Work Text:
Liber Familiae Imperialis
001.M31
A RECORD OF THE IMPERIAL FAMILY, BLESSINGS BE UPON THEM.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters, and they were [REDACTED]
Bile watched as his gene-mother preened and basked in the pomp and ceremony of the parade. He had thought it unwise, but he had quieted his protests knowing his Primarch.
The gleaming ranks of Emperor’s Children marched in perfect synchronised union in effortlessly aligned rows in front of and behind the Primarch’s Predator, from which she bade the citizens of this world. Fife and drum accompanied her, painting a perfect picture of a demigod, adorned in shining royal purple and gold, ready to lead humanity into this bright new age of hope.
Nay, this was a waste of time, Fabius thought. This world fought hard against them, and a parade like this, while useful as a show of martial force and intimidation, was also the perfect chance for the surrendered foe to inflict mass casualties on the gathered Astartes, and perhaps even the Primarch. The Solar Auxilia and other Imperial Army troopers lined the streets as a cordon, but they were hardly enough.
From the not too few unimpressed and grim faces, Fabius could tell they would likely be on this world again once more as conquerors. He could not blame them. An enforced occupation, completed in a day before most of them had so much as realised what had happened from their first strike destroying their planet wide communications? In their place, Fabius could hardly deny the appeal of renewing battle again, once the bulk of the legion had left.
A premonition. He turned his head, just in time to notice a burst of colour and speed. A small form. Dashing towards the Primarch, clutching something. An explosive? The line of Imperial army troopers yelled as they were found wanting in their incompetence. A child fanatic? Fabius stalled for the fraction of a millisecond before his heartbeat quickened to battle readiness and he raised his bolter to strike her down. His eyes focused. His breath hitched as he held it in. His ceramite clad index finger tensed, and prepared to pull the trigger.
His bolter had been slapped askew and he forcibly relaxed his grip at the last moment, the bolt round’s release denied. He looked up as the Primarch had been on him, in an instant, holding up a hand to halt the other Astartes from slaying the child.
The Phoenician stood still as the child halted and knelt. Offering up the bundle she held. From here, mere meters away, Fabius could better scrutinize her attire. Her cheeks had the signature dusting of coal dust, her clothes a common pattern for industrial workers of this world, badly fitted and thoroughly worn.
A banner. A badly painted banner, of purple and gold, in a crude imitation of their war plate. The Imperial Aquila their legion had earnt had been clumsily grafted on, the work of hands unused to any work requiring more finesse than a hammer. The girl offered it as the crowd hushed and Fulgrimia’s perfect features remained as unreadable as a stone façade.
And then she knelt.
“Thank you, child, what is your name?” She smiled softly. The Primarch ever enjoyed playing the part of the benevolent noble, adopting orphans in mass ceremonies. Fabius supposed it was prudent to help win over conquered worlds, perhaps.
“Claudia,” the factory urchin half whispered.
“I shall carry this into battle Claudia. I came from nothing too, I had worked in the mines of my world, until my hands and feet were raw and bloody, until my Father, the Emperor came to me.”
“You are not the Emperor?” The child gasped in ignorance. Fabius did not blame her. Who could look at the Primarch, and not assume that this was not the Master of Mankind, the sovereign of this galaxy? His gene-mother may deny it, but such flattery was hardly unappreciated, and she did her part in encouraging it.
Fulgrimia laughed, a casual thing that had the power to allure men and women alike and her face the picture of one that could launch a thousand fleets. “No child, I am but his daughter.”
She took the girl into her arms. She turned to the crowd, addressing them at last, raising a gauntleted hand. In anticipation, the crowd surged to fall to their knees. “Your struggle has not finished. It has only begun. Where you struggled for your world, we shall struggle together for the greater good of mankind! Come, people of this world, together, we shall stride my Father; your Emperor’s, path, to a new age, the Age of the Imperium. I shall carry the banner made by Claudia into a thousand battles more. A symbol of the trust I hold in you all!”
She allowed Claudia to tie the banner onto her arm, akin to a favour. The crowd began to murmur, before roaring with cheer and adoration, vowing to strive evermore for the glory of the Imperium.
His Primarch spared him a glance, as if to ask if Bile had any objections with a knowing look.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
Midas gritted his teeth as he battled to remain conscious. Multiple organs had been pierced. His first heart had stopped, a jag of shrapnel buried inside, his second struggling to remain operational even as his flesh desperately attempted to knit itself back together. His armour had been rent asunder from the multi-tonne device the Warlords of Callus Prime denotated as a final gesture of defiance as the Death Guard had ground their fortresses to rubble and closed in on their final bastion. The explosion had evaporated the fortress and all the Astartes who had stormed it. Those who had been fortunate to be outside had merely been engulfed in an unprecedented cloud of radiation, shrapnel, and fire as the relic of the Dark Age of Humanity’s hubris was unleased.
