Night on Terra was a rumor the sky told out of obligation. The smoke dimmed, the fires learned to whisper, and the stars hid behind the lid of ash.
The Colossi Valley did not quiet. It sharpened.
Kael stood with Azkaellon on a ridge of broken ferrocrete that had once been a transit artery. Below them, the valley's floor crawled—Iron Warriors re-forming lines with machine patience, Emperor's Children sweeping bodies aside with the indifference of artists cleaning brushes.
White Scars scouts ghosted the far escarpments, their vox clicks just under hearing. Blood Angels stood in a red-gold crescent, helms bowed, jump packs still hot. The Silent Company held the seam between the Legions, a hinge of darkness.
"Night assault," Azkaellon said softly, helm tucked beneath one arm. In the smoke-dim his face looked carved from grief and duty. "They won't let us sleep."
"We haven't earned it," Kael replied.
Azkaellon's gaze flicked to him. "Do you ever sleep?"
"When the math adds up," Kael said. "It hasn't lately."
A vox chitter climbed the air. Joras answered without looking away from his scanner. "Traitor armor shifting. Long barrels to the middle. Their guns are thinking, Captain."
"Iron Warriors guns always think," Kael murmured. "They pride themselves on it."
"Pride is their sister's sin," Azkaellon said dryly.
"Which sister?" Kael asked.
Azkaellon's smile was a cut that didn't bleed. "Take your pick."
The ridge shuddered. Far off, right where the valley opened toward the Colossi causeways, a Titan fell. The sound arrived late, a deep iron groan that sank into bones and stayed there.
Kael watched the silhouette sag, then roll, then vanish into a mountain of smoke with a final, ringing crash. The ground trembled again, a smaller aftershock like a final heartbeat.
The angels around Azkaellon bowed their helms as if a cathedral had gone by on a bier.
"Report," Kael said.
Malchion's voice: ragged, steady. "Watcher Above is returning to high orbit. Port flanks patched. She'll give us three passes, maybe four, before the batteries need to cool. Then she's blind for six minutes. If they time their push—"
"They will," Kael said. "We have to time ours first."
Azkaellon looked up at the black lid of sky. "He rides the storm well."
"She rides me," Kael said. "I just try to keep my feet."
Azkaellon glanced at him again, something like curiosity behind the iron. "You speak of your ship as if it were—"
"Alive?" Kael said. He tightened the straps at his gorget until the rub became pain, a useful anchor. "It is. All faithful things are."
A low chord rolled out across the valley. It wasn't sound exactly. It shook dust loose in long curtains. Emperor's Children voxes coughed a reply in counterpoint. The Iron Warriors' lines halted. Adjusted. Halted again in a new geometry.
"Here," Joras said, marking kill-boxes with one hand while the other touched the scar at his elbow like a habit. "Here, and here. They'll push with infantry and sonic flankers. Their siege tanks will walk our return arcs. If we fire too early, they're happy. If we fire too late, we're dead."
Azkaellon's helm slid into place with a hiss. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of a choir. "Then we fire when it will hurt their story."
Kael lifted his chin. He felt the five seconds breathe open: a smear of futures, dirty with warp static, but clear enough to light the first steps of a dance.
"To wings," Kael said. "To wheels. To knives."
The counter-signal rippled down both lines.
The first shells fell like hours. Long, screaming minutes that tore trenches into rearranged earth. Iron Warriors advanced into their own barrage, trusting the math, ignoring the men.
Emperor's Children skated the edge of it, jump-swept, laughing. Their choir began: a keening, rising glide that made the teeth ache. Men clutched at their helms.
A mortal gunner a dozen meters away drove a bayonet through his own ear and smiled like a man who had finally stopped listening to an old argument.
"Veil," Kael whispered.
The shadow at his feet rose like breath on a cold morning and then thickened, black glass poured and frozen into the air. The first ripple of sonic shriek hit the dark and sank into it, became nothing.
Other patches remained open—discipline, not generosity. Kael could not protect all of them. He could protect a corridor.
"Forward," Azkaellon commanded, and his angels moved.
They went up like flames: jump packs igniting, golden helms tilting as if listening to the air. Sanguinary Guard lanced through the first Emperor's Children wave, their blades making red punctuation, their wings leaving faint contrails of holiness and heat.
