…
Until no more xenos appeared before her and a deafening silence descended upon the field that was once a cacophony of roaring machines and the shrill of rifles and bolters firing. Exhausted she dropped, wounded and exhausted, onto the ground where the mud and blood drenched through the cracks of the chest plate and tears in the synskin underneath. If she was lucky, her Commissar would remember to look for his platoon…
Or what remained of it… Fredrik was dead. Ingrid had died within the first moments when the hatch of their deployment vehicle had opened. Shot straight through the brain. Two days ago she had found a severed arm with tattoos she knew had belonged to Laurence with too much blood for him to be alive still. The others… she did not know, nor did she want to remember the images of gore and intestines splattering the ground. In the silence, she heard no familiar voices. Her skin started to stretch taut as the layer of blood caked on her skin began to dry under the merciless sun’s glare. Even her eyelids had grown too heavy and she was done resisting. This death would certainly be a nicer death than the one her comrades had been afforded. Just falling asleep and to never wake up.
Imperator noster, qui sedet solio aureo.
No one would miss her. An amnesiac with no family who served the Astra Militarum for a decade now. Two campaigns she had survived now, her regiment’s sole survivor in the first and coming out barely unscathed after the second. This one had been her third and the one where her uncanny luck, as her Commissar would sneer, had finally run out. To where and to whom would she even be able to return to? If she survived, she’d be denied a promotion again. As she had been before. Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes, leaving a burning and stinging trail through the filth on her face. Not many were able to boast surviving beyond their first campaigns and here she was still clinging on by the skin of her teeth and sheer luck. A gift from the Emperor himself, and she was wallowing in self-pity.
Sanctificetur lux tuum,
After surviving the second campaign, she had wailed and babbled about wishing to die with the others. Her Commissar had beaten her until she had stopped. Then had paraded her in front of the freshly arrived recruits, forced her to prostrate herself before a shrine to sing hymns and litanies until her tongue and throat were too sore and raw to produce any sound. In the end, it had inspired the necessary fervour and zeal he had been looking for. Since then she had offered her devotion to the Emperor in silence only moving her lips to form the words.
Regnum tuum ubique esto –
“Over here! A survivor!”
The shout, closer than she had thought, tore Helena from her musings. Detached, she willed her muscles to turn her head into the direction of the encroaching noise. A moan of pain broke out of her at the movement. Eyes fluttering open, a face filled her vision. Unfocused and to blurry to make out any features. Squinting she tried to make out if it was her Commissar. The shoulder coverings were wrong… the width of the shoulders was broader… No this was another. At the realization the surge of strength left her and her head lolled to the sight where his boots were. Muddy and filthy… surely a guardsman was to be tasked later to shine them to perfection.
“You are one lucky soldier,” he spoke in a rough rumbling voice. “Or well… unlucky if you ask others. The Inquisition wants your testimony.” He scoffed even as ice cold dread burst in her chest leaving her gasping for air. “Get her to the chirurgeons and one of you let that Inquisition ass know we found his witness.”
She wanted to plead, to beg for a bolter through her head to put her out of the misery of the torment she was due to experience. But her tongue was leaden and her lips too cracked. All she let out was a groan. Hard hands, the armoured plates pressing on bruises and lacerations without care, grabbed her, hoisting her up on what felt like a stretcher. In the vertigo, the dizziness, she almost missed the light pinprick in her arm. A cool sensation spread from it. Belated she recognized the dulling sensation of a sedative wrangling her mind down. Before panic could truly set in, she slipped into a freefall into total darkness.
She fell and kept falling. Out of her skin and then crashed back inside as awareness recoiled back into her mind. Disoriented, the first thing she heard was the whirring of machinery to her side. Then came the harsh bright light beating through her closed eyelids, the rough texture of a blanket scratching her chin and lastly the pungent stench of disinfectants hanging in her nose. What was gone was the pervasive metallic taste and smell of blood. Gone from the tip of her tongue, replaced with a rough dryness where her tongue was glued tightly to the roof of her mouth. Eyelashes had crusted over making them stick together, making her force them apart as she cracked an eye open.
