"Prepare for dock."
Obol's voice carried across the bridge like the toll of a distant bell—steady, controlled, yet edged with something colder than command.
A chorus of confirmations followed, but none could mask the unease woven into each syllable.
The view beyond the Psicopompos shifted as the ship angled its colossal frame toward the vast silhouette ahead.
Segmentum Command awaited them—Or so it seemed.
The station hung in orbit like a gutted moon, a ring of skeletal superstructures, half-lit spires flickering like dying candles, vast gantries torn open as though ripped by the claws of a god.
Solar vanes drifted freely, sheared from their mounts.
Docking arms hung broken, trailing metal entrails into the void.
Cratered scars marred its outer rings—impact wounds, or worse.
And yet—
no fires burned.
No defense grid woke.
No engines pulsed.
The entire fortress was… silent.
—
Then The Psicopompos—The Conductor of Souls—slid into frame, descending from the black like a funeral leviathan.
Its hull bristled with gothic battlements and cathedral spines, each lit by the faint shimmer of its Gellar pylons.
Massive thruster-flares cast long, slow-moving light across the derelict station, painting its scars in ghostly gold.
For a brief moment, the two titans mirrored each other—
one a relic of Imperial order, torn and abandoned,
the other a warship marked by ash, carrying survivors who had stared into the maw of the Warp.
The Psicopompos approached in cold silence.
Docking clamps extended.
No response.
No guiding lights.
Nothing at all.
—
Obol rose from his throne.
The bridge fell silent, then serfs rushed to him at once—silent, precise, drilled to ritual perfection.
One by one they fitted the ceramite plates of his High-Scion harness, each piece locking into place with a heavy magnetic thunk.
The Gellar-borne emitter built into the cuirass awoke.
A low hum vibrated through the deck plating—reality stabilizing around him in a soft distortion of the air.
Dust motes froze, then resumed motion.
A bubble of sanity forming around its master.
Tech-Priests approached in a slow circle.
Censers swung.
Thick coils of red and black incense streamed outward, painting the air with warding fumes.
Binary cant washed against his armor like a low tide:
<001001-PROTECTION-LITANY-INITIATE>
Each phrase carried the weight of a curtain being drawn against the Immaterium.
Obol stood still through it all.
The cloak came last.
Red and sable-black, matching the Heraldry of House Kharon.
A living banner draped across his shoulders, buckled by golden clasps shaped like the hooded skull.
When the last serf stepped back, the cloak unfurled across his back like a shadow remembering its shape.
When the last serf stepped back, the cloak unfurled across Obol's shoulders like a shadow remembering its shape—silent, heavy, dignified.
Obol descended the throne-step, each footfall ringing through the bridge like a measured toll.
"I am selecting my retinue for this endeavor," he announced, voice carrying across the command deck.
His gaze swept the room—past officers, servitors, tech-adepts—until it found the faces he needed.
He nodded once.
"Lord Thrykos of Ossivane."
—
Thrykos straightened, helm tucked beneath one arm, the other resting on the pommel of a blade older than most ships.
"Yes, High-Scion."
—
Obol's eyes shifted.
"Lady Isera of Isyrr."
—
Isera stepped forward with silent precision, bowing her head just enough to acknowledge the gravity of the summons.
"Your will is mine, milord."
—
Then—
"Lord Caldrin of Chalyth."
—
Caldrin's jaw clenched with grim anticipation, his palm thudding once against his cuirass in salute.
" I stand ready."
—
Finally, Obol's gaze settled on the robed figure standing just behind the command dais.
"Magos Dominus Thale Serekin."
—
Thale inclined his head, mechadendrites curling behind him in a gesture halfway between a bow and a machine's acknowledgment.
His optics narrowed, evaluating factors beyond the mortal eye.
"High-Scion," he said at last, voice modulated into cold precision,
"I advise we bring a sanctified psyker with us.
Preferably one of the Navigators of House Orpheon."
Thale continued, tone trimmed of all emotion.
"If the station bears warp-taint, a sanctioned mind will detect what our instruments cannot.
And if… something lingers… they may shield us from direct exposure."
He paused—
servo-lenses irising wider.
"A Navigator's sight could determine whether this place fell to natural calamity—or design."
His mechadendrites clicked once in emphasis.
"Seraphine or Lysan. Either will suffice.
But I recommend Seraphine Orpheon.
Her resonance profile is… more stable."
—
Obol's brow tightened—not in disagreement, but in calculation.
The air on the bridge seemed to grow colder.
Outside the frontal viewport, the dead station drifted in silence, its once-proud spires now skeletal against the dying star.
A place no mortal should approach without a guide who could see beyond the veil.
—
"Lady Seraphine will do.
Relieve her from her station and have her fitted with war-gear."
He turned toward the airlock corridor, cloak trailing in sharp lines of red and black.
"We will wait by the airlock."
—
Thale inclined his head, mechadendrites snapping into motion like a flock of iron serpents.
"At once, High-Scion."
He pivoted with mechanical precision, already relaying binharic orders.
A cluster of serfs and servitors followed in a clattering procession—robes trailing, censer-smoke swirling as they hurried after the Magos.
—
In the opposite direction, the chosen Scions peeled away.
Thrykos strode first—armed for war.
Ossuary-plate wrapped him in black ceramite and pale bone, every panel etched in funeral script. Incense drifted from the vents of his gorget, trailing him like a quiet shroud.
A power maul—its head carved in the shape of a femur—hung across his back.
At his hip swung a funeral censer, smoke curling in soft spirals with each step.
Mag-locked to his cuirass rested a stockless Ossivane Repeater, compact and brutal, bone-gripped and bound in prayer cord.
—
Isera followed, clad in a crimson envoy's bodysuit beneath a light ceramite cuirass. Small, gold-etched pauldrons bore the crest of House Isyrr.
A thin fire-resistant cloak flowed behind her, flickering like smoke.
In her hand she carried a two-pronged shock-spear—slender, elegant—with a flamer vent between its tines and a narrow promethium line coiled along its shaft.
A compact auto-pistol rested at her hip, discreet and precise.
—
Beside her walked Caldrin—jaw set, eyes hard, a private oath burning behind them.
His armor was utilitarian— smoke-grey combat plate over void-mail, built for recoil control rather than pride.
Across his chest hung a short-barreled assault autogun, reinforced and drum-fed for brutal close-quarters work.
At his hip, the same compact autopistol as Isera's—practical, paired by choice as much as by marriage.
Their steps faded as they descended toward the holds to ready themselves for boarding.
—
Obol remained alone for a moment—standing at the threshold where the light bled into the shadowed hall leading toward the airlock.
His cloak settled behind him like settling ash.
At his side hung his sword—sheathed in blackened steel, its gold-filigreed hilt resting against his palm like an old oath.
On the other side, mag-locked to a hardpoint on his cuirass, sat a compact assault-shotgun—short-barreled, drum-fed, built for boarding actions and killing at arm's reach. Its matte finish drank the light.
For a heartbeat, he stood there alone—High-Scion, warrior, and bearer of a secret no one else could share.
Then he stepped forward into the dark.
—
"No idea why you are needed, Cal. You'll only slow me down,"
Isera muttered, eyes fixed on the spear as she adjusted the promethium valve.
A thin hiss of pressure escaped as she flexed the weapon downward, testing its bite.
—
Caldrin only chuckled—dry, unfazed.