The old legends differed in what they had told of what a man experiences when he was close to death. Many spoke of a nothingness. Others had recounted an uncertainty, akin to drowning in a bottomless pool. Others spoke of memories once thought lost, and others still spoke of faeries; choosers of the slain who carried them into some afterlife, winged Amazons, and others still of hooded figures that came to collect your soul for the underworld. All legends were but wishful figments of men living in a more ignorant time. Legends were comforting.
As the Apothecaries shifted his mangled innards unnaturally trying to extract the mangled pieces of his own armour from where they had been blown inwards, the delirium finally took him as his sympathetic nervous system gave up, and Midas remembered.
He had a father. Siblings. A mother. Yes. Mother. Faint memories, of when he was weak, and when he was unworthy, her gentle succour would allow him to rise once more.
What did she look like? Did she yet live? Did she remember Midas, her son? It had been more than a century and a half since he had taken to the stars. His mind raced, fingers that did not feel trying to reach out to grasp a face that he could not fully define.
Mother.
His eye muscles twitched as they struggled to open. Perhaps they did not. He could not tell what was imagined and what was real. Though the haze of his mind’s eye, he saw her. Mother. She was tall, and pale, and hooded. Her ashen complexion mirroring his own.
Perhaps the old legends were all correct? The Chooser of the Fallen had come, wearing the face of his long dead mother.
Her amber eyes were morose, but he could not really see much more beyond that. She knelt down, grabbing his arm to pierce his skin with a syringe in almost tentative fashion. The world spun as Midas saw the contents leave the barrel, entering his body. Had the Reaper come to give him the Emperor’s mercy and take his soul away? The world became black as he saw and felt nothing; all feeling, all pain left his system, flushed away.
Midas later learnt, that it was his Primarch, not the Reaper of Souls that had come to the Apothecarion to see her sons.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
Horlak spat vile insults upon the heads of Crasseus, Lorzek, and every Slave Master as he dispatched the few that had dared come within sword range. The Slave Masters’ crazed half animal soldiers fell upon him and his fellow slaves like dogs, their gene-hanced frames savaging them and ripping men into shreds and throwing their rendered bodies apart like a child might throw his toys in a tantrum in their berserker rage.
So, this was the end?
They had seen the stars. Something had made the entire Amaniteum Empire uneasy, when those ships from the stars had appeared. A sense of unease had settled on the planet, distracting the Lords for long enough for Horlak and his brothers and sisters to rise in rebellion.
Most had been born slaves, sent to the mines to work until they had expended themselves and left to rot in the unending darkness, but they had been waiting for their chance. They would bring down this wretched empire built upon their corpses or die free in the attempt. They had risen, ten million strong, armed with pickaxes, hammers, shafts, and whatever weapons they could scrounge from the few armouries they could take over. Now, as they stormed the capital of the Empire, they had been trapped. Misled, allowed into a killing zone, to trap them in desperate urban combat to be torn apart in a city-wide spectacle. Traps, drone soldiers, and the very city itself had worked against them, turning their assault into a blood bath.
This was the end. He felt the adrenaline rush through him one last time as he and his handful of warriors formed a circle in a desperate last stand. It would not be long until they too were torn apart. In the distance, the richly decorated spectator boxes stood undamaged. Horlak had no idea whether or not anyone was within. He bellowed out one last challenge in defiance.
“COME YOU WORTHLESS SHIT-EATING SONS OF WHORES. COME FACE US YOURSELVES INSTEAD OF SENDING YOUR BEASTS TO DIE, SLAVER CRAVENS.” Horlak roared as he raised his sword, preparing to block the slabbering monster that rushed him; the hulking half man half animal had two organic claws grafted onto his forearms in a sick perversion of nature, his face twisted and bloated with muscle as to be unrecognisable as a human’s. The creature raised one of his claws to strike, attempting to crush him beneath the weight.
Then with thunder, angels came. The first pod had crushed the beast mid-stride, the others landing elsewhere in the arena, into the palace, into the gardens, all over the city of the decadent and fallen.
The sands and winds seemed to still out of respect for a demigod’s tread. And he saw her.
A giantess, tall and terrible, in master forged artificer armour, wielding dual chain axes of such immensity that made the weapons they held seem like flimsy toys. Her features and armour were painted scarlet; the shade of blood spilled on the sand. His mind went blank for several seconds, before he remembered to force himself to release a breath he didn’t know he was holding and breathe. It was as if the Gods themselves had descended. Despite the vastness of the arena, it had seemed impossibly small for the warrior.