Turning her head to the side, she expected to see other guardsmen in their own medical cots beside her. Except… she was alone, the sight of a door close by greeted her. A small room with those lifeless grey plasteel walls she had always lived with. Her heart began to hammer against her ribs, as she realized… she was all alone in this room, hooked up to machines by multiple tubes and electrodes. The whirring grew louder until a shrill beeping pierced the previous stillness she had awoken to. She remembered, the comment made above her head, consigning her to a death worse –
“I see you are finally awake.”
A deep voice tore through the hazy panic like a sharp blade, was smooth, deep and deliberately slow. It stilled her completely, even her palpitating heart seized. Ice cold terror swept over her. Instincts, ingrained from a decades worth of training kicked in. She struck out to the side to grab at her weapon. Only to have her fingers jab through the various lines tearing at where they sat securely under her skin. Hissing through the piercing jabs, she blindly searched for the comforting weight of her rifle. But all she found was nothing. A tearing by her lower ribs had her collapse back onto her back, deflated and defeated. Black spots danced in her vision, and she had to focus on drawing in breath through her nose and expelling it.
An amused chuckle vibrated along the length of her spine, sending her teeth chattering. It scratched at the back of her brain, in the nook between the nape of her neck and where her skull began. She knew this voice, she had heard it before. Yet, it tugged at a memory long lost conjuring only the impression of a light in all consuming darkness. Slowly, feeling her heart stutter, she turned her head to the side. It couldn’t be –
“This is the second time you find yourself in my custody,” Xavier Calcazar drawled nonchalantly, almost bored even, as the frame of his power armour finally came into view. “It would warrant suspicion, would it not, guardsman?”
White teeth flashed as did his scarlet ocular augment.
Cold sweat broke out all over Helena’s skin. A barely concealed threat. Ten years ago she had awoken on a pile of corpses with him kneeling beside her holding an empty stim in his hands. Back then, he had only asked a few cursory questions before she was shipped off to her second campaign. The universe had an oddly twisted sense of humour when it came to her. What were the chances that within that time span, she’d cross paths with the Lord Inquisitor again? Let alone to find herself in the position of having to answer questions.
What irony would it be if he – who once saved her life on that warp breached vessel – were to condemn her to death today?
“Your Excellency,” she croaked out forcing her lips to part and her tongue to obey in a futile hope her terror would not shine through. “Any questions you have, I will answer them truthfully and to the fullest of my knowledge.”
A sole eyebrow had risen at her reply, but fell back into an inscrutable mask.
“I read your file. Exemplary conduct, your loyalty and faith in the Emperor is described as unwavering and unquestionable. You survived far longer than any ordinary guardsman would have the right to hope for,” he scoffed. “What interests me is that you served alongside Savant Militant Fredrik the longest.”
Before she could stop herself, Helena shook her head. “Guardsman Dervin –“
“There is nothing left of them to question in your stead,” he cut her off sharply his forehead knitting together in a displeased frown.
Dumbfounded, Helena deflated further into her stiff cot. Dervin had been assigned to the platoon before Fredrik had been. He had been the one who had served with Fredrik the longest. Void, both had served the guard longer than Helena had! And now both of them… were dead. She simply couldn’t believe it. Distantly she heard a choked sob break free just as hot tears pricked at the corner of her eyes.
“Your platoon was wiped out entirely. Except… for you and your Junior Commissar. He will join our little chat a bit later. But first, I need you to answer a few questions without him present.”
With no choice, Helena nodded not trusting herself to not say anything foolish or humiliating. At her assent the Lord Inquisitor pulled his chair closer to her bed.
“Let us begin then. For the record, you are Helena Scipio of the rank Guardsman. Enlisted on Dargonus fourteen terran years ago. Participated in the Inquity Reclamation, Defense of Undred and now the Rain Extermination Campaign. Survived all with no lasting injuries, correct?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“Quite the fortune you have had. One might consider it… unnatural.” The remark was light, but Helena felt the sharp sting of an accusation underneath it.
“The Emperor’s protection extends to all,” she blurted out even as her hands started to tremble. “I am simply grateful for every day I am able to devote my life to serving to the Golden Throne.”
Calcazar barely reacted except for a miniscule twitch in his brow.