"That is harsh, darling," he replied, checking the drum of his autogun with a smooth, practiced motion.
"Especially from someone who sets fire to everything she negotiates with."
—
She clicked her tongue.
"Only when diplomacy fails. Which is often your fault."
—
Before he could retort, Thrykos stepped forward.
"Preparation is complete, High-Scion."
His voice was gravel-deep, steady.
His gauntleted hand rested on the femur-headed power maul at his side—its runes glowing faintly where his touch met the haft.
His gaze shifted upward, tracking Obol as the High-Scion approached from the command bridge.
Thrykos bowed his head—just enough to show respect, never weakness.
Obol returned the nod, then turned toward the two silhouettes descending the corridor.
—
Logic and Arcane incarnate.
Thale Serekin's mechadendrites clicked in elegant precision, each movement exact to the millimeter.
Thin ribbons of incense-smoke trailed behind him, mingling with the cold, sterile scent of machine-oil.
His iron-shod staff struck the deck once—
TOK
—and the sound rippled through the corridor like a pulse through a dead vein.
Behind him came Lady Seraphine of Orpheon.
She did not walk so much as drift, her steps scarcely stirring the air. A sheer veil masked her eyes, threads of gold catching the lumen-light as she moved.
In both hands she held her Aquila staff, its wings folded and cold, the metal humming with an unseen resonance.
The void seemed to lean away from her.
The corridor fell into absolute silence as the two reached the waiting Scions.
—
"We burden you with our lack of insight yet again,"
Obol said, placing a hand to his chest as he bowed—not deeply, but with the precise formality owed to a Navigator of her standing.
"Your presence is greatly appreciated, Lady Seraphine."
—
The veiled woman inclined her head, the faintest motion—more felt than seen.
"The Warp stirs," she answered softly.
Her voice was quiet, but in the enclosed steel corridor it seemed to thread through every lumen and cable.
"I cannot ignore a call that reaches even through sleep."
Beside her, Thale's optics clicked and dilated in approval, runes pulsing across his faceplate.
—
Ahead of them, the airlock loomed—
a silent, waiting mouth of steel, bathed in the red glow of warning runes.
Obol drew a slow breath.
His gauntlet tightened around the grip of his assault-shotgun, knuckles creaking beneath ceramite.
"Then let us proceed."
—
Together, they stepped toward the sealed doors of the Psicopompos.
Toward the void-lit bridge between sanity and ruin.
Toward the darkness that had swallowed Segmentum Command alive.
—
The airlocks met with a deep metallic groan, the kind that vibrated up the bones.
A heartbeat later—
HSSSSSSK—
the seals parted, steam rolling like pale ghosts between the two hulls.
The door slid open.
Darkness greeted them.
A cargo hold—vast, dimly lit by flickering lumen-strips clinging to life.
Crates were overturned, rails half-torn from the walls.
No bodies.
No blood.
No signs of struggle.
Just absence.
A silence so absolute it felt engineered.
—
Thale stepped forward, mechadendrites rising like sniffing serpents.
"There are organic signatures," he intoned, voice echoing hollowly in the empty bay.
His optics flickered with rapid cascades of data.
Obol's shotgun lifted slightly.
"Human?"
A pause.
Thale's processors clicked. One by one, his lenses irised down to narrow slits.
"Insufficient data."
He turned his head slowly—like a machine trying to mimic caution.
—
Obol nodded once, sharp and silent.
Isera and Thrykos moved ahead immediately—
the envoy's spear lowered in a smooth, balanced glide,
Thrykos' ossuary-maul resting heavy in both hands as his repeater swept the shadows.
Their footsteps were the only sound in the hollow bay.
Obol followed, drawing a small slate from his belt.
The device flickered to life—a trembling pane of blue-green light rising above his palm.
A hololith map of the station.
Obscured.
Glitching.
Warped at the edges as though struggling to remember its own layout.
Corridors stuttered between shapes, sections blinked in and out of existence, whole wings of the facility appeared as smeared static.
Obol narrowed his eyes.
"Mapping is unstable," he muttered.
Behind him,
Caldrin chambered a round with a quiet
chk-CHNK,
and Seraphine lifted her veiled face toward the flickering projection—as if she could hear whatever was wrong with the map.
—
Thale's optics dimmed.
"Correction, High-Scion."
A single mechadendrite pointed at the distortion like an accusing finger.
"The station itself is unstable."
—
"Can you pinpoint the source?" Obol asked,
his free hand lifting his sidearm to a ready angle at his hip.
—
Seraphine did not answer immediately.
Instead, she stepped forward—
the faint rustle of her fire-silk veil brushing her cheek—and pressed her forehead gently against the silver Aquila atop her staff.
Her breath steadied and reality with it.
The air around her grew denser, the way it does before a storm.
A pulse shivered through the metal grating beneath their feet.
Then she inhaled—slow, deliberate—and lifted her head.
Her voice was quiet, but it left no room for doubt.
"Downward."
She turned slightly, her veil tilting toward a shadowed stairwell near the far wall.
"Echoes," Seraphine whispered.
"Screams. Murmurs. And…
something I cannot name."
—
"Same as on the dead world?" Obol asked, shifting his stance to face her.
—
Seraphine shook her head—
once, sharp, breath catching in her throat.
"No," she rasped,
"it's… more human."
Her fingers tightened around the Aquila staff as they proceeded.
—
"High-Scion," Isera called from Obol's right, her spear angling upward toward a flickering lumen-sign above a branching corridor.
"Security room."
The sigil pulsed weakly in the dim—the last heartbeat of a station that should have been alive.
—
"I can access the station data from the main cogitator," Thale said, his mechadendrites already shifting in anticipation.
Obol nodded once. Then, they turned right.
The security room swallowed them in darkness—the only light the intermittent flash of failing red lumens and the ghost-green glow of cogitator runes struggling to stay alive.
The air was stale.
A single servitor was slumped in its interface throne—its skull fused directly into the cogitator's data-jack, cables twisting from its spine like dead serpents. Its torso sagged forward, hanging at an unnatural angle.
Like a corpse crucified to a machine.
The flickering lumens cast its pallid flesh in stuttering frames—alive, dead, alive again—each twitch only a trick of broken light.
—
"Is it dead?" Caldrin muttered, autogun already raised toward the slack-jawed servitor.
—
"This unit is…"
Thale's voice flattened further as a red targeting-beam swept across the thing's sunken face.
"…inoperable. But I can force it into a sub-operational state."
—
Thale's mechadendrites slithered forward—silent, predatory.
Two wrapped around the servitor's neck, locking it in place with a metallic clack.
Another curled beneath its jaw, prying the face-plate open with a wet, grinding snap.
Pale flesh split—brass hinges groaned and the processor-cage beneath quivered like an exposed organ.
Then—
Shk-kcht.
Data-spikes extended from Thale's tendrils and plunged directly into the servitor's exposed brain.
The body jerked once, violently, as if shocked back to life—eyes snapping open in a dull, milk-white blaze.
Its lips moved because the data-spikes forced the motor nerves to fire.
A hollow, broken vox-hiss spilled from its throat.
—
"What happened to the station? Where is everyone?"
Obol asked, stepping closer.
The servitor did not react.
Its head remained slack, jaw hanging.
Only Thale's mechadendrites kept it upright, puppeted on cables like a corpse made to dance.