The White Scars hit the Iron Warriors' left with the sound of sudden weather: bolt pistols, curved blades, the ripping tear of bike engines pushed past safety. The Silent Company flowed into the gap between—shot, stepped, cut, stepped, a tide of work.
Kael moved where the world would soon be. A chain-axe took the space where he'd been a breath before. He cut the wrist that held it, pivoted, used the severed hand still gripping the haft to pull the traitor forward onto Veilrender.
The blade entered under the gorget and came out the back as a black flame. Kael pushed the dying weight aside and watched five seconds.
A lascannon painted his death across the dark. He stepped into the blind angle the gunner had given himself by loving his own textbook. The bolt from Kael's pistol took the Iron Warrior in the eye-lens. Joras's charge folded the gun into modern sculpture.
"Left! Left!" Malchion's bark.
Kael turned and saw the noise. Three Emperor's Children with torsos wired into instruments, ribcages strung and plucked by cybernetic, many-jointed hands while they fired one-handed with pistols ornamented until the machine-spirits must have been miserable.
Their song punched men flat. Azkaellon's left wing faltered, a Sanguinary Guard dropping to one knee, his visor spider-webbed with vibrating fractures.
Kael ran. The world narrowed. His shadow stretched ahead, finding purchase in the wrongness of the song. He hit the first, drove his blade through the harp and the lungs it had enslaved, and the note stopped as if a fist had closed around the throat of a bell.
The second swung his pistol up, but the dark around his legs thickened and he hesitated the length of a breath—more than enough. Kael slit his throat with the back edge while shooting the third through the mouth.
The silence where their song had been crashed like surf. Men gasped, like pain had been a pressure holding their ribs in place and now it was gone.
"Gratitude," Azkaellon said on a private channel, and the word sounded like an oath made backwards.
"Spend it later," Kael said.
"Agreed."
The Iron Warriors brought up their automata. Siege engines clanked through the breach, claws biting the earth, eyes the dead color of polluted ice. Their bodies were cathedral-narrow, braced in reinforcement bands and prayer-language hewn into their plating by men who had forgotten to mean it. The machines did not care. Their guns spun up.
"Watcher," Kael voxed. "Mark the middle. Timing to my hand."
On the ridge's edge, Malchion lifted two fingers, then one, then none.
"Now."
From above the lid of smoke, the Watcher Above put her knives into the dark. Lances scored lines through the ash, clean cuts that glowed blue-white and then yellow as heat found dust.
The first automaton became an absence with a long, slow sigh, its top third sliding off with improbable grace. The second went blind and walked forward without a head until it fell into a shell crater and folded itself up like a book closing. The third tried to pray and discovered it had been built without a mouth.
"That's one," Joras said. "Two… three…"
The fourth kept coming.
Kael didn't wait for math to catch up. He sprinted. The machine tracked him, the gun-barrel searching with dull hunger. Kael cut left and the barrel followed, then he cut back, and the barrel tracked just slow enough that he could put Veilrender through the joint where turret met body.
He levered. Metal screamed. The gun dragged its own aim offline. Azkaellon fell on it a second later like a verdict, blade sun-bright, severing power feeds with a shower of sparks. The automaton's legs kept walking for three steps before they remembered they were dead.
Azkaellon landed beside Kael in a hinge of wings and smoke. "I misjudged their armor."
"Never assume a heretic can't afford an upgrade," Kael said.
"Wise," Azkaellon said. "Infuriating."
Their world tightened. They fought back to back without agreement because some geometries do not require words. Azkaellon's sword traced perfect arcs that wrote scripture in blood. Kael cut the punctuation into men.
When the crush eased, they found themselves chest to shoulder with a ring of Blood Angels whose helms reflected fire like candles in red glass.
"Your men move like a litany," Azkaellon observed.
"They count," Kael said. "When you learn to count, you learn how not to die."
Azkaellon's helm tipped by a hair's breadth—either respect or calculation. Perhaps both. "And if the numbers do not favor you?"
"Then you cheat," Kael said.
Something hit him. Not a blade. Not a slug. A feeling, like falling and being caught by a hand that did not want to save him. He staggered. The five seconds tore wide—too wide—suddenly a hot flood of futures where Azkaellon's helm burst inward, where Malchion fell with his left side rotting black in a heartbeat, where Joras laughed through teeth that weren't his and sang an old Nostraman gutter ballad in High Gothic.
