The Auric Silence learned a new note. It threaded through her decks at watch-change—higher than coolant, lower than reactor-hum—an edge on the ship's voice no maintenance hymn could sand away. Men who had slept through shelling woke to it. Servitors paused between tasks as if the next command were already in the room. Even the lumen strips brightened a fraction and then seemed embarrassed, settling back as if they'd coughed in chapel.
Kael stood in the spine corridor and listened until the sound became part of his blood. The void outside was a black so complete it had forgotten stars. The navigators called it clear weather. He called it a lens: something was about to be seen.
Orders arrived unsigned and absolute. Not a target. A rendezvous. Not a planet. A point in space that ships would make into a place by agreeing to be there at the same time. Var Juren read the slate and did not change his face.
"Legionwide summons," he said. "No embellishment. We jump within the hour."
Kael inclined his head. "All companies?"
"All that can be gathered. We are to arrive formed and quiet." A beat, softer than Juren's words deserved. "The Emperor will be present."
The deck felt narrower, as if respect had mass.
Kael took the summons the way a man takes ash from a fire he keeps—carefully, grateful that heat still exists. He walked the Company deck without speaking. Armour sat open on cradles. Kits lay in ordered lines like tidy rows of small lies. Malchion tightened a strap until leather protested; Joras cleaned optics that already showed the world cruelly enough; Silas whispered to a power unit until its hum stopped sounding petulant.
"Dress parade or war?" Malchion asked without looking up.
"Neither," Kael said. "Something that will ask us to pretend we are not built for either."
They embarked.
The jump was gentle, like falling past the idea of falling. Kael's vision blurred at the edges and then remembered itself. When the Auric Silence bled back into realspace, the viewport filled with ships: a cathedral of hulls arrayed in patient tiers, banners folded, gun decks shuttered, wakes trimmed as if the void were water and someone cared about the shape of its surface. VII Legion bastions in yellow, Luna Wolves daggers in grey and white, Army carriers like hives hung on their sides, Mechanicum spires bristling with mathematics. No salute. No demand to be seen. The kind of order that doesn't need witnesses.
And at the centre—no single vessel, nothing so small. A presence. The Emperor's fleet. Light seemed to stand straighter near it.
Kael did not look long. Men who stare at the sun end up talking about light instead of work.
The summons to assembly carried no sound. It arrived in the body: a bruit through gene-seed, a pressure change in the skull like weather moving in. The Night's Children left their decks without speaking. Armour seals kissed skin in a litany of punctures and agreements. Cloaks were left behind; their shadows were not needed here. They marched to the forward hangar, boots marking time clean enough to drink.
Var Juren stood at the head, augmetic eye ticking faintly. "Positions," he said. The word arranged giants. The hangar's outer doors opened to void held back by a wall of field so perfect the air forgot to shiver. Across the gulf, other Legions formed: the precise geometry of the Fists, the confident sprawl of the Wolves. The Night's Children took their place and allowed the space between to do its work.
Kael's twin hearts found each other's pace. He thought of nothing. He allowed the next thing to arrive.
It arrived like a tide the ship could not register: a hum through the bones of men. A great transmission made of intention, not radio. Astropaths bowed under it and called it song because they had no accurate word. Gene-lines everywhere answered. The VIII's black-eyed ranks stiffened in the same breath—as if someone had said now inside each of them in a voice they had never heard and always obeyed.
Five seconds moved in Kael's head like a silent film played too fast: rain over a city that had no dawn, a figure on a tower with the dark for a cloak, a hand that had never shaken reaching toward a world and finding it already open. Then it was gone, leaving his palms cool and his mouth dry.
Malchion's voice touched his private channel. "Did you—"
"Yes," Kael said.
"What was it?"
"Timing."
A vox pennant unfurled across the hangar wall. Not words. A mark. The thunderbolt. The numeral. Then another sign below them neither seal nor sigil: an outline of a wing simplified until it was geometry. He felt his stomach decide to be empty.
Var Juren's voice: not loud, not ceremonial, but carrying. "By the Emperor's will, our gene-source is found."
Silence. No cheer. The silence of men built for consequences, not announcements.
"It is far," Juren continued. "We move at once. We arrive in strength and discipline. We will be measured by the manner of our faces."
Kael felt the Company shift with a single, small exhale. Father. The word everyone knew and no one said. He resisted it because it did not fit in his mouth without making a cut he did not have time to salve.
Back on the Company deck, he found the men half a pace closer to each other than habit allowed. He let it stand. He walked the line and checked buckles that had not failed, straps already correct, eyelets that would never tear. Busy hands make authentic calm.
Silas approached with a question shaped like an offering. "There will be a presentation," he said. "Colours. Names."
"We have a name," Kael replied.
"We have a number," Silas corrected gently.
Kael almost smiled. "For now."
The jump that followed felt like stepping from a cool room into air that knows your shape. The ship thinned and thickened; space went from honest to interested. In that slip, a flicker: five seconds of rain beneath a sky the colour of iron filings; the outline of spires; faces in windows with eyes like holes punched in paper.
He opened his hand in the dark and felt it noticed. Shadows shifted toward his palm, obedient, wanting. He did not feed them. He patted them away as one pats a dog that has put its head on a lap when papers require both hands.
They fell out of warp into a system every instrument called new and everyone's bones called remembered. A star sullen as old charcoal. Worlds like char held too long above a flame. One with a ring of lights around its night side—cities that had taught themselves to live like tired animals: small, cautious, quiet between meals. The Auric Silence turned on thrusters that did not complain. Fleet elements took their places with the grace of a ritual no choir had rehearsed and everyone knew.
The landing orders came coded and spare. Only senior officers would descend first. The Emperor's will sent by the Sigillite's hand. Var Juren looked at Kael as he passed him a slate.
