Nostramo tried to relearn breathing and failed. Crime came back first, then pride. Doors forgot polite knocks. The rain returned to making knives look clean. Curze's presence—once a weather that corrected men—became a storm that taught them to hide.
Kael walked the upper tiers with his helm mag-locked at his hip and Veilrender sheathed. He brought the Veiled Hand in small numbers, not to occupy but to pace. He posted schedules, not edicts. He seeded the docks with grain, not sermons. It worked for a week, then three days, then hours.
In the Kyroptera chamber, knives were compared instead of sharpened. Sevatar leaned against glass, lazy and alert; Sahaal looked like a blade that had learned resentment; Kest wore his noise like perfume. Curze arrived late and left early. He spoke to futures that ended badly and loved them because they fit.
Back aboard the Watcher Above, Kael stood with Veyra while the ship dimmed to his presence. "It's not a city anymore," she said, pencil ticking facts. "It's a habit that refuses to stop."
"Habits can be replaced," Kael answered. He didn't sound convinced.
A slate from the Sigillite arrived in a small, honest box. "Act as conscience", Malcador had written in neat ink. "When the hour comes, do not ask permission". The box held nothing else: no ship, no blade. Just trust on paper.
Kael closed the lid. "We'll be asked for something I can't give," he said.
"Then don't," Veyra replied. "And make it look like work."
The summons was a taste of iron in the air—the way Curze called when he wanted men to feel summoned by weather. The fleet rose from their berths like knives becoming sentences. Kael put the Watcher Above on the lower tier of the wedge and told his guns to mind their manners.
In Nightfall's strategium, Curze stood beneath a hololithic Nostramo that turned slowly like a dead god's eye. "It is diseased," he said. "We heal it by removing the organ."
Kael's voice came out calm because it always had. "Disease is treated. Amputation is for ignorance."
Curze did not look at him. "Justice is cautery."
Sevatar's mouth tightened. Sahaal said nothing. Kest smiled small and proud, as men do when escalation feels like destiny.
Kael stepped forward one pace. "Father—" The word tasted wrong. He tried again. "Lord, Nostramo still feeds fleets. It still houses children who can be taught."
Curze's black eyes did not blink. "Children grow into men who spend fear wrongly." He turned away. "Prepare."
Back aboard the Watcher Above, Kael's restraint cracked to show iron. "Disable every grand battery we can reach," he ordered. "Threx—deafen their targeting. Veyra—evacuation corridors, priority for hospitals and dock quarters. Malchion—secure the lifts. Joras—if you must shoot, shoot gears."
"Acknowledged," came the calm chorus. The ship leaned into the work like a craftsman with an hour to save a cathedral.
For forty minutes it seemed possible. Anti-orbital emplacements went dark under Threx's liturgies disguised as hacks. Veyra moved crowds along arteries that should never have held that much hope. Kael's darkness lay across streets to hide the vulnerable and confuse the confident. The Watcher Above reached down with cranes like hands to pluck families from rooftops without applause.
Then Nightfall spoke.
The first macro-cannon volley tore the sky. City-spires bloomed black and then nothing; the clouds turned to glass dust. The second volley walked the fire across districts like a finger under a text. Vox bands flooded with screams and then with silence and then with nothing at all.
"Curze," Kael voxed on a channel only two beings could open. "Stop."
"Observe," came the answer. "Learn."
"From ash?" Kael's voice finally rose. "From murder?"
"From truth," Curze said, and cut the line.
On the command gallery, Kael's self-control failed and turned into focus. "More cranes. More lines. Veyra—stack them in the bays like math, not mercy."
"They're both the same today," she said, and did it.
Threx sang ragged binharic through failing relays. "I can save six more batteries from speaking. No more."
"Do it," Kael said, and watched a continent die in neat, expanding circles. His hand gripped the rail until ceramite creaked. The darkness rose on its own and pressed itself to the glass as if it could hold the planet together with shadow. It couldn't. When the last volley fell, Nostramo took a breath that was not a breath and folded into itself until the night had one less star.
Silence. Not the useful kind. The other one.
Kael took his helm and clipped it to his belt because he needed his face to learn certain shapes. "Veyra," he said softly. "You have the ship."
"I always do," she answered, voice steady, eyes wet. "Go."
He went alone in a shuttle that didn't broadcast. Nightfall's hangar swallowed the craft like a sin confessed without witnesses. Night Lords watched him walk across the deck: some appalled, some admiring, all surprised to see a man so quiet burn.
The doors to the strategium opened because Kael's shadow told them to, flowing ahead like ink seeking a page. The chamber smelled of hot metal and prophecy. Curze stood at the viewport with Nostramo's corpse-light painting his face in pale fire. He did not turn.
"Why?" Kael asked. Not a whisper. A carried voice. Raw.
"Because they would have betrayed us," Curze said. "Because they already had. Because justice is cleaner than rot."
"Justice is work," Kael said, stepping forward, Veilrender still sheathed. "You taught me fear is a currency. You spent the mint."
Curze's eyes closed and opened. "I saw it," he said, as if the words were a drug. "I have always seen it."
"And chose it," Kael said, anger finally punching through restraint. "You chose the future where we become the thing we were made to hunt."
Curze turned. For a moment there was a man under the legend—tired, furious, so lonely the air seemed to recoil. "You are my son," he said. "You are my—" The word failed. "And you call me monster."
