They left Nostramo with their armour still smelling of rain and iron, and came back to it less and less each year. The Great Crusade opened like a wound that would never close: stars sutured to the Emperor's design by fleets that did not sleep. The Night Lords learned to be a needle that threaded law through skin that did not consent.
Kael alternated between two gravities. Under Curze, the VIIIth hit worlds like a verdict. Under Malcador, the Veiled Hand disappeared into the margins where verdicts could not be publicly read. He learned to march with banners and whisper through vents; to salute on a parade ground and sign a writ in a room that didn't exist.
The first campaign that gave them fame they had not asked for was on Ossyr Halim—a port-world built of glass and theft. Curze painted the sky with the governor's confession and left the city silent as a chapel. Kael took the power exchange under the bay and rewired the tides so the docks had to run on schedule or drown. He posted one notice in two tongues: Work and live. Cheat and swim. The Raven Guard sent a message afterward in their careful, dry way: Your silence carries farther than ours today. Corvus Corax's signet sat in the corner like a wing folded tight. Kael filed it away and replied with numbers.
On Krydal, they served beside the VIIth. Rogal Dorn inspected their lines as if he could find the fault of a hinge by watching men breathe. He stopped opposite Kael and studied the matte midnight plates, the white bolt, the restrained wing. "You look like a problem well-defined," he said.
"We prefer being an answer," Kael replied.
"Answers become habits," Dorn said. "Be careful which ones you teach." He moved on, and the Veiled Hand left the planet with a new respect for walls that didn't need paint to be tall.
Between wars, Malcador's sealed orders arrived as they always did—clean ink, no ornament. Pacify without being seen. Clean a truth the Crusade cannot afford to state. Open this door, close that mouth. The Watcher Above went alone into dark space where records grew thin and the vox carried only the sound of a ship's breath. Veyra's ledgers changed tone—fewer pallets, more codes. Threx's adepts learned to bless locks into opening and to apologize to them afterward.
"Why us?" Malchion asked once, during a maintenance watch when the only loud thing in the gallery was the smell of oil.
"Because we don't ask," Kael said.
"And because we don't write songs," Veyra added without looking up.
---
Fame followed function. Ultramarines began to nod at the white bolt and the bat-wing without flinching; Raven Guard made space at tables; the Luna Wolves shared targeting solutions with a frankness that meant we'd like to steal your tricks.
Horus himself spoke to Kael twice—once after a parade, once in a void corridor that carried voices like knives. "You are a quiet storm," the Warmaster said. "We need both kinds." The word both hung longer than it should have. Kael filed it.
Sevatar came and went like weather a ship chooses to enjoy. He walked Kael's decks as if they were a knife he was thinking of buying.
"This ship listens to you," he said once, running a gloved finger along a bulkhead that had just dimmed to the exact register of Kael's voice.
"It listens to work," Kael said.
Sevatar's teeth showed. "We should spar," he said later, in a cargo bay cleared with Veyra's irritated permission.
They did. It wasn't a duel so much as an argument in steel. Sevatar moved like punctuation—a cut to end a sentence; a feint to start a new clause. Kael moved as if time had a seam his fingers could find.
Five seconds unrolled, re-rolled, gave him angles that made Sevatar's edge whisper where it meant to shout. They broke apart twice, three times, until sweat made the deck honest.
"Who taught you to read a man that way?" Sevatar asked, panting, amused.
"Rooms taught me," Kael said. "Men leave their shapes in them."
Sevatar laughed, honest and sharp. "You're terrible company," he said. "I approve."
Talos watched from the catwalk, silent, eyes like obsidian set to see heat. He said nothing that day. Later, he asked to watch their drills again. Kael said yes because he recognized hunger that wasn't about blood.
Curze joined them sometimes—briefly, like a shadow checking that the light was falling in the right place. In the early years he spoke to Kael like a craftsman admiring another's tools. "You don't indulge," he said during the Vel Karth compliance, after Kael had turned a riot into a levy.