—
Thale turned slightly, his optics shifting from blue to a cold, surgical red.
"Unexpected outcome."
One mechadendrite curled beneath the servitor's jaw, lifting its slack head as if inspecting a broken instrument.
"It has forgotten how to function," he murmured—an impossibility spoken like a diagnosis.
"I will access what remains of its memory-blocks."
Two additional mechadendrites unfurled—sleek, needle-tipped—gliding beneath the faceplate with almost reverent precision.
Metal popped.
Bone creaked.
The skull casing split open with a wet, brittle click.
Then—
SHNK.
Two data-spikes drove into the exposed cranial ports.
The servitor's corpse lurched once, limbs spasming like a marionette jerked by dead hands.
Thale's voice fell into a liturgical monotone.
"Memory-extraction… commencing."
A moment of static hissed through his vox-grille.
"I will now play the recovered audio logs."
The chamber held still.
Then—
Thale's vocalizer crackled…
and another voice—raw, frightened, human—began to echo through him.
—
A calm, authoritative voice spoke—strained, but still holding to discipline.
[Log 31-Gamma: Commander Varas]
"All hands—Varas speaking.
We've confirmed tampering in the inner systems."
A pause.
The distant thud of heavy bulkhead doors sealing.
Someone breathing too close to the recorder—quick, anxious.
"The Gellar field is down. The engine is… acting up.
I'm heading to investigate."
A metallic bang echoed—like a deckplate struck from below.
Varas continued, her voice now unsteady.
"This doesn't make sense.
Everything was fine—no anomalies reported.
No breaches. Nothing."
Another pause.
Paper rustled, or perhaps a hand trembling against a console.
Then her voice cracked—fear bleeding into it.
"Emperor's grace… everyone who came back from the Engine Room is—dead or mutated,
I have sealed the room from further exposure."
"Our astropath said it reeks of warp but
how can there be a warp-bleed on a station that is still?"
Before the words settled, a voice shouted behind her.
"Shoot them! Traitors—!"
A full volley of gunfire erupted—wild, panicked.
Screams.
Metal scraping.
A terminal collapsing.
Then—
SKRRRHK—
Static swallowed the log whole.
Cut.
—
"Traitors?"
Caldrin's voice cut through the tense silence, sharp and disbelieving.
"Are you telling me they can turn people?"
He leaned halfway through the doorway, autogun raised, eyes scanning the shadows as if expecting the servitor to lunge back to life.
—
"How old is this recording?" Obol asked, his brows tightened but his voice calm.
—
Thale's mechadendrites flexed once, adjusting their grip on the exposed cranial ports.
"Approximately 1,460 hours…" he said, vocalizer flattening the numbers into cold fact.
"…or two months."
—
The words hung in the stale air.
Two months.
Everything they were seeing—this silent ruin—had happened recently.
Obol's jaw tightened, though his voice remained steady.
"Can you access the visual record?"
—
Thale's optics pulsed a deeper red.
"Affirmative. Reconstructing.
For a moment, everything in the room held still—the servitor twitching faintly under his grip, the screens flickering with dormant ghosts.
Then—
SKR–CHZZT—
A feedback snarl ripped through the cogitator stack.
Thale's head snapped back an inch as a burst of corrupted data surged through the link.
His optics flared
—BRIGHT WHITE—
—then one shattered into a spray of sparks.
Thale hissed, voice glitching into layered binharic.
"Corrupted—unknown—"
The servitor convulsed violently.
A red-veined pattern pulsed along the data-spikes.
Then the corruption traveled upward.
Straight into Thale.
His mechadendrites seized, spasming like struck serpents.
One curled backward, clawing at the ports in his own spine.
Another pierced the wall behind him with a shriek of metal.
The entire rig went wild.
Red motes crawled across the cables like insects swarming.
Thale lunged forward with sudden, shocking force—
and tore the mechadendrites free from his own back.
Metal screamed.
Oil sprayed.
The severed limbs hit the floor in a wet clatter—
then began to twitch as if something inside them was trying to move.
Thrykos stepped between Thale and the floor, maul rising instinctively.
Caldrin's autogun snapped toward the crawling limbs.
Even Seraphine recoiled, her breath catching behind the veil.
Obol's voice cut through the chaos—cold, command-sharp.
"Magos—status!"
—
Thale straightened, one optic dead, the other flickering weakly.
His metal claws clenched as he crushed the remaining data-spike with a single, violent twist.
When he spoke, his voice crackled through a ruined vox-grill.
"Reconstruction failed.
Visual records… unusable."
A final spark spat from his shoulder as a severed mechadendrite twitched its last.
and fell still.
Thale's remaining optic dimmed low.
"This corruption is not in any Mechanicum archive," he rasped.
"It affects both man and machine…."
—
A quiet, suffocating silence settled over the room.
Even the flickering lumens seemed to recoil from the words.
Obol exhaled once—slow, controlled.
"Purge it."
—
Isera stepped forward immediately.
She lowered her spear, flipped a valve with her thumb—
and flames whispered along the promethium line.
Then she swept her cloak forward, the crowlike hood folding over her helm as she knelt—
a ritual stance, as much a prayer as preparation.
Behind her, Thrykos stepped aside, making room.
Caldrin took position at the door, autogun ready.
Obol stepped back into the corridor first.
The others followed one by one,
leaving the corrupted chamber—and Isera—behind the threshold.
The hallway's red lumens washed their armor in rusted shades…
…but behind them, the glow shifted.
Orange. Harsh. Flickering.
The bloom of fire.
The Security Room pulsed like a dying ember,
its walls strobing with the hungry light of Isera's cleansing flame—
the silhouette of her cloak bending and swaying within, a lone burner in a chamber where reality had already begun to warp.
A low whump echoed as something inside ignited.
Then another.
And the corridor outside darkened again, lit only by the steady red of warning runes—while behind them, the room burned.
Isera stepped out at last.
She lowered her hood with a slow sweep of her hand—
ash drifting off her cloak in faint spirals, embers clinging to the folds before dying mid-air.
The chamber behind her still crackled with the last breaths of the purge-flame.
Caldrin's smirk cut through the settling ash.
"You're so beautiful when you're covered in ruins, darling."
—
Isera shot him a sideways glare as she brushed embers from her cloak.
"Are you saying I'm not beautiful normally? You sick man."
He only shrugged—utterly unrepentant—and moved to take point down the stairs.
She hissed under her breath and followed after him.
Together, the boarding party turned toward the shadowed stairwell—the one Seraphine had indicated earlier—and began their descent.
Boots struck metal.
Step after step, the faint red lumens above them guttered and died.
They descended into the station's throat—
toward the place where whispers crawled from the dark,
and where dead signals waited to be found.
—
Another long hallway stretched before them—dead silent, drowned in darkness.
No bodies.
No blood.
Not even the stench of decay.
Just emptiness.
"Bullet holes, High-Scion," Thrykos rumbled as he knelt, gauntlet brushing the scorched metal.
The femur-headed power maul on his back glowed faintly, its runes reacting to the residue.
"Strange," he muttered, leaning closer.
"There are impacts here, clean ones. These weren't misses."
He traced the edge of one crater with a practiced finger.
"They hit something… then exited."
He pointed the maul toward the opposite wall—where more holes aligned in a perfect through-line.
"But whatever was struck—left no trace."
He rose slowly, eyes narrowing.
"This place reeks death."
A beat.