“Commendable.” This single word held as much condemnation as derision in it. “After your recovery by the Holy Ordo Xenos from the voidship Steelcrest in the aftermath of a warp breach, you were reassigned to the Defense of Undred?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Ten Terran years ago,” she said fighting against the urge to swallow down the sudden knot in her throat. “I was reassigned and shipped off immediately to the Defense of Undred and then with its completion we were assigned to this post.”
“For the entirety of these years you served alongside the Savant Militant?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“When did you join this platoon?”
“They were already stationed on the battlefronts by Undred and I part of the reinforcements shortly after the first battle concluded for those they had lost.”
Calcazar hummed pensively. Whether in satisfaction or suspicion, Helena could not tell. The ensuing pause in his questioning dragged like a sharp nail along her nerves making her squirm underneath the scrutinizing gaze.
“Your previous platoon, the one before your reassignment, had no psyker, is that correct?”
“Yes, your Excellency.”
“And you have never worked with one before this assignment?”
Instinctively, Helena opened her mouth but snapped it shut. A trap had been laid, one she had almost stepped into. The wrong answer would land her in an unmarked ditch.
“I cannot recall having worked with other Psykers before, your Excellency. If I had, it was before my time in the Guard.”
A corner of the Inquisitor’s mouth twitched. Slowly he leaned forward, until his frame blocked the lumen’s light bathing her in his shadow.
“None of your memories ever returned, have they?”
His glare pinned her to the cot like an insect, trying to peel away at her for an answer she could not give. Why the interest? Why this picking at her lack of memories of a time before the Guard? Was it truly relevant anymore? Within two years’ time, she’d have spent as long in the Guard as the time lost to her. Yet…, at his probing look she tried to wrack her brain for whatever she might still somehow remember. What could the Lord Inquisitor feasibly wish to know? All her campaigns had dealt with the enemies of humanity… and she had always miraculously emerged victorious and alive. Suddenly her chest constricted under an iron vice grip. Had she caused the chaos on the battlefield? Had she… had her wishing for anything to end the bloodshed – her constant prayers – fallen onto the wrong ears? The air around her grew hotter, yet she could not seem to draw enough into her lungs.
Her head was suddenly whipped around as a loud slap rang out. With her right cheek stinging viciously, she could not help but yelp. Stunned she looked up to Calcazar who looked at his metal hand with a disgusted curl around his mouth.
“Get a hold of yourself, guardsman,” he hissed then turning his attention back to her. “Now answer my question.”
“Your Excellency,” she responded as her instincts from all the drills kicking back in, “regretfully, all my memories before turning sixteen are lost to me. If I had, then I submit my ignorance to the fullest judgement of the Inquisition and will accept any punishment deemed fit.”
His nose curled so briefly that Helena wondered if it had just been a trick of the light. No emotions were betrayed by his blank expression, only the glaring red of his augment kept her frozen solid in place.
“It is rather unusual that a guardsman of your rank holds a substantially thick folder with my organization.”
An insidious crawling feeling took root underneath her skin, urging her to grab all those tubes and electrodes and rip them off of her so she could run. But where to? With how weak her limbs and joints felt, she was certain she would not be able to get even an inch from her bed before the Inquisitor would grab her. The urge to flee, a notion she had thought excised from her very being, surged through her. Before she could reign her traitorous tongue in, it let slip out the question that had been sitting and prickling on it.
“Forgive me for asking, your Excellency, but why are my lost memories of interest to the point that the Lord Inquisitor is personally interrogating me?”
A minor twitched curled a corner of Calcazar’s mouth upwards. But his quiet chuckle exuded pure poison. Everything inside of her screamed to flee, to hide and to press her hands over her ears.
“An excellent question, guardsman.” His mouth twisted into a malicious smile revealing a row of white teeth. “Unfortunately for you, I am the one who is asking the questions here. Though,” he leaned forward still and Helena had to dig her broken nails into her palms to not shrink away from him. “If you prove yourself useful and compliant, I might consider giving you answers.”
“I beg forgiveness for my insolence, your Excellency,” Helena whispered feeling faint all of the sudden.
At that he just scoffed, settling back on his chair but keeping his eyes still on her. Even with her being as still as a statue, his eyes were like sticky fingers on her skin, noticing every tiny twitch her body betrayed her with. By the throne, she wanted to be out of here. To have this nightmare over with! She was under no illusion that she would not leave this room alive, but in a black body bag. No one came out of the Inquisition’s clutches alive. At least, no one of similar insignificance.