Kael shut his eyes. He dropped to one knee and drove the point of his sword into the earth. The shadow leapt up the blade and became a cage. The futures hit it and scraped away like birds against glass.
"Varan?" Azkaellon's voice, sharp.
"Someone pressed the warp against my head," Kael said, rising. "I told it to wait."
"Word Bearers," Azkaellon said. "I smell sermons."
They came with books and knives. Red armor that had learned to love the color for the wrong reason. Priests with vox-amps bolted to their throats spoke words that crawled on the air and sought ears to live in. Behind them, new daemons bulged the night like hernias in the skin of reality.
Azkaellon's restraint became a weapon. "Kill the speakers," he said, quiet but absolute.
Kael moved. He had hunted priests in older, smaller wars, in alleys where the only witnesses were wet stone and the rats who loved him because he fed them earlier in the evening.
He found the first Dark Apostle by listening for the rhythm of his breath between words. He shot him in the mouth mid-syllable. The book fell. It bled. Kael put a boot on its spine and cut it in half. The daemon trying to be born out of it made a sound like fabric tearing underwater and died disappointed.
Two more fell quickly—blade across guts, pistol through lens, cross-cut under the ribs. The fourth turned and saw him and smiled like a friend arriving. He began to say Kael's name. The shadow reached up and put its finger to his lips. He went silent forever.
Around them, the fight became religious—every blow a psalm, every parry a denial. The White Scars scythed through a line of Iron Warriors, their blades proof that speed is a kind of faith. The Blood Angels burned with a strange, terrible beauty; men on both sides stared when they should have ducked, and paid for it.
The Emperor's Children made one last push—their captain a man whose face was a mask of polished bone, whose tongue had been replaced with a hummingblade that sang to everything it kissed.
He whirled at Azkaellon, a spinning storm of grace gone rotten. Azkaellon met him beat for beat, their duel a choreography that wanted music. The Emperor's Child tried to provide it.
Kael killed the drummer: a Noise Marine elevated above the scrum on a mound of corpses, pounding an abomination of percussive cannon. One bolt through the throat. The beat stuttered. Azkaellon took the opening and took the head.
The line broke. The traitors stepped back—once, twice—then turned into a retreat that pretended it was a redeployment so the Iron Warriors wouldn't be offended.
Kael leaned on his sword and let the world breathe around him. His armor was a mess of scrapes and scored plates; one greave bled black machine-blood where a lasburn had chewed too close to a knee-joint.
He counted men. He counted angels. He counted bikes and bodies and the minutes until the next bombardment. Numbers steadied his hands.
Azkaellon removed his helm. He looked almost young without it. Men like him are carved to wear sorrow. When they put it down, the boy is visible for a breath.
"You're wounded," he said, looking at Kael's side.
"I am busy," Kael answered.
"Those aren't opposed states," Azkaellon said.
Kael said nothing. Azkaellon gestured. A Sanguinary Priest came, golden chalice at his belt, narthecium humming with patient malice. He reached for Kael's seals.
"No," Kael said.
Azkaellon's brow creased. "Pride?"
"Paranoia," Kael said. "You don't want my armor thinking other hands are allowed."
The priest paused, eyes flicking to the rune-lines that crawled like silver veins across the Aegis Tenebris. He bowed two millimeters and stepped back.
"We'll see to your men," Azkaellon said. "You have my word."
"I take it," Kael said, which was the closest he could come to thank you without losing something he'd need later.
The night shifted. Quiet tried to be born. It failed.
The ground shook—a different cadence, deeper, spaced like footsteps made by something that had never known haste. Joras turned his head, listening with more than ears. "Engines," he said. "Big ones."
"Daemons?" Malchion asked.
"Worse," Joras said. "Plans."
The Iron Warriors returned with a truth built from iron. They had brought up their siege towers—vast, ribbed things with maws that opened to vomit infantry into parapets. Behind them, a shadow too large to be contained. The White Scars' outriders flared in and out of sight around their ankles, stinging, cutting, dying. The towers ignored them.