"And yet… nothing was found."
—
They continued downward—another level, another flight of metal steps echoing beneath them.
Then Seraphine staggered.
She lurched sideways, veil trembling—and a stream of black bile spilled from her lips, splattering the grated floor.
Her knees buckled.
Obol was at her side in an instant.
"Lady Seraphine—"
—
She wiped her mouth with the back of her glove, trying—failing—to mask the tremor in her breath.
A strained smile tugged at her lips.
"Quite the gallant… aren't you, Lord Obol?"
Her voice rasped, the humor brittle and thin.
—
Obol exhaled slowly, one hand bracing her shoulder, the other pressing gently to her temple.
"Do not waste strength on bravado.
Are you able to continue?"
—
Seraphine closed her eyes for a heartbeat.
The veil fluttered.
Her fingers tightened around the Aquila-topped staff.
She nodded—weak but resolute.
"I will endure."
Supported by her staff, she pushed herself upright, each step careful but determined as the party resumed its descent into the dark.
—
As they descended, the shadows pressed closer.
The air grew thicker—wrong.
Then—
"Obol."
The voice struck his mind like a cold blade, sharp and urgent.
"Obol Kharon.
Leave that place.
Do not go further."
—
Obol stiffened.
He didn't look around—didn't dare.
In his thoughts alone, he answered.
"Anathor? You can see what I'm seeing?"
—
A ripple moved through his skull—like distant machinery turning, like breath inside metal lungs.
"Yes.
And more than you can.
Leave. Now.
For your own mortality."
—
Obol's jaw tightened.
He kept walking.
"I cannot. We must learn what happened here—must bring word to the Imperium."
—
A pause—heavy, cold, unreadable.
Then the question came, alien in its simplicity.
"Why?"
—
Obol's fingers tightened around his weapon.
"For mankind."
Silence followed.
Anathor receded like a tide pulling back,
watching through Obol's eyes,
feeling through Obol's senses,
but offering nothing more than presence.
—
"How many people lived on this station, Magos?"
Caldrin's voice carried forward—too loud in the dead hallway.
The question made the hair along Obol's neck stand on end.
—
Thale did not look up from his wrist-slate.
"Estimated population: ten to forty thousand."
The number hung in the air.
—
"Yet.... there's nothing." Caldrin whispered.
A silence no station of that size should ever know.
—
Seraphine staggered to a halt.
Her staff struck the metal floor with a resonant clang—
a sound far too heavy for her slight frame.
The entire party turned sharply toward her.
Her veil trembled.
Her breath misted in the cold air.
And she lifted a shaking hand toward the rusted sign bolted above a sealed hatch.
"Here…"
Her voice was barely more than a rasp.
Her finger pointed upward
ENGINE.
—
Obol lowered the flickering slate, its hololith-map dissolving into static again.
"Record said this room is contaminated," he muttered.
"But there should be an engineering room for monitoring.
A secondary control point."
—
His eyes scanned the corridor's shadows, watching for another sign—another door—anything.
Metal creaked somewhere above them.
Everyone shifted, weapons half-raised.
Then—
"Over here, milord!"
Isera's voice cut through the gloom.
Her shock-spear snapped forward, illuminating the wall ahead with the thin blue glow of its charged prongs.
A worn plaque hung crooked over a sealed hatch, half-rusted, half-burned:
ENGINEERING – PRIMARY CONTROL
The letters flickered with faint lumen-strips struggling for life.
Caldrin joined her side, sweeping his autogun across the darkness.
Thrykos stepped up behind the couple, power maul igniting with a bone-white hum.
Obol approached last, jaw tightened, eyes narrowing at the sealed hatch.
"Engineering," he said quietly.
—
Seraphine shuddered behind him, whispering to nobody—or to something only she could hear.
"…so many voices…"
—
The hatch groaned open under Thale's override, its locks grinding like they hadn't moved in weeks.
The boarding party stepped inside.
The Engineering Control Room stretched before them—wide, circular, and dimly lit by dying red lumen-strips.
Rows of cogitator banks curved along the walls like ribs of a dark cathedral.
At the far side stood a reinforced viewing window, thick as a fortress wall.
Beyond it, the Engine Room lay in darkness.
Obol approached the glass, watching the void-black chamber beyond but couldn't see anything—
"High-Scion," Thrykos rumbled, interrupted Obol from investigating further.
His maul lowered slightly—not in readiness, but in recognition.
"There is someone here."
—
Caldrin angled his autogun toward the floor.
Isera had already started moving.
Her spear dipped low, and her cloak swept aside as she rushed deeper into the room.
There—against the base of a cogitator pillar—
A body.
Sitting upright.
Back braced against the control panel. Head slumped forward onto her chest.
A woman, still in an officer's coat, filthy with soot and dried blood.
Isera dropped to one knee beside her, checking the collar.
Her gloved fingers brushed the silvered nameplate.
She froze.
"…Commander Varas," she whispered.
The same woman from the log.
—
Thale stepped closer, his optics narrowing sharply.
"Impossible. Estimated survival probability after two months—"
—
"Quiet," Isera hissed.
Her fingers pressed lightly against the officer's throat.
Everyone held their breath.
Then—
Her eyes widened.
"…pulse," she whispered, disbelieving.
"She's alive."
Isera leaned in closer.
Commander Varas' face was sunken, cheeks hollowed into sharp angles.
Her lips were cracked white. Her skin clung to bone like old parchment.
She had not eaten in days—maybe longer.
She had likely sat here the entire time since sealing the Engine Room.
"I'm waking her," Isera said softly.
Obol nodded once.
She pressed two fingers gently beneath Varas' jaw, balancing her head upright.
"Commander… Varas? Can you hear me?"
—
The officer's eyelids twitched.
Then—
Her eyes snapped open.
Wide.
Alive with terror.
She sucked in a ragged breath and screamed.
"NO—NO, STAY BACK!
YOU'RE NOT REAL—
YOU'RE NOT—!"
Caldrin lunged forward, hands raised in a calming gesture—
But Varas thrashed, scrambling backward on trembling legs.
"You're changed! I SAW WHAT YOU BECAME—DON'T TOUCH ME—!"
—
"Varas, stop," Obol called, stepping closer, voice steady but firm.
"We are House Kharon—Imperial—"
—
She wasn't listening.
Her eyes darted around the room, pupils blown wide with weeks of starvation and hallucination. Her breath hitched in broken sobs.
"I sealed them out—sealed it out—
I won't… I won't let you turn me—
I WON'T GO LIKE THE OTHERS!"
Before anyone registered the movement—
Varas' hand snatched a jagged shard of broken paneling from the floor.
A sharp metal spike.
—
"Isera—!" Caldrin shouted.
Too late.
Varas lunged with the desperation of an animal cornered by ghosts.
The shard plunged into Isera's side.
Shk-Shk—Shk!
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
Each strike wild—each fueled by hysteria.
Isera gasped, staggered back, cloak flaring as blood seeped through her envoy suit.
Caldrin roared, charging in—But she had already stabbed Isera again.
The spear clattered from her hands.
Isera's cry tore through the chamber as the jagged metal sank deep into her abdomen.
Blood splashed across her crimson envoy suit.
Her legs buckled.
She collapsed, gasping, fingers slipping in her own pooling blood.
"Isera!" Caldrin roared.
His autogun fell from his hands as he lunged.