"You will attend," he said.
Kael heard Malchion inhale where he pretended not to be listening. He did not look at him. "Understood."
They dropped in a courier skiff that had no ornament because ornament assumes context. The world rose in a stain of weather. Lightning stitched but did not illuminate. The skiff entered the atmosphere like a thought that didn't need permission. The landing pad was a flat circle of regret made of poured stone and old blood. Rain made the old blood honest.
Guards waited, but not the kind that wear uniforms to advertise employment. These men wore the city the way rats wear drains. They had knives that had been loved more than children. Their eyes were black from edge to edge and reflected nothing but movement. They did not notched-salute. They did not point guns. They watched, a profession that needs no props.
A man in a coat that once had value and now had history led them through corridors that pretended to be halls. Their lamps sat under shades like sick birds. Everything smelled of cleaned tools and rain left to dry indoors. They came at last to a door that was not a door so much as an intersection of decisions. Two figures stood there. One wore black without shine and carried a seal that made locks forget what they were built to do. The other needed no introduction because the air had already made it.
Malcador's eyes were stone under cloud. The Emperor's were… a colour Kael's armour could not render.
The room decided to be smaller.
Var Juren knelt without folding. Kael followed, armour accepting the floor like a promise. The Emperor did not speak immediately. He looked at them, and in that looking was measure and mercy and a kind of patience that does not need to prove itself.
"You have done the work I asked of you," He said at last. His voice was not loud. It did not need to be; it resided in permission. "You will do other work now."
Kael did not lift his head. He did not need to see to know the shape of a tide.
Malcador's voice entered the room like a key in a lock. "The gene-source of the Eighth has been found." He did not say father. He was kind that way. "He stands where the storms do not bother to break. He has made a law out of darkness because no better law was offered."
Kael's mouth was dry. "What would you have us be to him?"
"Not reflection," Malcador said. "Not argument. Continuation."
The Emperor stepped past them toward the door. The guards made way as water does for a ship that knows where it is going. "Rise," He said, and they obeyed because refusal is a concept some rooms do not contain. "You will meet him. You will show your faces. You will not ask to be named."
Juren's jaw moved once. "We will be measured by our restraint."
The Emperor looked at Kael. For a fraction, five seconds cracked open again—tower, rain, a figure as absolute as a verdict. The dark inside Kael leaned like iron dust under a magnet.
"You are early," the Emperor said softly, almost to Himself. Then, to them: "Come."
They crossed a terrace that let the city show its teeth: spires cut up from rock, windows like eyes that did not blink, streets that learned the shape of fear and made it routinized. People waited in the rain and did not wipe their faces because you do not draw attention to yourself in a world that values attention as currency.
He was there.
Tall because the world demanded it, not because he wished to fill space. Armour that could have been blue if the rain had admitted colour. Bare head under water that chose not to make him blink. Eyes that were black the way holes are black: not a colour, a function. His presence made the stone remember it was under sky and the sky remember it was above stone.
The Emperor stopped a stride away. The space between them was a lesson no one needed letters to read.
Var Juren took one knee. Kael did not trust his legs to behave if he stood longer. He knelt too, slow, armour plates speaking courtesy to joints. He did not look up. He watched the rain strike the floor and bounce in smaller rains.
The voice that answered the Emperor sounded like a man who had learned to make words stand by themselves without fence or law. "You took your time," he said.
"We came as we could," the Emperor replied.
"And what do you want for your trouble?"
"My sons," the Emperor said, as if telling the truth cost nothing.
The man on the terrace—him—was silent a long moment. Long enough that the rain sounded like thinking.
"And if I decline?" he asked at last.
"You will not," the Emperor said, and made no threat of it.
There was no ceremony in what followed. No trumpets, no banners, no knelt ranks taking oaths that would be quoted in orders of battle. The city watched men who made rules talk like men who had used knives. Something moved in the air—pressure, weather, the gene-deep echo of a door opening in a house that had been built before the tenants were born.
Kael did not see the handshake because he was not meant to. He felt the consequence. It vibrated the needles in his skin where the Carapace interfaced. It pried at his vision—five seconds of future and five seconds of past overlapping like a palimpsest. It sounded like distant machinery being switched from one circuit to another without losing power.
Later—minutes, hours—Kael would not be able to say when—he found himself at the parapet, rain making a skin on his helm. The city below looked like a memory he had not earned. A presence joined him—not heavy, not announced. Malcador, by the smell of ink and old cloth.
"You felt it," the Sigillite said.
"Yes."
"He will change you."
Kael considered the honest forms of denial and found none that did not insult the question. "We will change into what we already were," he said.
Malcador's almost-smile. "Poetry from a butcher."
"Instruction," Kael corrected.
Below, the crowd began to move in patterns that described acceptance when seen from high enough. Above, the fleet altered its lights as ships took down one set of stories and prepared another. Somewhere behind him, a man whose name would change the Legion turned and fixed black eyes on black eyes and called his sons home without saying home aloud.
Kael opened his hand. The darkness came and lay there, warm as anything that should be cold. He let it rest. He did not feed it. He did not refuse it.
"Captain," Var Juren said at his shoulder. "Form the Company. We will present."
Kael turned away from the parapet. The future had taken its correct position: five seconds ahead, visible if you didn't blink. He could see the next room. He could feel the shape of the story it would leave.
"Fifteenth," he voxed, voice steady and human, "on me."
They moved through rain that chose not to sting. The terrace filled with giants made to be sons and a father made to be inevitable. Kael took his place where the line required him. He did not smile. He did not fear. He did not pray.
He breathed, and the dark breathed with him, and for the first time since the table on Luna, he felt something like belonging without shame.