“What was your rapport with the Savant Militant?”
“We…,” Helena trailed off, unsure what answer he truly sought. “We were not close, your Excellency. He mostly kept to himself and isolated from the rest of us. If we interacted, it was in the trenches or during meals. Nothing substantial.”
Calcazar hummed. “That is not quite the truth, is it?”
Fear, ugly and sharp as ice shot through her heart. “Your Excellency –“
He lifted his hand silencing her plea on the spot. “I read reports that noted that you particularly had a friendlier association with him than anyone else. And you wish to tell me that your relation with him was not substantial?”
“I swear by the Golden Throne, I do not know much about Fredrik because he would never divulge anything about himself. All we ever talked about were the battles, the missions assigned to us… he is… he was the reason why my regiment survived for as long as we did.”
A small smirk played around his lips. “Yet here you are calling him by his first name.”
“He asked me to, Your Excellency.”
“That does not seem like a superficial relation to me.”
The tears she had held back finally spilled as the bare thread of whatever control she had exerted over herself snapped. Deep down she knew she was doomed. What did she stand to lose? Her life had been forfeit the moment she had awoken with the Lord Inquisitor in her room.
“Then I stand corrected, your Excellency. We did not talk about anything personal with me having no memories from before the Guard whereas he was not forthcoming about himself either. If it was possible, he would seek his solitude from the rest of us. Preferably away from all of us. That is all I can say. “
“He never mentioned about his fears, his thoughts, his dreams… his desires?”
“No…,” Helena trailed off trying to conceal a pathetic hiccup while she tried to remember any instance in the last decade where Fredrik might have had hinted at anything deeply personal.
Suddenly, cold metal fingers clamped around her chin digging painfully into her already bruised skin. Hissing at the sharp pain she tried to flinch away but the sheer force of the digits kept her rooted in place. Heart hammering against her ribs, she realised with horror that Calcazar had seemingly soundlessly leapt up and now loomed over her.
“Don’t lie to me,” he growled, digging the metal fingers deliberately into a forming bruise.
“I am not, your Excellency. I beg of you to believe me!”
A hiss pressed through his bared teeth. “What did he talk about if it wasn’t related to any of your missions?!”
Helena whimpered, trying to twist her head away, but Calcazar did not relent.
“The star constellations,” she finally blurted out. “He would only ever talk about them. The ones seen from Holy Terra and the other worlds we were stationed at.”
An irritated glint appeared in the Inquisitor’s eyes and his grip tightened. This time Helena could not help but let out a choked moan from the pain.
“What utter nonsense are you spouting?” he grit out. “I ask again: what else did he talk about?”
“Nothing else, I swear by the Throne and the Emperor himself,” Helena blurted out, forcing her jaw to move despite the unforgiving grip on it. “Please, your Excellency, I speak the truth!”
A corner of his lip twitched in a brief illusion of a snarl. Then with disgusted scoff, he tossed her away as if she were nothing but the dirt under his boots.
“I want to know what happened out there, guardsman. And be assured, I will know if you lie to me.”
Her pulse hammered in her temples now. Yet before she could reign herself in, the words tumbled out of her mouth.
“We were about to be overrun by the Xenos,” she had to draw in a deep breath through her nose trying to keep the tremour out of her voice. “Psyker Fredrik thinned their ranks from a distance while we killed the remnants that were still encroaching on our position. The platoon’s standard strategy.”
“Did it work?”
“It did,” Helena licked her lips before adding quietly, “For a time at least.” She squeezed her eyes shut trying to banish the blood drenched images. “I do not know how long we have been fighting by then. But…,” she trailed off.
Calcazar merely stared at her, a metal digit tapping loudly and impatiently against the metal of his armour. An invitation to keep going. One he would not extend to her again.
“He grabbed me,” she released a stuttering breath in the briefest flicker of hope it would save her forfeit life. “He was mutating before my eyes and rambled on about something squirming in his gut. Before I could do anything else, chaos erupted all around us.”
“Was that all he said?” Calcazar snapped. “Are you sure he said nothing else?”