Horlak’s knees grew weak and his breath hitched as he felt the compulsion to kneel, unworthy to look the Red Angel directly in the eye. But he felt rage most of all as the battle adrenaline returned. The aura of bloodlust around the woman instilled fury so unyielding he could scarcely control himself. Had they come to aid the slavers? He would not die easily. He launched himself at the demigod, intending to drive his gladius through her bare throat before she swung an oversized hand and slapped him back. He felt his rib cage crack with audible effect before he fell into the sands, two of his fellow slaves tending to him immediately.
She regarded them. Expression full of malice, hate and barely restrained savagery, gaze flickering for a moment between their ragged states and their shackles, hastily broken and still on their limbs and cuffed around their necks. Her smouldering gaze narrowed for a second and Horlak prepared to be struck down by her now growling chain axes.
The giantess made a motion to the warriors arrayed behind her instead. And then she turned away, launching herself at the remainder of the techno-beasts, hacking and hewing with revving chain axes, the few that the warriors in blue and white from the other pods had not yet slain, howling with unabated fury.
“She likes you.” One of the warriors patted Horlak on the shoulder, the weight of his enormous, ceramite clad hand almost crushing Horlak’s bones. “The Primarch doesn’t usually do that.”
The warrior said nothing else as he followed where the giantess had gone, losing themselves in a frenzy as they, inadvertedly or intentionally, won liberation for Horlak and his brothers and sisters.
Amanitea had been liberated.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
Alizebeth wanted them dead.
They had taken her sister. They had lied. They killed her, butchered her because Alizebeth dared beg for her life.
She had been the only family she had left. They were orphans. Who knew if they were truly related by blood, but with similar hair and similar complexions, they had reckoned close enough. They had lived in the darkest streets, in the shanty towns of the undercity, barely surviving day by day, struggling to salvage enough scraps to stave off the all-consuming hunger, before the gangs of Sycophax had taken them one night, shoving them into cages in dimly lit warehouses alongside perhaps forty others. Houses of depravity and death.
Satine had been sick for days now. What the gangers fed them was somehow worse. But Alizebeth had hoped that maybe with a little bit more food, Satine could be better. So, she dared ask. Decius had been the one that seemed to deal the softest blows. He seemed the most familiar. Though perhaps that was simply because the overweight man did not want to exert his strength cracking his barbed whip.
They had all taken turns, beating, whipping, branding them to earn their compliance. The children, most likely orphans, some on the cusp of adulthood, others barely toddlers, all starved and frail, had cried at the start. They learnt not too soon enough after they had butchered the first ones that dared fight back or speak too loudly.
Decius grunted when she asked. Looking at Satine before slapping Alizebeth aside. He held her up by the neck. Pulled out a knife, and gutted her with a knife the size of her arm, throwing her frail, bleeding corpse into the trash compactor without so much as a second thought. The machine had groaned even as it consumed Satine, the sick crunch of bone and flesh lasting for a minute before it stopped.
Rage incandescent filled her. Despair made manifest as every fibre of her body told her to claw their eyes out. Hang them up by their entrails. Flay them alive so their screams could be made into her music. Yet she had no strength. The chains restrained her movement until her skin was raw and bloody and blistered from where her bone met the metal shackles.
They had laughed. When her strength finally failed, they had injected her with something that made the world a haze. She saw as Decius towered over her, tall, dark and terrible, and others like him crowded over her, but her body was unable to move even a muscle. A haze grew over her, as she could not tell Decius from the visions flashing past her. She saw the streets where she had grown up. She saw her system’s main star, once, when she had travelled to the upper levels. She saw Satine’s sunken eyes, accusing her as Alizebeth herself felt the end drew near. She saw Decius leering as he pressed his face close, his breath, the smell of rotting meat, the only thing she was certain of. Perhaps they will slit her throat after this.
Satine disappeared. Her vision spun as her breathing grew out of control. Despite her struggle, she could not focus her eyesight. She dreamed of a shadow. A woman. Pale as death. Her hair was the pitch-black night sky. Skulls, skin, and grisly trophies adorned her dark blue war plate. She stood still. A pair of claws suddenly shimmered to life in the dark night, yet she stood unmoving. She was the night itself. The darkness grew, and Alizebeth’s vision and the woman both faded.
Alizebeth heard and saw nothing after that.
She came to the next morning. Her shackles had been struck through, deep gashes in the wall where they had been attached. She hastily found some rags to cover herself with, the gangers of Sycophax nowhere to be seen. The rest of the orphans had long left, leaving empty shackles and blood stains scattered over the floor.
She tentatively walked outside. She had not been outside for months. She dared to approach the crowd coalescing on the centre square. The stench of iron grew so thick as to be palatable the closer she approached the crowd.
There, the bodies of Decius and his fellows had been slain and quartered, their shocked expressions frozen in rigor mortis. Their bodies, flayed of all skin, had hung loosely about, nailed at various points around the plaza as a decorative mural.
