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The warp corruption raced over the falling hulk like an avalanche. He could hear the metal yielding, howling like something in lethal pain. He could see the walls shifting, bubbling as though molten, extruding faces, teeth, eyes at random that resorbed and reappeared at random. He could smell the sour reek of the unholy, even through his helmet. The wards that Khauri had inscribed on the machines of the engine, on the floor, sizzled and glowed. The ward the Librarian had drawn on Blood Eye’s own helmet still had the coppery salt tang of his blood, hot in he who had been known as Blood Eye's olfactory array.
He was ready for this to be over. Had been ready for decades, since his exile had been pronounced. The weight of shame, the weight of the isolation, was claustrophobic. He found himself longing for the frozen time in stasis, unable to think or feel, above the slow monitoring of the other capsules.
And finally he could let that weight go, as well, and just become an unbecoming, a mote floating in the great ocean, without thought, without emotion, just existing as one with the great togetherness, finally belonging, again.
It did not matter that he would have to eradicate his entire self to earn that. It was a price he had been trying to pay for decades.
And now he had it.
The metal around him bubbled into vile pustules. The ship was getting closer to its goal, the engines driving it in, crushing the pinnacle and the horrors within.
He remembered the Blind One, looking at him for a moment, before he left–that hard look of someone weighing another’s choice, and then the harder realization that no fault could be found in it. They had been together for so long and both–all of them–had made the conscious decision to refuse to care about each other. Just do the job until you were picked off. The first to go felt like a mercy, like one being chosen, removed from a factorium of misery and death. And Blood Eye had survived too long. He had started to feel…unchosen. Unworthy.
Until now.
The look in the Blind One’s eyes was one of envy. A heatless envy, of one who had found his moment in time and was claiming it, from one still waiting, fighting for patience.
And now it was happening and he felt…more at peace than he could remember ever being in his life. Not just an end to his exile but an end to his exile doing something that would turn the tide of battle. Save, perhaps, even, his former brothers. He would be unknown to them, unremembered, unmourned, but still. It was more than he had dared to hope for.
A bright, actinic flare, and the sound was a maelstrom of unholy shrieks and protesting metal, his lungs full of the scent of the engines overheating, turning white hot beside him, as he held the course on, refusing to let the machinations from the warp divert course. He had a singular purpose now, everything in his mind honed as clean as the relic weapons of their chapter.
He waited, for the engines to blow, for the collision of the Materium and Immaterium to explode like matter and antimatter. Time seemed to crawl, as he anticipated, leaned toward it.
It did not come.
Blood Eye could see abominations swirling around him, purpleyellow, the color of bruises, of wrongness, but the wards of the Librarian held.
He could feel the heat, almost furnace hot, against his side and still, the wards held.
He could see, and feel, the metal, the systems, crashing around him. He could see the noosphere contract, accordion folded and crushed. And the wards held.
And then a horrible silence fell, slowly at first like a heavy curtain, as the overheated metal ticked as it cooled, the shrieking of the warp silenced. And the wards held.
He almost allowed himself the indulgence of a curse. Aloud. He looked around, confused, frustrated, cheated. He should not be alive. He should not. He had earned his death, many times over. He had suffered enough. Surely he had expiated his sins, at least that much.
His connection to the engines told him they had burned out, slagging their generators, and that the systems on the ship were dead. Gone. Nothing spoke to him. It was an overwhelming, claustrophobic silence. He could feel the weight of the crumpled ship around him like a tangible thing, the air thick with it.
Maybe, he thought, knowing it wasn’t right but he had to do something, try something, this was the Great Ocean, but he was still too much in his body to let go. The Exile closed his eyes, letting his connection to the noosphere flare out one last time, searching, and finding nothing. He exhaled, trying to will himself free of his body.
But some things could not be forced, and he knew this, but he could not stop himself from trying, anyway, reaching for the peace and oblivion of the Great Ocean, only to have it recede before him like an ebb tide. Folly. But it was better than sitting in the dread feeling of rejection that it had still, after all that, not been enough.
He felt the start of tears prick his eyes, and there was no one to see them fall, no one to stop him but himself, and still he did, refusing the tears and the sharp cut of new grief.