A single kick—brutal, fueled by fury—sent Commander Varas crashing backward.
Her spine struck the thick transparisteel window with a dull thud.
But she didn't fall.
She clawed at the floor, at the walls, at the ragged shard in her hand, eyes full of feral terror.
"Get away from me! I won't become one of you—
I won't—I WON'T!"
—
Caldrin slammed into her, pinning her wrist against the glass.
"DROP IT!"
—
She didn't.
She twisted the shard up toward his throat.
Her arm snapped forward—
BANG!
BANG!
Two shots cracked through the chamber, deafening in the enclosed space.
Obol stood frozen in the firing stance—sidearm still smoking, muzzle-flash fading from his barrel.
Varas jerked twice, the breath knocked from her body.
The shard slipped from her fingers.
Her head rolled to the side, eyes glassy.
Caldrin staggered back, chest heaving, choking on shock and rage.
But Obol wasn't looking at Varas.
His eyes were fixed on the window behind her.
On what the muzzle flash had illuminated.
The darkness beyond the glass wasn't empty.
Obol's breath hitched.
His mind stalled—caught between disbelief and horror.
Then—
"High-Scion!"
Thrykos' gauntleted hand clamped down on his pauldron, shaking hard enough to rattle metal.
Obol blinked—snapped back into his body.
He turned.
Caldrin was on his knees, cradling Isera against his chest.
Her hands trembling around the bleeding wound.
Her teeth grit against a scream she refused to let out.
Thale was already at her side, vox chanting binharic triage liturgies, mechadendrites whirring as they sealed vessels and stabilized vitals with surgical precision.
Obol's gaze shifted—
—and froze on Seraphine.
She stood rooted to the deck.
Her grip on the Aquila-staff was white-knuckled, nails cracked and bleeding where they dug into the haft.
Her veil trembled.
Her eyes—whatever lay behind that warped blindness—were fixed on the window.
Staring.
Whatever she saw held her like a vice.
"Fuck—!" Obol spat, shoving down the swell of dread in his throat.
He stepped over Varas' corpse, boots splashing in blood, and reached for the wall panel beside the window.
His fingers found the manual override.
A heavy lever, dust-caked and rust-stiff.
He pulled it down with a snap.
The light in the Engine Room flared on—and the truth was finally visible.
Everyone in the control room froze.
The Engine Room—
was full.
Packed wall to wall.
Countless bodies stood shoulder to shoulder, packed like a human sea that had forgotten how to breathe, their backs turned against the window.
Their limbs hung slack.
Their heads lifted, looking at something.
Skin stretched tight across faces that looked half-starved, half embalmed.
Thousands of them.
The sight hit Obol like a fist to the lungs.
"…Emperor preserve us," he whispered.
But the nightmare had a center.
Because above that stagnant mass—
something floated.
Levitating a full meter off the ground.
A single figure—
thin, elongated, spine bent wrong—arms drooping like marionette strings without a puppeteer.
Its robes were astropath-green, shredded and soaked in something too black to be blood.
Chains trailed from its limbs.
And at its throat—
a heavy iron band fitted with sigil-plates still flickering weakly.
A psyker's null collar.
Its halo of shattered runes glowed like dying embers around its head.
Thrykos raised his repeater, sighted through the scope—the lens adjusted, zooming in on the collar.
The old veteran's voice cracked just slightly.
"An… astropath," he muttered.
But even he couldn't say it with certainty.
Because the thing's eyes—
glowed from behind their sewn-shut lids.
Black Light leaking from the stitches like a furnace trapped behind cloth.
Seraphine stumbled backward, clutching her staff as if it were the only thing anchoring her to sanity.
The floating figure in the Engine Room—
was a Daemonhost—
it turned its head toward her with a slow, unnatural rotation.
Stitches tore at the strain.
Black light leaked through the cracks.
Seraphine's breath hitched.
Then the thing's interest fixed on her—
one psyker sensing another.
Her veil snapped backward as if yanked by an invisible current.
"Run—!"
The word barely escaped her lips before her feet left the floor.
Her body lifted—straight up—head tilted at a wrong, painful angle,unable to tear her gaze from the abomination behind the glass.
Everyone froze in horror.
"No—!" Obol lunged—
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Thrykos' repeater barked three sharp flashes.
The rounds slammed into the reinforced glass—and vanished.
Not deflected nor ricocheted.
They were absorbed.
The glass pulsed once, like a membrane digesting the kinetic force.
"What in the—" Thrykos choked, already reloading, teeth bared.
—
Behind them, Caldrin was struggling to hold Isera upright, while Thale performed emergency treatment, stitching cut and reconnect her vessels, her blood soaking through Caldrin's arm.
"Obol!" Caldrin shouted, voice raw with fear and rage.
"She's dying—!"
—
Seraphine's heels kicked at empty air, hands clawing at the invisible grip that held her aloft.
Her staff slipped from her fingers and clattered against the deck.
Obol drew his sword in a single, fluid motion, the ceramite grip trembling in his hand—not with fear, but fury.
The daemonhost's mouth split into a grin too wide, too deliberate.
Its voice slithered through the glass like smoke:
"Perfect.....another one."
The glass began to bulge outward where Seraphine was held—as if the thing's attention alone was enough to deform reality.
The entire station seemed to groan.
The lights steadied in the Engine Room and the thing in the center lifted its head.
A slow, jerking motion.
Like a marionette pulled by invisible strings.
Then—
Seraphine choked.
Her body lifted higher from the ground, boots scraping helplessly against the metal before losing contact entirely.
"Seraphine!"
Obol lunged forward—too late.
His hand closed around her ankle as she was dragged upward, weight tearing against his grip.
For a heartbeat, he held her.
Then—
SCREEEKKK—
A sound like flesh being ripped off bone.
Obol looked up—
—and she was gone.
Vanished into the air, swallowed by the pull of the daemonhost.
All that remained in his hands was her foot.
Torn free just above the ankle, still warm, still bleeding.
Obol froze.
Then dropped it.
The severed limb hit the grated floor with a wet, final thud.
Behind him, someone screamed.
Thrykos' oath choked in his throat.
Caldrin staggered back, clutching Isera tighter as if to shield her from the sight.
Vanished into the air, swallowed by the pull of the daemonhost.
All that remained in his hands
was her foot.
Torn free just above the ankle, still warm, still bleeding.
Obol froze.
Then dropped it.
The severed limb hit the grated floor with a wet, final thud.
Behind him, someone screamed.
Thrykos' oath choked in his throat.
Caldrin staggered back, clutching Isera tighter as if to shield her from the sight.
Serephine slowly being pulled toward the daemonhost.
Her veil fluttered, then soaked dark.
Blood and tears seeped from beneath the cloth running down in thin red lines.
The thing's gaze fixed on her, hungry, knowing, ancient.
Behind her, the chamber reacted all at once.
A sound—wet, sharp, like a knuckle cracking—
POP.
One head burst.
Then another.
POP—POP—POP—
Grey matter splattered the walls.
Blood streaked the glass in sudden, violent arcs.
Bodies crumpled in chains, slumping like puppets with their strings cut.
The sickening rhythm continued—
POP
POP
POP POP
The Engine Room filled with a fog of iron and steam, and not a single corpse remained intact.
The glass shuddered, spider-cracks spreading across its surface as gore battered against it from the inside.