Their blood had been creatively applied in a flourish decorating all the buildings around them. Their skin, along with the skin of hundreds of others, was sown into a grand covering, spanning the entire centre pavilion. A leering winged skull banner had been planted as a message. A warning to those who disturbed the Emperor’s peace.
A prayer had been answered.
Kassandra Kurze had brought the Emperor’s justice to Sycophax.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
A serpent had but one head.
Vanmax’s ecology had been filled with serpents of all kinds. For reasons known only to the gene-alchemists, legless, slithering things had been the predominant lifeform to evolve on this world. Plant eating serpents. Sea serpents. Man-eating serpents. Land serpents. From his childhood, Narsies had learnt to tell the safe serpents from the venomous ones. From his youth, he began hunting them for food.
Vanmax was never an industrial world. They maintained enough lost technologies of the days before Mankind’s fall to cross the void, but they had neither armadas nor great armies that marched across the stars.
When the Imperium came, Vanmax bowed.
They had taken the best of the youth to join the Emperor’s shining legions and the hardiest men as regiments in the Imperial army. The howls of jubilation of being reunited with the rest of mankind soon faded into normalcy. Not much had changed, barring the few imperial administrators and Martian tech-priests that had come forth to aid their development as a staging point for further campaigns of the Emperor’s great work.
And from their unification with the rest of mankind, came the horrors that followed.
The dead serpent hung lifelessly before Narsies, half buried in the wall of his trench, the lower half of its body submerged in mud so thick it may as well have been concrete. Its head, a formerly vibrant purple, dull in the smog filtered light. Dozens corpses of his fallen fellow troopers, frozen in various states of decomposition, were half entombed in the mud. Limbs, half decayed faces, and burst organs peered from the hastily constructed mud wall, their bodies forevermore part of the fortification. The stench had been so thick and enduring that he opted to keep his gas mask on at all times to filter at least some of the smell of rotting meat and pus and shit out of his orifices.
Soon Narsies would join them.
The Orks had come in their billions. Following Ullanor, they had scattered across the stars. The warboss, Graxtoz had led one of the last great remnants of the great Ork Empire across the stars, and they descended on Vanmax. The skies had filled with the semi-destroyed hulks and commandeered asteroids.
The last wave had wiped out near the entire strength of his company. A dozen troopers, half armed with lasguns, a man with a melta, and the rest still carrying the kinetic autoguns of Vanmaxan manufacture. A sergeant from another squad desperately tried to organise them into squads in futility.
The final wave came, the Orks savaging their lines as Narsies and the men of Vanmax fought their final stand like demons out of ancient Terran myth and died to the last man in the face of the Xenos assault. The sergeant’s squad had been the last to go as they engaged the hulking greenskins in brutal hand to hand combat. The first had skewered itself on Narsies’ bayonet while a fellow trooper hack its head off with her chainsword. The second crushed the trooper with a crudely fashioned hammer, striking her torso as she dissipated into a mist of gore and blood as Narsies desperately unloaded his magazine into the creature, the recoil hammering into his shoulder. The third had come with an axe, hacking off Narsies leg from behind as he lost his balance and collapsed into the mud below.
This was the end.
The Xeno raised the axe to finish him off.
The Xeno roared in triumph.
The Xeno fell to the ground, a hole where his brain used to be.
All around him, the orks fell where they stood, roaring their impotent fury.
Another standing nearby picked him up, intending to crush his head with his bare fists.
A pair of silver tips found its way through the creature’s chest from behind, before retracting. Narsies fell from the Xeno’s grip unceremoniously. A giant in sea-green stepped over the corpse of the creature as other Astartes advanced slowly around them, cover fire and careful manuveuring not allowing for the Xenos even half a moment's respite to mount a counter attack, inflicting a dreadful slaughter on the remaining greenskins.
The scales of their armour shimmered in the low light. The giant regarded Narsies, and the usual transhuman dread washed over him like a balmy sea breeze. This must have been an officer of some kind, for their armour was respendent. A nest of golden serpents adorned the warrior’s helm, coiled in frozen menace, their sculpted heads seeming to hiss down at him as if condemning him for daring to fail to rise and kneel. There was something beyond a mere Astartes before him.
A serpent with three heads.
Another ork came howling vengeance, shaking him out of his thoughts, but before he could even conjure a single thought, the silver spear flashed and the ork's head spun into the trench, severed from its hulking, stilling form.
The giant took off their helm, delicate features impossibly noble, unreadable, almost ordinary but for their perfection. A mess of silver hair, and knowing eyes.
“You held,” she said with an unreadable expression, as though reporting a fact already known. “You did as planned.”
She offered a faint, approving smile. “And you did it well.”
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
The banner had not fallen. That, more than anything, and not much else, was what kept Captain Jerek standing.