"Indulgence is expensive," Kael said.
Curze nodded, satisfied. Later, on Phobus, under a sky full of wheeling carrion and a palace that wouldn't stop screaming, Curze stood too long over a kneeling tyrant and recited things that had not happened in a voice that sounded like he was reading from a book set on fire.
Sevatar looked at Kael then. Kael looked back and said nothing, because you don't challenge tide when a city is still between you and the sea.
The shifts were small at first. Curze slept less. He stared at maps until the maps looked away. He wore his armour longer each day and spoke to Nostramo's rain in a tone that suggested he expected it to answer. The Kyroptera began to split into men who loved the fear more than its purpose and men who tolerated the fear because it was the shortest path to purpose. Kest leaned into noise until he forgot the reason for sound.
Var Jahan's debts grew abstract. Sahaal tightened his grip on method and earned new scars where brothers should have apologized. Sevatar smiled more often and laughed less loudly. Talos kept watching.
"Do you feel it?" Malchion asked, after Ulexis, where they'd pulled a planetary judiciary out of their own wells and taught them schedules.
"Yes," Kael said.
"What is it?"
"Thirst," Kael said. "For a thing that satisfies nothing."
---
The ship became a second skin. The Watcher Above learned to shut doors the way Kael would have; learned to lower the lights by a polite fraction a heartbeat before he entered a room; learned to seep its systems' hum into his pulse so his five seconds arrived with less friction.
Threx began to refer to the vessel as she without theology. Veyra stopped arguing with bulkheads aloud and instead wrote notes on them like a woman leaving messages to a clever colleague: don't stall here, quiet at change of watch, remember the pumps.
Kael requisitioned modifications through channels that did not ask why. The prow took a cowl that swallowed augur pings. The launch cradles gained arrestor rigs that could catch pods in silence. The vox-mast received baffling that turned words into a whisper even when shouted.
The galleys learned to bleed light into the floor instead of the air. The armoury lights went completely dark; men found weapons by memory and left them in the same place because routine is cheaper than sight.
"Isn't this… superstition?" a young serf asked once, trying and failing to keep fear out of curiosity.
"No," Veyra said. "It's literacy."
On the Aethon Reach, they fought alongside the White Scars for a single, glorious week. Lightning and knives made a common grammar. A khan with wind at his back grinned at Kael after a clean, fast kill and clapped him on the shoulder with a friendliness that would have broken a lesser man.
"You ride the dark like we ride the air," he said. "I envy your saddle."
"We envy your horizon," Kael said, and meant it.
The Ultramarines sent a detachment to watch Kael break a labour revolt without breaking the labour. The captain in blue who debriefed him afterward spoke in tidy periods. "You used fear as a scalpel," he said. "The wound closed. We'll write a treatise."
"Don't," Kael said. "Treatises make men forget to watch rooms."
The Raven Guard invited him to a silent feast—no speaking, only hand-sign and the soft music of metal on ceramic. Corax himself sent him a small black token afterward, feathered at the edges, stamped FOR USE, not FOR PRIDE. Kael kept it in a pocket with Malcador's first note. The two weights together always made his coat hang straight.
---
Curze's change was slow enough to forgive each day and too fast to forgive the year. On Nhorum, the Primarch ordered a governor's court emptied and repopulated with the men who used to be judged there. No blood—just a mirror.
The planet learned a new habit and called it good. On Khymer, Curze executed three hundred by making them watch a recording of their own crimes until their hearts stopped. No blood—just a sermon. The planet learned a new habit and called it holy. On Vardan III, he left nothing but a warning written in air. The planet learned to stop learning.
Sevatar started visiting Kael less to spar and more to stand beside him where maps breathed. "You're stubborn," he said. "I respect it. It's going to get you killed, and I respect that, too."
"Death is a poor teacher," Kael said.
"It's an excellent editor," Sevatar replied.
Talos began to pray in private. He still watched Kael's hands when they folded maps.
Kest stopped speaking to him at all.