Seraphine writhed in the air—her veil torn and dripping red, her fingers clawing at nothing as her mouth opened in a silent, choking scream.
She was being pulled forward—inch by inch—toward the levitating horror that had once been an Imperial astropath.
The daemonhost tilted its head, watching her approach with childlike curiosity.
"FIRE!" Obol roared.
Slugs, autogun rounds, and repeater shells tore through the air—hammering the glass, the walls, the console housings—but nothing penetrated the shimmering pressure around the creature.
It didn't even flinch.
Seraphine screamed as her spine arched.
Obol's eyes snapped downward just as the air recoiled from Isera's spear—the heat shimmering off the flamer-line along its shaft.
His breath caught.
He snatched the spear off the floor.
With one motion he jammed the twin prongs into the observation window and pulled the igniter—
FWOOM
The concentrated promethium jet hit the reinforced panel like molten acid.
Glass softened—bowed—then sagged like melted resin.
"NOW!" he shouted, voice cracking.
BANG! BOOM!
BANG! BANG!
Weapons opened up again, every Scion firing through the burning breach—
but the rounds still twisted away from the abomination, spiraling into nothing.
Pointless.
All pointless—
BANG.
The world froze.
Seraphine's head burst apart in a red blossom, her body going limp in the air.
Obol's breath died in his chest.
Slowly, he turned.
Thale's mechadendrite hung in the air, Isera's compact auto-pistol gripped like a surgical tool.
Smoke drifted from the barrel.
The Magos Dominus lowered it—calm, almost emotionless.
"Whatever it intended with her," Thale said, voice flat as iron,
"this was the only statistically viable interruption."
Seraphine's body dropped to the floor on the other side of the melted window with a hollow, wet thud.
The daemonhost turned its gaze toward them—and smiled.
—
"Run."
Anathor's voice struck Obol's mind with the force of a bell.
One word—Instinct overriding thought.
Obol moved before breath returned to him.
He helped Caldrin hauled Isera with one arm—her blood slick on his gauntlet, her breaths thin and rattling.
Caldrin shifted immediately, taking her weight, his face a mask of terror barely held together with fury.
Behind them,
Thale advanced backwards, mechadendrites sweeping up discarded weapons and dragging them in a clatter of steel—arms of a predatory machine refusing to leave anything useful behind.
Thrykos was last.
The veteran planted himself at the threshold, repeater aimed into the collapsing chamber, firing measured bursts not at the daemonhost—but to stagger whatever writhed in the shadows behind it.
Then—
CHNK-CHNK-CHNK
Incendiary grenades clattered into the Engine Room.
"Burn in hell, you bastard," Thrykos growled.
A heartbeat later—
FWOOOOOOM
A wall of white-orange fire devoured the chamber, flash-painting the glass with molten streaks as shrieking silhouettes flailed within.
The daemonhost didn't flinch.
It only turned its head.
Watching—Smiling.
Thrykos slammed the hatch shut and spun the valve until his wrists popped.
Metal screamed.
He seized a bent length of conduit—twice his arm's thickness—and jammed it into the locking teeth, forcing it down with a grunt until the bar wedged tight.
The hatch buckled once from the other side.
A warping sound. Something pressing against it.
"Move!" Thrykos barked, pushing away from the door.
"Now!"
The team fled down the corridor, boots pounding, smoke rolling after them like a living pursuit.
Behind them—
the hatch trembled again.
A hairline crack spidered across its surface.
They did not look back.
They ran.
—
"Where is the closest hangar, Magos?"
Obol shouted over the thunder of gunfire, sweat streaking down his temple, stinging his eyes.
Behind him—
BRRAAT—BRRAAT—BRRAT!
Thrykos' repeater roared in disciplined bursts while Thale's mechadendrites snapped forward, firing integrated las-stings in rapid succession. Their shots carved streaks of light through the dark corridor—
—but did nothing.
The hatch they'd sealed exploded outward.
The daemonhost drifted through the shrapnel fog like a corpse risen on puppet strings, head lolling, limbs weightless, robes dragging across the deck with a whisper like dead leaves.
Sigils burned faintly beneath its skin—charcoal-black veins crawling with red light.
"Magos!" Obol barked, tightening his grip on the barely-conscious Isera as Caldrin kept her upright.
Without slowing, Thale's optics flickered through three colors—red, blue, then amber—as he processed schematics in real time.
"Port transit lane—one level down. 212 meters"
His vox-voice rattled with strain as another mechadendrite drew a pistol and fired.
"Follow the primary tram rail—left junction."
Metal groaned behind them.
The daemonhost accelerated.
Not running.
Not flying.
Dragged by invisible force— jerking forward in violent snaps like gravity itself was folding to pull it closer.
Every lumen it passed shattered in a burst of sparks.
"MOVE!" Obol yelled.
The party broke into a full sprint—
boots hammering metal—
breaths ragged—
the wounded Isera carried between her husband and her commander.
Obol slapped a blood-streaked hand to the vox-beads at his ear—
"Psicopompos!" he roared, breath tearing out of him as they ran.
"Disengage the airlocks and descend to Floor 61!
Ready starboard firing solutions and grav-projector."
—
For a heartbeat, only static answered.
Then the bridge crackled to life.
"High-Scion, confirm Floor 61?"
—
"DO IT!" Obol bellowed, the word echoing down the corridor like a gunshot.
"NOW!"
Another beat.
Then—
"Aye, High-Scion! Disengaging locks—maneuvering thrusters igniting—
grav projector charging!"
A distant tremor rolled through the station's walls as the great ship obeyed, repositioning like a leviathan realigning itself in the deep.
Behind them—
SKREEEE—RRRHK
The daemonhost twisted, its body writhing midair as if reality recoiled around it.
Its head snapped toward Obol with a wet crack, and its lips peeled back in a smile far too wide.
"Flee."
The word crawled into Obol's skull like a parasite.
—
Ahead, emergency lumen-strips flickered and then stabilized—just enough to guide their sprint.
Behind him, Caldrin hissed.
"Obol—she's fading—!"
Isera's blood dripped in a thin trail behind them, each drop sizzling on the deck. Her breaths were shallow, her eyes unfocused but still clinging to life.
—
Obol tightened his grip on her arm and forced his legs to move faster.
"Hold her—keep pressure on the wound!" he barked.
—
Thrykos fired another repeater burst—
BRAP-BRAP-BRAP!
"Magos, status?!" Obol demanded.
Thale didn't look back, three mechadendrites firing independently while a fourth supported Isera's weight.
"Rapid descent of the Psicopompos has destabilized the station's residual gravity," he answered through clenched vox.
"Corridor shifts are imminent."
And still—
the daemonhost came.
Silent.
Gliding.
Unstoppable.
The station lurched— a loud groan like a dying titan rolled through the metal bones of the corridor as the Psicopompos tore itself free of the docking clamps.
Gravity spasmed—first sideways, then down, then nowhere at all.
The entire corridor tilted.
Obol's boots lost traction—his shoulder slammed into a wall.
Caldrin nearly dropped Isera.
Thale's mechadendrites stabbed into the deck to anchor himself, sparking.
Behind them, the daemonhost floated, perfectly level, drifting after them as if gravity itself bowed to its presence.
The party stumbled, half-crawling, half-running at a steep angle as the whole passage rolled onto its side.
Lumen-strips flickered erratically, bathing them in stuttering red as if warning the station itself was dying.