Around him the line still held, but only barely. The Expeditionary assault had gone cleanly at first, as all of Hathor Lupercal’s wars did. A decapitation strike. Direct assaults into soft points to cause chaos, only it happened too cleanly. Then the counterfire had come in angles and foxholes they had already cleared and accounted for, and the left flank had begun to fold like parchment under a flame.
Now everything was smoke and broken ceramite and screaming vox-distortion. Men were still moving, the only thing distinguishing it from a rout being that the men didn’t seem to know what direction to rout towards.
Jerek revved his chain sword against futilely, the blade screaming his frustration where his voice could not.
Still holding. Barely.
“Reinforce the breach!” he screamed into the vox, though his voice had already gone hoarse from shouting orders that no longer returned clean responses. “Second cohort, pivot left—left, damn you, not—”
He slammed the vox onto the rock face he was taking cover behind in frustration as nought but static and the sounds of las fire came through. There was nothing left but die or retreat. Neither option was appealing.
The roar of a Thunder Hawk approached, and a dozen heavy footfalls shook the earth behind him as multiple tonnes of muscle and ceramite made contact.
Jerek turned around, already knowing.
Hathor Lupercal walked through the smoke, her armour moderately worn but unbroken. Her elite Justaerin flanked her, sighting down their bolt guns and gunning down their opposition with the staccato of disciplined fire. The Warmaster herself surveyed the battlefield, unperturbed by the whizzing shots flying past her, the pace of a woman who, by her sheer presence, owned the space she was within. Bolter fire seemed to bend away from her in lazy arcs that could not find purchase. Artillery fire evaded her.
Around them, Jerek’s men stiffened in the presence of the Primarch and her honour guard. No matter how closely the Sons of Hathor had worked with the Imperial army, transhuman dread was something you could never quite get used to. You built up a normalcy to it, of course, but it was never something you could be fully at ease with.
Hathor bent down, hopping into a collapsed trench where Imperial Army troopers were trying and failing to hold formation with a fusillade of lasguns, not that there were that many targets remaining now, as the Justaerin cleared out the remaining squads of enemy troopers.
There, she crouched, and reached out. A soldier, a boy, perhaps sixteen solar years old, perhaps, had been trying to prop himself up to a firing position, despite half his leg being gone. Hathor reached out and steadied him to his position, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the galaxy.
“Easy,” the Warmaster said quietly as the boy, unaware who had helped him, gave a war cry and fired indiscriminately in the general direction of the few remaining retreating hostiles. He eventually stopped after a few moments as his lasgun ran hot and his magazine empty from the reckless barrage, leaving him panting as his adrenaline faded.
The boy stopped, and finally looked up at the demigod who had helped him, mouth gaping, mirroring his entire squad, who had been watching the entire thing.
“Still shooting,” Hathor noted, a friendly smirk. “Even with one leg. I’ve seen veterans who would have called that a reasonable excuse to stop. My sons could learn a thing or two from you, they’re too fond of their Martian made limbs.”
The boy tried to speak, failed, then simply. Then the fact he was missing a limb finally registered, as he begun to lose his balance.
Hathor caught him before he fell, and shifted him with careful strength, pressing a hand briefly to the severed limb, before tearing a piece of his own tunic for one of the few remaining medics to use as a tourniquet as they tended the boy.
Hathor turned towards Jerek, and raised an eyebrow, an amused expression adorned on her face. Jerek found himself kneeling without instruction.
“Captain,” she added lightly, “if all your men are this stubborn, I may have to start budgeting more ammunition for you. I’d be damned if I didn’t say that there are regiments that deserve less.”
Jerek almost laughed at that—almost—because the absurdity of it cut through the smoke for a heartbeat.
“My lady, we can still hold the line if –”
“You’ve done your part captain, and you’ve done it well, but the time for holding is complete.” Hathor said gently, rising from the trench. She gazed over the shattered flank. “Our counter attack begins soon enough.”
She stepped past him, boots sinking into ash and broken rock as the loose earth yielded to the footsteps of a demigod, and she raised her voice for all within the vicinity to listen. The words of the appointed General of all of Mankind’s armies were not to be denied.
“My sons, push the centre forward. Imperial auxiliaries, fall in on my mark on the wings! We’ll beat the bastards before sunset.”
The Justaerin and other sons of Hathor clashed their bolt guns against their chests in a martial display, howling with enthusiasm born out of unshakable belief in their victory under the auspices of their gene-mother. The stunned troopers began joining in with a rising crescendo, sharing in the righteous fury replacing the panic and fear that had been present just moments before. Lasguns were reloaded, and grenades primed as each and every soldier, human and transhuman alike, thrust their favoured implements of war into the sky in solidarity.
Hathor glanced back at Jerek over her shoulder, expression softer now.