The Exile, whose own name had been spoken only once in decades, pulled from his mind by the Chief Librarian, stayed like that, fighting his despair, sharpened teeth gritted, eyes ground shut, for hours, days, locked in this internal battle, until even his body relented, pulling him roughly not to the oblivion he sought but to the black blankness of suspended animation, denied respite or release.
****
“Here,” Khauri said. It was a simple working. He had done the wards with his own blood and blood always found itself. It took very little effort to find his old wards buried under the twisted metal of the Sire of Belaphrone. Beside him, Te Kahurangi stood, impassive, immobile, watching the serfs work, painstakingly slowly, carving their way into the ruin of the former void ship. He and the Chief Librarian had warded and blessed each of them, the humans and servitors both, for though the Warp was not active here, there was always something in where it had been that suggested contagion.
They had been digging for days, excavating, piece by piece, flinging the metal aside to be rendered, reused.
Some electric thrum ran through the crew, subtle but enough that Khauri strode forward, to see that their weapons had cut through to a small void in the wreckage. He leant his own strength to the effort, peeling off the metal.
And there he was, armor thick with dust, frozen in time and space.
One of the serfs scrambled down, into the space, with a hoisting chain, moving swiftly to attach it to the armor, scuttling up the same rope with the fear of superstition under her feet.
A barked order, and the chain’s slack tightened, and the armor-locked figure of the Carcharodon, lost to time, began moving, inching upward.
Even the Pale Nomad noticed, now, breaking his reverie to watch, even extending his hand to guide the immobile form to the crumpled external plating of the ancient ship. His hands came up to release the seals on the helmet, air and dim daylight reaching in for the first time in a decade. A decade that Blood Eye had struggled with himself, trapped and unbearable.
Te Kahurangi removed one glove, touching it to the center of the Techmarine’s forehead.
Blood Eye jolted, as though electric current had been run through him, his entire body rigid, mouth gasping for the first breath in years, eyes struggling to focus, forming slowly on the shape of… No. He shook his head, trying to dispel the vision, trying to reject the reality of his eyes.
“You are needed, Techmarine.”
He was a Void Exile. He could not say no. Still, he tried. “There are others.” Many others of the Martian cant within the Shivers.
The Chief Librarian tilted his head, a smile of something like amusement curling on his parchment-gash mouth. “You are needed.”
“Chief LIbrarian.” This was a risk, but what did he have left to lose? He was already an Exile, anathema of his kind. Killing him would bring him nothing except…everything he wanted. “I do not want this.”
Kahurangi’s smile softened. “How many of us do solely what we want? Duty requires. We respond.” It was, after all, that simple, the basic contours of it.
"Your exile is over, if you wish it. Bail Sharr has spoken." Khauri approached, feeling the emotions, despair, anger, and that hollow emptiness of never quite being good enough, roiling off the Techmarine. It was not much, but it was all he could offer in return.
He knew the name, though he had not heard it spoken in so long. The Blind One: he had been redeemed. He had done enough. Was it possible that Blood Eye had done enough himself?
It did not seem possible.
"As I told the one you knew as the Blind One, it is a great sin to put one's own personal grief above duty, to separate oneself from destiny, isolated in barbs of pain. That selfishness is not worthy of you."
Blood Eye almost shrank back under the blow, then rallied, jaw setting. He did not have the folly in him to gainsay the Chief Librarian so far. Not when such a challenge had been flung at him.
Te Kahurangi stepped backward, gesturing him to move. His limbs felt sore and rusty from disuse, the pain of suspended animation halted abruptly. "We would not have come for you had the need not been dire."
"When we realized," Khauri cut in, with something like an apology, for leaving him crushed under the weight of spaceworn metal and his own misery, for years.
He took a step forward, in pain, but knowing the next would be easier, and the next easier after that, heading toward the Thunderhawk's landing zone, his systems registering a proper, buzzing noosphere, full of the mutter of servitors.
"You are welcomed among the Void Brothers, once again," Te Kahurangi said, with the same voice that had ended Bail Sharr's exile, "Epsilon-one-twelve-Hahono."
The name, his true name, the one he had born since he had first risen in the Great Ocean, prickled something inside him, like an old system getting current for the first time. It wasn't right, though. Not yet. "Blood Eye," he dared to correct. He was not ready to be anything else again. If he must live, if he must serve, he would earn himself again.
But not...just...yet.