Vehemently Helena shook her head. There had been nothing more the man she had known had said from that point onward. Behind her eyelids she saw the red haze settling over the battlefield, soaking the ground and the very air around them. The metallic tang of blood clung to her nose again and in the inside of her mouth. Blood had been everywhere! Even Fredrik’s eyes were filled with blood when he had grabbed at her to drag her down with him. A cold sheen settled all over the back of her neck and after a moment Helena realized she was trembling. The Lord Inquisitor kept staring down on her, waiting, an impatient twitch around his mouth the only indication his patience was slowly running thin with her.
“He spoke… but it wasn’t him that spoke.” Even her voice wavered, with how tight her throat had grown. “My soul would be tarnished if I repeated what was said.”
“How dutiful,” Calcazar snarled. “What did you see? What happened then?”
“He changed,” Helena squeaked, unable to tear her eyes away from Calcazar. “There… there was so much blood. It was everywhere. Xenos and soldiers were tearing each other apart limb by limb. It was carnage where no one distinguished between friend or foe.”
Calcazar did not say anything, letting her words hang in the now charged up air between them. A frown formed around his mouth and brows.
“How come you were unaffected?”
“I…,” Helena licked her sudden dry lips, “I sang to the Emperor. For guidance and protection. So I may see his light and overcome heresy in whatever form that would stand in my way.”
Hymns, ones that had come from a place buried deep inside of her, ones she had learnt from the past now lost to her, had spilled from her lips as she had stared down onto a foreign face, foreign eyes and hearing a foreign tongue coming from a once familiar face. A saving grace, one she swore she would thank the Emperor for until her dying breath. She was going to die. But not as a heretic. The smallest mercy a nobody like her would be afforded.
“Sing then.”
She blinked. The order had been clear, as loud as the crack of a whip in the quiet room.
“Your Excellency?”
“Sing what you sang then, guardsman.” Annoyance had crept into his tone. “Or do I have to force you?”
Helena shook her head quickly, opening her mouth in the hope she remembered what she had sang in the haze. A croak slipped out, all scratchy and hoarse. Yet, even to her own surprise, the words of the hymn came up easily, as if on instinct. Looking to the side, she tried to focus on anything else. Just not on the harsh glint of a rosette by her side. So she sang, sang until the hymn stopped and she had given the concluding salutations to the Emperor. Silence followed. Her heart fluttered erratically in her throat the longer it stretched. Hope and devastation warring with one another.
“Again.”
A cold command. One that had Helena snap her eyes back to the unmoving Inquisitor whose lips were still curled in visible disgust.
“Your Excellency?”
She hated how weak and how much her voice wavered betraying her fear.
“Again. Do I need to repeat myself again, guardsman?”
His eyebrow twitched. A small twitch that had her scramble for whatever dregs of composure and dignity still left to her. So she sang again. Once more he commanded her to repeat it, then he demanded she sing another. Gasping and gulping for air, she tried to scratch together another. There had been another she had sung on the battlefield.
“Again!”
“Please…,” she begged no longer caring how pathetic and undignified it was. “What more do I need to do to prove my resolve?!”
“Again.”
He was merciless, ordering her to repeat her singing until her voice cracked, the words so hoarse they were barely audible. Then a coughing fit had her writhe on the cot which had the iron taste of blood back in the back of her mouth. Body convulsing, she tried to retch, but her stomach tied itself into twists and knots and all that came was the burning sting of bile in her nose. Begging for relief was futile. Razors lined her throat, tearing and slicing when she tried to beg for an end.
“Why did the psyker not end his own life?! How did it all end?!”
The low growl had her flinch away, but the movement was caught immediately by the Inquisitor whose metal hand clamped down on her shoulder, digits digging into the soft bit underneath her clavicle. A pained shout was forced out of her, the bruising force pressing down on her ribcage. Before she could respond however, he began shaking her. Pain exploded behind her forehead, pulsing behind her eyes until black voids exploded in her vision until she slumped forward. Breaths had to be forced through her nose, even as it burned viciously from unspilled bile clinging to its inner linings. Squeezing her eyes shut as hard as she could, she tried to banish the taste, the images of the battle she did not wish to ever see again –
“Well, I am waiting for an answer.”
Fingers curled around her chin, jerking her face up until a gale of hot breath washed over her face. Still blind, Helena reached down to her hip where a flask would be – had been – holstered. Water…. She needed water.