“You did not lose your line, Captain,” she said. “You fought well, but remember, never let the enemy set the pace of your war. your elements with a careful hand.”
A grin flashed across her face, sharp and alive with momentum.
“Now,” she added, “I trust you know what to do?”
Something in him locked into place. The doubt burned away.
“Yes, my lady!” Jerek answered, already rising.
“Good.” A wolfish expression came across the Primarch. “I do enjoy a man who can take care of things while I enjoy myself. To me!”
Raising Worldbreaker above her head, she howled in jubilation as she charged, a howl echoed by her sons and chorused by the cheers of the troopers as they surged in a wave towards the enemy positions on the hill.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
The choir broke all at once.
One moment the chorus held its shape. Thought and voice branching through the immaterium. At the best of times, it was demanding. Now, it threatened to tear her apart. Maelia collapsed, her hands clawing at her temples that did not feel as the incomprehensible darkness and vastness forced itself through her mind.
Some screamed. Others went silent, their minds retreating in rigor mortis, their voices to be silent for eternity.
The Warp was not darkness. Not truly.
It was both light and dark. Too much light. Too much darkness. Too many meanings existing in the same instant, colliding without end or mercy. It pressed through Maelia’s thoughts like a tide made of screaming stars, and thirsting laughter. Each one a concept she could almost understand before it shattered and warped into something else. Xenos danced and sung before her. Voices without mouths. Time without direction. Emotion without origin.
She was falling through it.
Not downward.
Everywhere. In every direction, a concept impossible by science, but somehow, possible here.
Her mind tried to anchor itself to her body desperately but she was found wanting. The rest of the choir had dissolved into madness, each drifting in the infinite expanse. She was breaking apart, transformed into pure sensation as she began to dissolve.
Then something reached out.
Something reached her, and forced her to form to become coherent once more.
Her breath, or what she thought was her breath, hitched and gasped.
The red giantess stood, tall and unyielding, as she reformed Maelia.
Her form was not fixed, nor was Maelia’s. It was interpreted and reinterpreted constantly: a towering figure in war-plate, a mess of geometry, being of warp flame, and a thousand more forms imprinting itself upon her fractured awareness.
“Too loud,” Magnolia said, and inflicted her will on the immaterium.
The words were not sound. They were a concept imposed into being in unreality. A lattice formed around her collapsing thoughts. She felt herself being again. The chaos pressed again and shifted again reflexively, as if chased away and offended by the order imposed. She no longer felt like she was being dissolved.
“Are you alright, Astropath?”
“I…” She lost the ability to form coherent words. The single eye of the Primarch narrowed for a split second in enquiry, before she waved a hand and everything once again shifted.
“There,” she murmured. “You are not drowning anymore.”
The pressure lessened. The screams grew silent. Reality itself calmed around her. That was the only way Maelia could understand it. The Warp still shifted in every direction, still tried to rewrite her into something less coherent than thought itself, but now there were boundaries. Strong boundaries that held disorder at bay. Edges where meaning stopped bleeding into madness.
“I…” Maelia tried, and failed, then forced herself again. “I am… here.”
“Good, now stick close to me.” Their communion was sibilant, the one island of serenity within the twisting continents of the great ocean.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Maelia,” she managed.
“Maelia,” she repeated, as though tasting the shape of it in thought. “Good. Names are anchors. Hold to it.”
She did, little by little, she regained herself, forcing the churning feeling out of her bones until it was but a whisper.
“You are not the first choir to fracture in my presence,” the greatest sorcerer amongst the Emperor’s daughters said.
Maelia swallowed. “What… happens to them?”
“That depends,” the Crimson Queen replied. “Some are lost if their minds are too frail. Some are rebuilt. Others still understand the Great Ocean better as a result, the way my Father and I do.”
She tilted her head, as if remembering something distant.
“I walked this place, once, before I had even stepped out my gestation chamber. I wandered the Great Ocean, and my Father reached out through the vast expanse to find me, and walked with me.”
The Warp around them shifted at Magnolia’s will. Maelia felt as if she was watching a memory she could not see, but she felt. Two presences, too grand to comprehend, moving through infinite tides. A Father. A Daughter.
“He taught me to listen without being consumed,” she continued. “The wonders of the Great Ocean. We learned its languages, and mapped the unmappable. My Father warned me about the dangers well; none can master it as we did.”
Maelia swallowed. “So… He can walk here?”
Magnolia’s single eye looked beyond her, considering her question.
“He did walk here,” she corrected gently. “And I with Him. He rarely does, now with his great work at hand.”
Maelia nodded weakly, clinging to that idea more than the words themselves.
“You will return,” she said softly. “You will remember less than you should, and more than you expect. That is how mortals survive contact with the Ocean. Do not be afraid. There is no sin but ignorance, and you are ignorant no more.”