"Do you intend to correct him?" Veyra asked once, meaning Curze but not saying the name because the ship listened and ships have loyalties.
"No," Kael said. "I intend to do the work."
"What if the work becomes the correction?"
"Then I'll count the cost."
She nodded, because counting was faith.
---
Malcador's last message before Gethrax was a thin slate with very little ink. Continue. Do not name what you see. Some truths walk toward those who keep their eyes down. He sent a small crate—the kind that looked like it should hold a fruit and held something that rusts men from the inside if they look too long.
Inside: a compact vox-relay with a cipher only Kael's ring would open, three vials of suppressant that Threx catalogued as blessed coolant to satisfy his conscience, and a strip of parchment that said simply: for work, not witness in the Sigillite's small, precise hand.
Kael closed the crate and did not show it to anyone. He placed it in the armoury where the dark liked to sit and let it learn the smell of the ship.
The Watcher Above drifted between wars like a thought a man chooses not to say aloud. Kael walked her decks and felt the shadow in the crevices—his shadow—learning corridors, counting screws, filing sounds.
He slept in armour more often. He dreamed of rooms he had not entered yet, and woke to find the ship dimmed in the direction of those rooms, as if it had dreamed with him and decided to be helpful.
On Vyrak's Belt, he took his helm off in a vacuum lock to listen to a rebel's last breath with his own ears. The man whispered, "We were told you'd enjoy this."
Kael shook his head. "I do not," he said. "I remember it."
Later, in the strategium, Malchion asked, "What are we now?"
"What we were meant to be," Kael said. "A reason for men to choose obedience so they never have to meet us."
"And if they don't choose it?"
Kael laid a hand on the deck. The shadow pooled against his fingers, warm, obedient. "Then we make the room smaller," he said. "And leave it working."
He turned his head toward the void where the Crusade burned in long, bright lines and counted five seconds. They were still his. For now.
The middle years of the Great Crusade passed like long knives: clean edges, difficult handles. Whole sectors learned the Emperor's arithmetic; others learned to pretend until a fleet arrived. Kael's world narrowed to orders, rooms, seconds—the small mechanics by which empires decide whether to breathe.
He carried two sets of writs now. The first wore the VIII Legion's seal and sent the Veiled Hand to strike with Curze's spearheads—rapid pacifications, judicial excisions, the kind of war where a city wakes under new law before it has time to dream of the old.
The second came in Malcador's neat script—missions too delicate for a flag: seize a relay without admitting the relay exists; rescue a governor whose death would make a martyr; destroy a ledger that would make allies inconvenient. The Watcher Above grew famous for results and infamous for the absence of music. Other fleets learned to mark her arrival by how suddenly decks went quiet.
On Indraxis, the Fifteenth took a manufactorum city without firing a macro; Kael shut air to the riot quarter in precise thirty-second pulses until courage broke into useful surrender. In the dark between pulses he walked alone—really alone—through an alley of glass tubing and exhausted machines.
He opened his palm and let the shadow leave him not as a cloud, but as himself drawn thin: a man-shaped absence peeling from his armour to taste the corners. For one breath he was gone, for one heartbeat the world forgot his shape, and when he returned the shadow settled into the creases of the Varanshade as if it had always lived there.
Afterward, Threx's adepts logged the luminant drop with reverent dread; Veyra crossed the reading with a graphite line and wrote DO NOT RECORD MIRACLES above it.
"Is that new?" Malchion asked later, over the map table.
"No," Kael said, honest. "I am only admitting it."
---
Nostramo decayed the way a body does when it refuses to eat anything but memory. The Legion returned between campaigns to a world of closed doors and long, bright knives worn for fashion. At first Curze's presence was enough: a walk upon the terrace; a night spent in the rain with the city listening.
Then even the weather learned to ignore him. He began to mutter judgments as if there were no one left qualified to hear them; he paced in armour that never cooled. He ordered the noble houses he had once tolerated to be un-nobled again, this time not by appointment but by demonstration.