Thrykos braced himself sideways, firing down the slanted hall—
BRAP-BRAP-BRAP!
None of it slowed the thing.
The daemonhost glided over the tilted floor, fingers trailing along the metal as if tasting every ripple of fear.
A vent tore from the ceiling and skidded past them, sucked backward by the shifting gravity field toward the pursuing horror.
Obol forced his feet to keep moving, dragging against the pull.
"Magos!" he roared, struggling for balance.
"Structural intregity?!"
—
Thale's voice cut through the chaos—flat, strained, red runes flickering across his optics as he clung to the tilted deck with embedded mechadendrites.
"The Psicopompos' disengagement has severed half the stabilizer locks.
The station is no longer anchored to orbital drift."
A bellow rolled through the corridor as the entire station were shifting down toward the world below.
Thale continued, tone rising by a fraction—enough to signal danger even a human could feel.
"We have an hour—perhaps less—before planetary gravity asserts dominance."
He braced himself against another violent tilt.
"We must reach an egress point before freefall."
Behind them, the daemonhost glided faster—gravity meant nothing to it.
The boarding party had nearly reached the stairwell when—
KRRAAAAAANG—
A seismic roar tore through the corridor.
The entire deck lurched beneath their feet as something massive slammed into the station from outside.
The lights flickered. Dust rained from the ceiling.
A low, shuddering groan rolled through the superstructure as the floor began to tilt—
first a few degrees, then sharply, violently—
UPWARD.
Thrykos slammed a gauntlet against the wall to anchor himself.
Caldrin grabbed Isera, dragging her against a support beam as the angle increased.
Thale steadied himself with three mechadendrites, his optics flaring in warning-red.
"Impact detected," he snapped.
"External object—unknown composition.
Possibility : an ice rock from the planet's ring system."
—
The hallway tilted again—steeper, groaning with the strain.
Loose debris slid past them, tumbling toward what had become the lower end of the corridor.
Obol braced himself against a bulkhead.
"What angle are we at?"
—
"Forty-seven degrees and rising," Thale answered instantly.
"Structural integrity will not survive prolonged stress at this vector."
—
Isera pointed upward—the stairwell, once level with them, now hung above like a ladder bolted to a cliff face.
"We climb," Obol ordered.
They began to ascend, boots clanging against the angled floor, grabbing at pipes and recessed handles as the world tilted around them.
Then Obol hit his vox-bead.
"Psicopompos."
—
The reply came instantly, tense and clipped.
"Standing by, my lord."
—
"Prepare plasma cannons."
Obol's voice cut through the chaos, sharp as a blade.
"Fire on my mark."
—
"Acknowledged, High-Scion. Plasma batteries charging."
The corridor groaned around them, tilted nearly vertical now.
—
"Everyone—HANG ON!" Obol barked.
"And throw everything you can down the shaft!"
Thrykos didn't need to be told twice—he kicked a storage locker loose and sent it crashing downward.
Caldrin tossed fragmentation grenades.
Isera hurled broken pipes and torn paneling.
Even Thale snapped off a bulkhead strut with a mechadendrite and flung it into the darkness below.
A hailstorm of debris rained down the corridor.
It clattered, shattered, some hit and stuck to it form
But the daemonhost rose through it.
Unbothered.
Its form absorbing or exuding every object, climbing the corridor like gravity did not apply.
Obol's jaw set.
"Cover me."
Before anyone could protest, he dropped himself down the shaft.
He slid, boots scraping metal, cape snapping behind him.
He hit a door-frame mid-fall and caught himself with one arm.
Below, the daemonhost reached upward—fingers stretching,
Obol swung his leg and stomped the lockdown control on the door-frame.
CHUNK.
The blast-door slammed shut—just as the daemonhost's fingers got cut by the bulkhead.
"NOW!" he roared into the vox.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
The Psicopompos' starboard cannons struck the station in rapid sequence.
The entire corridor lurched violently as the impact forced the station downward in its orbit.
Obol was launched like a projectile.
He slammed shoulder-first into the wall.
A sickening CRACK snapped through his armor.
"FUCK—!"
His voice strangled in pain as he tumbled to a stop against a railing.
White-hot agony radiated through his arm.
"I Dislocated my shoulder" he hissed through clenched teeth, trying—and failing—to push himself upright.
—
Above him, Thrykos shouted.
"High-Scion!"
Boots thundered as the Scions scrambled to reach him, the daemonhost pounding on the other side of the sealed hatch—each blow bending metal like foil.
Obol forced himself to his knees, his injured arm hanging limp.
Behind them—
the daemonhost accelerated.
Its eyes burned black through the dark.
"RUN—!" Obol repeated, half-shoving, half-guiding the others.
They reached the stairwell—
—and stopped short.
The stairs were wrong—tilted ninety degrees, every step became a vertical plate.
Every landing a slanted ledge.
Gravity still pulled them down the corridor, not down the stairwell.
They would have to walk on the side wall, gripping railings like ladders.
Obol stepped sideways into the stairwell, boots gripping the metal wall.
His hand seized the railing, using it as a climbing bar.
"FOLLOW ME!"
Thrykos shoved Caldrin and Isera forward.
Thale came next, mag-clamps clicking.
The daemonhost hovered into the stairwell behind them, passing the doorframe without slowing.
The distortion of its passage made the handrails tremble.
The boarding party climbed SIDEWAYS—
walking along the wall, hauling themselves around corners,
passing stairways that yawned like vertical pits.
Floor numbers rotated at crazy angles:
62 — sideways
61 — sideways
60 — upside-down behind them
Lights flickered.
Distant explosions boomed as Psicopompos fired again to stabilize the descent.
Obol's shoulder burned with every pull.
Thale's vox spoke loudly.
"WE ARE NEARING HANGAR LEVELS.
ADVISE INCREASED SPEED."
—
"I'm TRYING!" Obol snapped, voice cracking.
A bulkhead in the stairwell suddenly buckled inward—the daemonhost's arm pushing through steel like wet parchment.
Its injured hand slowly began growing fingers and groped toward Caldrin's boot.
Obol grabbed him by his collar and yanked him upward along the wall.
Another rumble—
Another plasma strike—
And suddenly—
A splash of white-blue light washed through the stairwell.
A hangar bay.
The Psicopompos had aligned.
A surge of white-blue radiance poured through the ruptured docking doors—
the grav-projectors firing at full intensity.
The air warped.
Metal groaned as if resenting the correction.
And then—
GRAVITY TURNED.
The sideways world snapped violently upright.
Obol's boots wrenched beneath him and slammed to the floor—
the real floor now, pulled back into alignment with the Psicopompos' artificial gravity field.
Thrykos staggered, catching Isera.
Caldrin dropped to one knee, dragging her with him.
Thale's mag-clamps sparked as they recalibrated mid-fall.
The entire stairwell shuddered, stair-plates folding into nonsense geometry as the projector's field forced the station to obey.
Obol didn't look back—
he looked up.
And saw the open hangar yawning before him, bathed in the false-dawn glow of the projectors.
Dust floated upward, then down again as gravity stabilized.
Because behind them—
the daemonhost landed perfectly on its feet.
Unshaken, unbroken, its silhouette reforming in the rising dust.
It tilted its head, vertebrae cracking like snapping twigs.
Black light slid across its hollow eyes.
Obol's heartbeat slammed in his ears.
And then—
his vox-beads erupted in panic.