“Look at me!”
The room tilted and whirled around her as she forced her eyes to open, only to find the Inquisitor’s face filling out her vision entirely.
“His fingers,” she gulped for air, her mouth too dry with her tongue having been stuck tightly to the roof of it. “They… mutated away.”
Hacking coughs took over. A disgusted snarl was all she heard, before the grip on her chin vanished. Only to plunge into her hair, yanking it until it pulled painfully at her scalp and she was forced to hang over the edge of her cot.
“If you need to retch, do it with your head bowed to your betters,” he growled, shaking her as he did. “What happened next?”
“He begged me to end his life for he no longer could himself,” she whimpered, trying to swallow down the growing squirming of her gut and the burning in the back of her throat. “I… he no longer looked human.”
“And you did so?”
“Yes,” her voice cracked some more, but she forced the last part out even as the brief flash of sickly yellowed eyes appeared behind her eyelids as she blinked. “I stabbed him with my knife. Many… and many times over.”
“He did not die immediately?”
Helena shook her head, unable to speak, unable to think, only the images of the grotesque form drenched in blood before her as the voice of the man she had known for years begged her for relief from a mouth that was no longer his own.
“And where was your Junior Commissar in all of this?”
At that Helena felt herself grow impossibly still despite the nausea and the incessant pounding between her temples. Without thinking, her eyes flicked over from her bowed position to the door just in case. No one but her and the Inquisitor occupied the room, yet an icy feeling prickled at the back of her neck. The officer had vanished as soon as the first few shots had whizzed too close for comfort by his head. He had always possessed a cowardly streak, letting them fight out the worst of it. Only then he’d reemerge once victory was certain and he needed to be seen as an unfaltering beacon of Imperial glory in the concluding blaze of battle. It was known in her platoon. Yet, if a whisper of such sentiment were to be uttered, they would have all faced charges of insubordination. Consequences she was certain would come to her if she spoke once the Lord Inquisitor was done with her.
She had assumed the duties of her Commissar in his absence when she had been left with no other choice.
A cool metal rim was pressed hard against her lips. She flinched away, jerking in the Inquisitor’s grip tearing at the roots of her hair. A few strands were certainly torn out, but his grip remained strong. Much to her bewilderment, she watched, as the man lifted an open flask to her slightly parted lips.
“Drink, girl.”
Before she could respond, too stunned by this gift, he tilted the flask letting cool water rush into her mouth. Soothing her raw throat, she greedily gulped down what was offered. It was yanked away far too soon. A few gulps had been all he had granted her. Then she was tossed back onto her back so she had to face him again.
“I… I did not see him,” she said reluctantly, hoping it was enough for it was all the truth she could offer.
Instead, his left eye narrowed. “A dangerous insinuation to make, guardsman.”
“I wouldn’t dare!” Helena vehemently shook her head as much as his grip on her scalp allowed her to. “He was around certainly, just because I did not –“
“Do not feed me this grox shit,” the Inquisitor growled into her panicked babbling, tilting her face until her neck strained at the front and a piercing pain erupted at the back of her neck. “Where was he?”
A thumb settled by the shell of her left ear pressing into the small metal augments there. Involuntarily she let out a hiss of pain, feeling the metal dig further into where it had been anchored into the bone.
“I… I do not know.” Tears clung to the corners of her eyes feeling some strands of her hair slowly being torn out by their roots. “He wasn’t there when the Psyker mutated.”
The Inquisitor let out a dry, almost amused, huff.
“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” he drawled, easing up on his grip but not letting go off her yet. “Your account correlates with the other witness statements.”
Heat flared up in her cheeks and neck at the mockery. However, there was no relief the statement brought. The foul squirm of her gut grew more the longer he scrutinized her. Unease crawled under her skin the longer the silence stretched. A dizzying realization hit her as she finally dared to look into his eye. One that felt familiar, a brief flicker of something she thought she recognized. He was not done with her… not just yet.
“Your Excellency has more questions for me?” she dared ask with a no longer cracking voice.
A corner of his mouth twitched before it twisted into a satisfied smirk. “Well observed. There is a lot more I want to know, guardsman.”
Helena swallowed feeling everything inside of her sink.
“I am at your full disposal, your Excellency.”