The warp thinned at the edges of perception, real space reasserting itself once more like the sand revealed at a tide’s receding.
The Red Cyclops remained until the last moment.
“Rest now Maelia, you’ve done well.”
And in the vastness of the Immaterium, that was enough to keep her whole.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
The numbers did. Not. Add. Up.
Warsmith Darros stood on the half-finished bastion and watched men die for arithmetic.
They dropped in ones and twos from the scaffolds. Some from exhaustion. Some from weakness of flesh. Others fell where they stood, lungs burned out by the thick iron laced dust. The labour conscripts had been driven for thirty hours without proper rest. The quotas had demanded it. The siege required it.
Even his own warriors had forsaken their bolters for shovels great enough to carry a man and hammers heavy enough to break through steel, but even transhuman effort made little change. The calculations did not care.
Darros did.
He checked the slate again. It had been a marvel of siege craft on paper. The angles, load tolerances, projected landing vectors. The wall would hold, but the blasted world took a toll on his resources.
They would finish it in time, but not before consuming another third of the labour force.
He knew what came next. Demotion, if he was fortunate. Decimation, if he was not. A lesson. A lesson he was keen to avoid even if it meant piling each damn brick himself before her gaze fell upon this section. He was iron. Iron did not bend; it broke before that. He would not break. He would see this complete before the Primarch came.
The gasps of a Thunder Hawk’s engines approached his landing pad. Darros was out of time.
No heralds. No preceding parades like the Phoenician. No screeching heralds like the Urizen. The Lady of Iron appeared, suddenly and terribly like an unannounced hammer blow.
Darros and his squad dropped to one knee as she approached.
“My Lady Primarch.”
She did not acknowledge him at first.
Her gaze swept the structure, silent in her judgement, but Darros knew his fate. There was no use in begging, he made no mistakes, but it was his guilt regardless. Her eyes moved faster than thought survey each and every one of Darros’s faults.
The silence stretched.
It felt like a blade at Darros’ throat.
“Your projections,” she said at last. Her judgement was soon to arrive, pronounced and terrible. He offered the slate without rising. She glanced over them with perfect, inhuman pace.
A stencil appeared in her hand as though conjured. She strode to the nearby bastion wall and began to write directly upon the ferrocrete, lines and symbols appearing with impossible precision. Angles shifted to account for quicker ease of construction. Supports shifted to lower labour input. Entire sections reimagined in seconds. Compared to her work, Darros’ own seemed like a child’s, imitating in crude fashion what should’ve been better.
“Move the load-bearing columns here,” she said, not looking at him. “Reduce the span. You are overextending your materials to compensate for the initial geometry.”
Her stencil struck the schematics again.
“Redirect labour to the lower tiers. You are killing them for height you do not yet require.”
Another section.
“With this configuration, the structure reaches combat readiness in forty-three percent less time.”
Darros’ mind raced to keep pace. He recalculated, rechecked—
She was correct. Of course she was correct.
“Your initial projections. Adequate, but could have been better.” She spoke.
Darros went still.
The words did not come as praise. They never did. Not from her.
He had expected demotion, or death. He had expected the moment where she would pause, tilt her head slightly, and pronounce him no longer worthy of the Iron Fourth. His breathing grew heavier as it always did in the presence of the Primarch as his gauntleted fists clenched with effort.
Death had not come.
He knew better than to expect more. He turned, barking orders. His voice snapped through the bastion with all the vigour of a man who had escaped death. “You heard the Primarch. Re-route labour divisions! Lower tiers first, stagger the scaffold cycles! Move the stress crews off verticals and into base reinforcement!”
The Iron Warriors moved instantly. They always did.
Below, the conscript lines shifted in confusion as overseers re-sorted them.
Petra watched for a moment longer, her gaze lingering across the adjusted flow of manpower. Then, almost absently, she added: “Extend water distribution to every third tier instead of every fifth. They fail when dehydration compounds fatigue.” Darros could not ascertain whether she spoke of the serfs or of the structure.
She paused.
“And rotate the weakest conscripts to lower masonry. If they die, they will do so supporting weight rather than lifting it. That reduces wasted output. And distribute the respirators.”
He bowed his head. “At once, my Lady Primarch.”
The Primarch of the Fourth left without acknowledgement, as though nothing here had ever warranted her attention in the first place.
Mercy or efficiency; Darros decided it did not matter. The outcome was identical.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.
Cathedral bells rung a storm every hour. Their lords, the warriors of the 18th, stood on every corner preaching the word of Emperor. Incense thickened the air as the perfect city stirred.
Legion serf Baldon Var had polished those stones since boyhood.
It had come quietly.
His treasonous thoughts.