"You're killing the only history this place has," Sevatar said once, more complaint than plea.
"I am killing a lie," Curze answered, eyes all black and unblinking. "We will write a truer one in fear."
"Fear doesn't write," Kael said quietly. "It edits."
Curze looked at him as if measuring the cost of agreement. "Then edit," he said. "Everywhere."
---
The Watcher Above became part of Kael's gait. Bulkheads lowered their lights a half tone before he passed; blast doors took pains not to complain; the engines idled in the register his breath preferred during approach burns. He asked for modifications without ceremony and received them with none.
Veyra oversaw a refit that turned the ship into doctrine with mass:
— Prow-cowls that drank auspex like a sponge.
— Grapnel galleries that deployed boarding pods as if laying down punctuation.
— Void-shrouds that reduced footprint at the cost of pride.
— A dark-weather lighting scheme that never fully illuminated anything and never hindered work.
"Superstition," a junior enginseer muttered once, not softly enough.
"Stupidity is superstition with manners," Veyra said, and handed him a new schedule to learn by heart.
The human crew learned to move as one. The Nostramans aboard, drawn from docks and ledgers, took to the ship as if it were a city that didn't lie. Terran serfs taught them military hand-speech and were surprised how quickly the black-eyed men learned not just the signs, but the patience behind them.
In wardroom and galley, the mix was uneasy and then… practiced. Fear as currency, routine as faith.
---
They fought with the Ultramarines on Meridian's Reach, where a governor's militia had mistaken bureaucracy for strength. Kael's men entered through the ventilation hives while the XIIIth drilled in the streets, and for a day blue and midnight worked in complementary sentences.
Afterward, an Ultramarines tribune offered dry praise. "You achieve compliance without reducing revenue," he said. "Guilliman likes that."
"I like not returning," Kael said.
With the Raven Guard on Astartes Gate, they swapped doctrine without pride. Corax visited the Watcher Above unannounced—no retinue, only a silence that made the ship feel seen. He stood in the gallery looking down into the human decks while Veyra kept the crew moving without glancing up.
"This is what discipline looks like when it remembers mercy," Corax said at last, eyes on Kael.
"Mercy is cheaper than tragedy," Kael answered.
Corax's mouth turned by a degree that was almost a smile. "Fewer statues," he said, and left.
Horus Lupercal met Kael twice more in those middle years. The Warmaster's charisma weighed nothing and somehow pressed on the lungs. "Some men are loud because they are afraid," he said to Kael in a corridor with no witnesses. "You are quiet because you are not. I will need both kinds."
"You will need results," Kael said.
Horus did not disagree.
---
Sevatar still came to spar, but less often. When they fought, Kael's seconds unrolled like a ribbon and Sevatar grinned through them, cutting when the future bent too far and ceding when it didn't. Sometimes Talos watched in silence from above, prayers half-birthed in his mouth like crows not yet trained to land.
"You're steady," Sevatar said afterward, sweat glossing the script on his throat. "It's starting to look like stubbornness, Varan."
"Stubbornness is steady when everyone else is falling," Kael said.
"It also gets you killed," Sevatar replied.
"So does fashion," Kael said, nodding at a newly lacquered bat crest a Nostraman sergeant had added to his helm. The sergeant heard and removed it by next watch.
Kest avoided Kael outright now. When they crossed in the Kyroptera chamber, Kest looked through him the way a drunk looks through glass. Var Jahan's debts to Curze's mood grew heavier; Sahaal's face acquired new scars and new frowns.
The council began to feel like a room where knives are compared instead of sharpened.
"Do you want out?" Veyra asked one night, when the Watcher's lights dimmed of their own accord and the ship felt like a house with the children asleep.
"I want to work," Kael said.
"Work is a kind of prayer," she answered. "But gods often demand offerings."
"Then we'll invoice them," Kael said, and she allowed herself a rare smile.
---
On Tylanor, he saw Curze at his most efficient and most worrying in the same hour. A revolution court was lined with men wearing their verdicts on placards around their necks.