"The vault—#@!;—breached—"
"—the fused—!night#?!—loose!"
"It's—#^+—moving toward—@&0!—the hang—#R—!"
Voices layered over one another, shards of words cutting through static like flailing knives.
The channel cracked, drowned by screeching feedback—as if the vox itself was terrified.
Obol looked up—and the deck shook beneath his boots.
BOOM.
A second impact.
BOOM.
Dust rained from the ceiling.
And then, through the blinding glare of the Psicopompos' grav-projectors—
Anathor burst into the hangar.
Warp-fused plates scraped the bulkhead.
Its gait was uneven—half a stride from Thanatos, half from Cinerion, and something else woven between.
It moved like a thing that had never learned how to walk—
only how to charge.
Its optics snapped onto the daemonhost.
Amber. Burning. Focused.
The vox went dead-silent in Obol's ear.
—
"Congratulations, Obol Kharon." he muttered under his breath.
"You managed to keep a secret for almost a week
—FUCK!"
The curse tore out louder than intended.
Four snapped toward him in shock.
—
"To be precise," Anathor said calmly inside his mind,
"it was four days and six hours—"
—
"You're not helping!" Obol barked aloud, cutting the voice off.
He turned sharply to the others, who were now staring at him like he'd grown a second head.
"No time for explanations! MOVE!" he shouted.
"Get to the Psicopompos—now!"
—
The daemonhost halted.
Every joint locked with a sickening crack as its head snapped toward Anathor.
Its voice rasped out, not from its mouth, but from everywhere at once—
"What… are you?"
The thing drifted backward, as if pulled away by invisible hooks.
Its eyes—black, bottomless—widened with primal recognition.
"Why do you carry the scent—"
Its jaw unhinged, flesh tearing.
"—of the FIRST PRINCE?"
The corridor shook as it shrieked, the sound splitting lumen-strips and rupturing pipes overhead.
It recoiled, limbs folding inward like a dying insect.
"HE DID NOT MAKE YOU.
HE DID NOT BREATHE YOU.
WHAT ARE YOU?"
Its body convulsed.
It was afraid.
Afraid of the fused Knight.
Afraid of Anathor.
—
Anathor answered—cold and indifferent, without breath or emotion.
"I am Anathor.
The Soulless."
—
Then he moved.
The fused giant exploded forward, floor plating buckling beneath its weight.
In a single, fluid motion, Anathor's hand closed around the daemonhost's skull—fingers digging in with a metallic scream.
SLAM.
The impact cracked the deck like brittle bone, a shockwave rattling the entire hangar junction.
Before the daemonhost could even twitch, Anathor yanked it up—
then hurled it sideways with horrific force.
KRAKK—!
Its body hit a pillar, folding at angles that broke anatomy.
Spine snapped. Limbs twisted. Flesh ballooned and sank like melted wax.
For a heartbeat, it stayed down.
Then—
crk… crk-CRK…
The daemonhost floated back up.
Its bones rearranged themselves in jagged snaps—spine knitting, ribs sliding back into place, neck rolling unnaturally until its head faced the right way again.
It hovered, ruined flesh tightening like a drawn veil.
Then, in a voice split between a thousand whispers and a single scream.
"SOULLESS ?…
YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST
I will reclaim HIS fragment from your still corpse and ascend."
—
Anathor did not answer.
He charged again.
The titan's stride shook the bay, every movement fueled not by reactor or spirit, but by something deeper—something that should never have existed.
The daemonhost met him in a blur of snapping limbs and warping flesh, claws dragging sparks across Anathor's breastplate as the two collided with a sound like collapsing stone.
Obol staggered back from the shockwave.
The path to the Psicopompos' hangar—open, lit,
salvation—lay just a dozen meters behind him.
He could run.
He could lead his Scions through.
He could survive.
But if he crossed that threshold—
Psicopompos would seal the bulkhead.
And Anathor would be left behind.
—
He swore, fists tightening around the hilt of his sheathed sword.
He couldn't lose another one.
Not again.
Obol turned—and ran toward the fight.
"High-Scion—!" Thrykos shouted behind him.
Caldrin yelled something as well, struggling to carry Isera, weapons firing wildly to keep the corridor clear.
But Obol didn't hear them.
His mind was already locked onto the daemonhost.
He drew steel.
The sword hissed from its sheath, its gold-inlaid teeth catching the flicker of grav-light.
In his other hand—the compact assault-shotgun snapped open, slug loaded, chamber slammed shut with a harsh CLACK.
He planted his feet.
"Anathor!" he roared.
—
The fused Knight's optics flashed—a single amber flare of recognition.
"Obol Kharon."
The voice rang in his mind like a tolling bell.
The daemonhost twisted in Anathor's grip, jaws splitting open, leaking black fire.
A blast of warp-light erupted from its torso—
SHOOM—
slamming into Anathor's chestplate, melting runes and tearing fused plating apart.
The giant staggered.
Obol sprinted.
He fired.
BOOM—!
The slug tore through one of the daemonhost's distended arms.
It didn't slow.
He fired again.
BOOM!
This time the blast tore a chunk from its shoulder—yet the wound closed instantly, bone writhing beneath wet flesh.
The daemonhost shrieked, its eyes burning with fractured gold.
It saw Obol.
And smiled.
Then it surged toward him—
but Anathor slammed a fist around its midsection, yanking it back, crushing ribs with a sound like snapping metal.
Obol skid to a halt, breath burning in his lungs, sword raised, shotgun leveled.
"Psicopompos—disengage!"
Obol's order cracked across the vox like a blade.
The entire station lurched as the great ship's thrusters fired in reverse, straining against the planet's pull.
Steel groaned. Bulkheads screamed.
Gravity twisted sideways for a heartbeat, then snapped back.
Obol didn't look away from the daemonhost.
"I won't die!" he shouted over the thunder of engines.
"Just trust me!"
—
He fired again—
BOOM!
the slug tearing a line of black fire across the daemonhost's drifting flesh.
It barely reacted.
Behind him, Thale froze—optic narrowing, mechadendrites curling like startled serpents as he stared at the fused Knight.
"A man of iron?"
The Magos whispered, the words half accusation, half disbelief.
Anathor did not answer.
His amber optics were locked on the daemonhost—
calculating, hungry, alive.
—
A sudden shout tore Obol's attention sideways.
"High-Scion!"
Isera.
Pale. Bleeding. barely conscious in Caldrin's arms.
With the last shreds of her strength she tore her spear from its sling and hurled it—
—a line of crimson and gold spinning through the grav-light—
It struck the deck beside Obol's boot with a ringing impact, skidding to his grasp.
He snatched it up.
The flamer-vent hissed as he thumbed the igniter.
He sheathed his sword in a single practiced motion.
Isera sagged against Caldrin's shoulder, her eyes fluttering shut.
Caldrin held her tight, jaw clenched.
"End that monster," he growled.
—
Obol lifted the spear.
Its twin prongs glowed ember-red.
Promethium surged through the line with a dull thrum.
The daemonhost turned—head twisting almost all the way around in a snapping spiral—to face him.
Its voice slithered across the air.
"You cannot burn what is already beyond fire…"
—
Obol stepped forward.
"Then let's find out."
He leveled the spear, flame building at its core—
And Anathor advanced beside him, each step cracking the deckplates, the fused Knight's shadow falling over Obol like a towering omen.
Then charged.