He hid no blasphemy, but an absence. An absence that contradicted Lady Aurelia’s very words. Words he knew were true
When others felt ecstasy and prostrated themselves with burning fervour before the Emperor’s image, Baldon felt only stone. When the warrior-priests spoke of revelation, he heard words, but no fire stirred in him. He feared himself hollow.
Lady Aurelia’s words could not be false. They could not be. It must be he who was defective.
Did he have a soul?
He had toiled in silence as their liege preached in the central cathedral, a monument to the Emperor, a behemoth of stone, beautified glass, and precious metals. Her voice carried beneath the vaulting dome, impossibly clear and resounding, every syllable seeming to vibrate through stone and steel alike, as the warriors of the 18th and the civilians alike stood entranced. Men and women wept openly as she preached salvation to their souls.
“PRAISE HIM. LOVE HIM. HE ON TERRA HEARS.” The repeating beseeching of the faithful, reached a crescendo as Baldon turned harder to his labours, head bowed low, scrubbing the flagstones harder as though toil alone might scour treason from his thoughts, attempting to block out the accusatory crowds. Through works, salvation, just as the Urizen decreed.
The sermon ended. The enraptured masses thronged around the Primarch, like lost children, the boldest among them dared reach out to trace their fingers on the tips of her cloak.
He did not see, but he felt a burning gaze fall upon him, before he heard the next command.
Silence, vast and sacred, descended.
“Leave us.”
It was not spoken loudly, yet the command rolled through the cathedral without room for argumentation or negotiation. The congregation emptied. Baldon Var readied to comply, before a second command was spoken.
“Not you, child.”
Baldon froze. He felt the tread of a demigod before the shadow, vast and regal, fell over the stones he had been polishing.
He looked up.
He forgot how to breathe.
Lady Aurelia stood above him.
Her gold and crimson robes were radiant under the kaleidoscopic effect of the walls of stained glass surrounding them, scripture grafted in matching gold onto her skin. Her face seemed carved from some higher ideal than mortal flesh could bear, terrible in its beauty, framed by her ash white hair. Her eyes burned with such warmth and knowing that Baldon felt himself laid bare unto creation. His limbs weakened. Every instinct screamed to throw himself at her feet and never rise again.
He prostrated himself, bowing lower than he thought he could ever bow.
“My lady I am not worthy—”
“Why,” she asked, her voice soft as prayer, as if reading his mind “do you labour as one seeking punishment?”
“You wonder,” he froze. He did not, he wanted to beseech her. He was not a traitor. He did not have doubt. She continued. “Why others burn with faith while you feel only ash.”
“Lift up your eyes, child.”
He did not dare move for several heartbeats. He readied himself to be struck down for his lack of faith. When no blow came, he slowly raised his head.
Lorgar Aurelia, Primarch, daughter of the Emperor, had knelt beside a serf. The sight alone was enough to unmake him.
“Do not tremble so,” she said, with a soft smile, almost amused. “I did not come to condemn you.”
The demigod’s touch banished something in him he had carried for years. He could not lie. He broke.
“My lady… there is no fire in me. Others hear your truth and are moved to tears, but I…” His voice cracked. “I feel only silence.”
“And so you believe yourself broken,” she said.
He nodded, weeping openly now. Aurelia’s expression softened further.
“Hush child, a heart that fears failing the truth has not abandoned it.”
He stared, hardly breathing.
“When I kneel…” He faltered, ashamed even before her. “I do all that is asked. I pray. I labour. I hear your words and know they are as true as the Emperor’s love, yet…”
He struggled, unable to force shape onto the terror gnawing within him.
“My lady… when the faithful weep, when they seem… touched. What if a man cannot feel what he ought?” His whispered treason seemed blasphemous to speak aloud, but the Primarch did not change. Instead she regarded him with such aching pity it wounded him.
“Wanting things may yet be made whole,” she said in her sing-song voice, every word a perfect melody. The experience broke him; the Herald of the God-Emperor, Wisest of the Wise, comforting one as unworthy as he.
“Does the Emperor hear men such as I my lady? Does our worship please him on Terra?”
The Primarch’s features froze for not even a portion of a second, but the warmth had gone. The candles guttered. Her golden eyes seemed, for one impossible instant, bottomless. A chill washed over him despite the incense heat.
“He hears.” She slowly pronounced. “And He tests.”
The motherly warmth returned as though it had never left.
“Blessed is the mind too small for doubt, child. Through you works, the Emperor may yet provide salvation” The Urizen rose.
She turned from him, her presence already receding into something vast and untouchable once more. “Walk in faith, Baldon Var. Even in silence, the Emperor protects.”
And as she departed, her presence swelling once more into something vast, distant and radiant, Baldon remained kneeling in the dust, weeping from shame, shame that his heart ever doubted the truth of the Master of Mankind.
The Emperor had 20 Daughters.