"I call you brother," Kael said, chest heaving. "Because a father does not do this."
The word hit. Curze flinched, small and deep. His mouth made a shape that could have been relief or hurt. Then it became rage.
"Draw," he said.
Kael drew.
Veilrender cleared the latch with a sound like breath leaving a wound. Darkness poured off his shoulders and into his hands, slicking along the blade, sucking light out of the room in a polite radius around him. His five seconds unfolded, sharp and bright: Curze's first step, the angle of his shoulder, the way prophecy made him arrogant in the initial lunge.
Curze moved like gravity flexing.
They met with a shock that rattled the teeth in the walls. Kael's stance was precise, ugly, unromantic: hips under shoulders, elbows tucked, cuts made to end arguments. Curze's were beautiful, hateful: a dancer's economy on a butcher's timetable. Veilrender hissed along a vambrace that wasn't there; Curze's hand found Kael's gorget and hurled him six paces. He rolled, came up low, slashed twice to test reflex, and found them perfect.
Five seconds gave him a moment: Curze's heel skidding on a slick of spilled oil from a ruptured pipe. Kael stepped into it as it happened, before Curze—and cut. The blade kissed skin. Blood beaded along the Primarch's ribs. Curze looked down at it like a man finding weather indoors and smiled without joy.
"Good," he said, and hit Kael so hard the world doubled.
Kael slammed into a pillar and felt something in the Varanshade crack—breastplate spiderwebbing, alarms purring in his ears. He bellowed. Not a speech. A noise. Years of quiet leaving in one sound. He charged.
Darkness bloomed. It spilled from him in layers—sound-dampening first, then light-slowing, then absence. Curze's next step landed a handspan short as if he'd misjudged distance for the first time in his life. Kael cut across that moment, shoulder to hip, and drew another line of blood. He spun—low, mean, a dockyard hook—Veilrender snagging a gauntlet and wrenching. For a heartbeat, Curze's hand was empty.
The Night Haunter's eyes found the shadow coiled around Kael's wrist—the darkness that obeyed him like a well-trained hound, owned, not endured. Something old and bitter moved across the Primarch's face.
"You wear the dark like a crown," Curze hissed. "I wore it like chains."
"It could have been both," Kael snapped. "You chose chains."
Curze screamed. Not volume; meaning. He came in fast enough to unmake thought. Kael's five seconds tried to keep up and failed for the first time. The Primarch's knee hammered his chest; his elbow crushed a pauldron; a backhand carved sparking arcs across his helm. Kael vanished into his own shadow and reappeared behind Nightfall's lord, stabbing for the kidney out of pure, trained blasphemy. Curze caught the blade bare-handed, blood flowing, and dragged Kael forward by his own sword until their faces were a breath apart.
"You call me brother," Curze said, voice breaking. "So be it."
Kael saw the hand switch too late. The final blow was not a cut. It was a rejected embrace. Curze's palm hit the broken plate over Kael's sternum and pushed with the strength of god and nightmare. Ceramite shattered. The world went white. Kael flew—skidding, tumbling, choking on nothing—until a bulkhead caught him and turned him from motion into pain.
He tried to stand. His legs forgot how. He crawled on one gauntlet and the shadow tried to help and could not carry him because it was only a loyal dog and he was very heavy.
Curze did not follow to finish it. He stood where he was with Veilrender still in his bleeding hand, looked at the blade as if it were a letter in a script he had never learned, and set it down on the floor between them like an offering he refused to accept.
"Go, Varan," he said, turning away. "Be the silence you worship. I cannot bear your reflection."
"Konrad," Kael whispered, because anger had burned out and left only ash and a word. "Brother."
Curze stopped with his back to him. His shoulders shook once. He disappeared into the dark like a man walking into rain he had ordered and found cold.
Kael lay on the deck and listened to Nightfall breathe around him. His chest felt like a map of wrong decisions. Footsteps approached—Atramentar gauntlets, heavy, respectful. Sevatar's voice dropped beside him, not mocking.
"You're still terrible company," Sevatar murmured. "That was… instructive."
"Help me up," Kael said.
They did. Sevatar's hand was firm and quick. He put Veilrender back in Kael's grasp without comment. "Get out before he thinks of teaching you another lesson," the First Captain advised.
Kael nodded. "This is the last time," he said.
Sevatar's expression flickered; something like sorrow passed through it and hid. "I know," he said.
The Watcher Above took him in like a house that had been waiting with lights dimmed. Threx fussed in a litany of diagnostics; Veyra stood very straight with her slate pressed to her ribs.
"Set course," Kael said, voice flat and edged. "Not for Nostramo. Not for any Kyroptera anchor. Plot for Terra."
Veyra didn't ask. "Direct," she said. "No flourish."
Kael stood at the forward glass. The void still burned with what Nostramo had been. His shadow rose, hesitant, and lay along his arm. He let it. He did not feed it. He did not refuse it.
Malchion found his place at Kael's right shoulder. "What are we now?" he asked, quiet.
"What we always were," Kael answered. "A reason to choose obedience."
"And if no one does?"
"We'll be the silence after," Kael said. He breathed once, pain flaring and settling. "Make it quiet."
The engines obeyed. The Watcher Above turned her dagger nose toward the heart of the Imperium and slid into the dark, carrying a captain who had called his father brother and survived the answer.