Curze walked the line, reading aloud in a voice almost gentle. When he finished, he killed none of them. He turned to the crowd and said, "These will be judges now, for a time," and the city learned humility. Later that night, Kael found Curze in a chapel to no god, whispering his own death like a recipe he was testing.
"The future is a room that keeps describing itself," Curze said.
"Then make it smaller," Kael answered, the only comfort he knew.
Curze laughed softly. It sounded like a man remembering a song he hated.
On Varkos the Primarch needed no court: he simply named crimes from a balcony and men died in their beds. The next day he loved a child for crying at the wrong time and hated a saint for praying at the right one. Shifts inside the shifts—a drift toward prophecy without context.
"Do we correct him?" Malchion asked in a whisper meant for allies.
"No," Kael said, eyes on the map. "We correct what we can reach."
"And if he asks us to reach farther?"
"Then we count."
---
Malcador's sealed assignments grew rarer but heavier. Remove this counsellor without unmaking the government. Feed this rebellion for six days, then starve it by returning its grain.
Convince this general his own plan was your idea and let him live with the victory. Kael did not refuse; he adjusted. The Watcher Above became a rumour other Legions stopped trying to verify: a dagger-shaped quiet that arrived, left a better problem, and was already gone before anyone could write a speech.
In the strategium after Ysmar Six, Veyra stood with Kael and watched a city's power grid settle into a rhythm that could be defended without cruelty. "You can't hold this tide," she said softly.
"I'm not trying to," Kael replied. "I'm canalising it."
"And when the sea decides it hates canals?"
"Then we will be very tired," he said.
She considered that, then nodded. "I'll schedule the fatigue."
---
The Watcher Above loved him for his use. Doors stopped locking at his approach. The darkness grew fond; it pooled where his hands rested on rails; it slipped into the seams of his words so men listened harder than they meant to.
Once, during a breach on Orphion, a heavy bolter stitched a corridor with lead and lesson; Kael felt the five seconds unspool, stepped outward into the shadow he carried, and the rounds passed through a man who was there a heartbeat ago and not now. He reappeared behind the gunner and disabled him with a neat cut across tendons instead of a head removed.
Malchion swore reverently; Threx recorded the luminant dip and titled it localized eclipse, sanctioned. Veyra wrote DON'T TEACH THIS TO FOOLS in the margin.
After the operation, Talos found him on the gallery. "It's like watching a sermon," the younger Astartes said. "Except it's about rooms, not gods."
"Rooms are honest," Kael said. "They tell you where men will die if you make them."
"Do you believe in anything?" Talos asked.
"Yes," Kael said. "Schedules."
Talos smiled like a boy coming in from rain. "Me too," he said, and left before the admission could be heard.
---
Nostramo sent for them less often. When it did, it was to witness—not to help. The nobles bled again, this time not to purge but to feed prophecy. Curze's eyes went deeper, his armour older.
He began talking to his sons by describing futures none of them could survive. Sevatar made jokes with edges; Sahaal stopped pretending to be patient; Kest drank more noise than wine. The Atramentar stood stiller, as if stillness could delay inheritance.
On the eve of the first great fracture, Kael stood alone in the Watcher Above's forward gallery. The void beyond the glass scattered starlight like filings; the ship dimmed one more degree because she knew he liked it that way. He opened his hand. The darkness rose and lay there, warm, as loyal as any hound. He did not feed it. He did not refuse it.
"Quartermaster," he said.
Veyra's voice answered from the pit, steady as the metronome that had become the ship's second heart. "Captain."
"If the day comes when Curze asks for something we cannot give," he said, "you will evacuate the human crew without waiting for my order."
"I won't," she said, after a breath. "I'll wait for your order and then pretend I didn't."
"That will do," Kael said.
He looked out at nothing and counted five seconds. They were still his. Somewhere, very far away and very near, an age was ending its breath and another was drawing one. The Watcher Above rested like a blade on a whetstone.
"Make it quiet," he said to the ship.
It did.