"That one," Kael said, indicating the largest with a knuckle. "That's the key. Kill it, and their geometry collapses. Kill it, and they fight like angry men again."
Azkaellon followed his line. He nodded once. "You need a ladder."
Kael pointed at his shadow.
Azkaellon actually laughed. It sounded shocked to find itself. "Then I'll keep them admiring the view."
They set it in motion with the calm of men who have decided how they prefer to die. Blood Angels drew the eye: wings flaring, jump packs carving comets through smoke. White Scars slashed at flanks in a white blur of curved steel and engine cough.
The Silent Company went low and left, where the tower's undercarriage met ground and the ground had a different color—reinforced from below, a foundation that had meant to resist earthquakes and had not considered knives.
Kael ran. He reached the shadow of the tower and the shadow accepted him, deepening, thickening, welcoming its owner home. He put his palm to the iron and let the dark climb. It became a line tight as wire, a strip of night stretched to a blade's width. He put his boot to it and rose, one step, then another, up the side of the tower through the firelight, a man ascending the absence of stairs.
Bullets struck where he should have been. He was not there when they arrived. An Iron Warrior leaned out to fire. Kael's blade took his arm off at the elbow. The arm fell and kept firing until it emptied itself of faith. Kael reached the lip and rolled inside.
The interior was a machine's throat. Chains hung like curtains. Gears bigger than houses turned with patient malice. At the core, a heart of iron beat out the tower's rhythm. Two Techmarines in hazard black tended control-altars, their servo-arms grafted into ports like worshipers who had found a god they could touch.
Kael threw his last grenades at the altar and the altar ate them because it had been built by men who refused to be ashamed of being good at their jobs. He smiled without humor.
"All right," he said. "We'll do it my way."
He ran to the heart and drove Veilrender in to the hilt. The blade sang. The shadow rushed the wound and poured into the machine like night poured into a room. The tower's beat stuttered.
The Techmarines screamed—not in pain, but in outrage. They came at him with chain-glaives; he stepped inside the first swing and cut the cabling in a fan of sparks. A servo-arm caught his pauldron and wrenched; plates popped, seals hissed.
He jammed his pistol under the Techmarine's chin and fired. The second struck his ribs with the haft of his blade and a white sheet of pain covered the world. Kael pivoted on the hurt, used it like a handhold, and cut low. The Techmarine fell in two unhappy pieces.
The tower screamed. The machine-spirit had finally noticed it was dying. Kael wrenched Veilrender free and planted three krak charges in a triangle, then turned and ran.
He fell out of the tower in a long, ugly arc, caught himself on the shadow-line halfway, lost his grip, fell again, hit the ground, rolled, found his feet because stubbornness beats gravity if you've practiced, and kept moving.
He said, "Down," and the world obeyed.
The charges blew. The tower folded into itself, one side collapsing while the other side tried to continue being a building out of habit. The result was ground-level art and a large hole where an idea had been.
The Iron Warriors' perfect lines faltered in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with depended-upon vectors vanishing.
"Now," Azkaellon said, and the angels dove.
They fell like judgments, a hundred points of gold in a sky that had forgotten how to show anything but soot. Their descent broke the push. The White Scars turned the stagger into a rout with rude laughter and beautiful knives. The Silent Company pressed, black wedge sliding forward in a tide of red and rain.
Kael tried to follow and his body finally sent its bill. His side went hot, then cold. The HUD printed neat, professional text about internal hemorrhage and compromised seals, and then obligingly dimmed it so as not to distract him from dying well.
He went to one knee and the world shifted. A moment later it tilted again. He realized he was on his back with Malchion crouched over him, one hand on his chest, the other firing at something Kael couldn't see.
"Stay," Malchion said, and his tone suggested that if Kael disobeyed, Malchion would be very disappointed and then very violent with whomever had encouraged him.
"I have… more work," Kael said, jaw numb.
"You have a hole," Malchion said. "It's the same shape as a scythe's opinion."
Joras slid into view, his narthecium clenched between his teeth because his good hand was busy throwing a last sapper's present somewhere that exploded in a way that offended an Iron Warrior. He spat the tool into his palm, popped Kael's torso seals, and worked with speed that owed more to love than practice.
"Hold the dark," Joras said. "It's leaking into me."
Kael realized the shadow had crept up Joras's wrist and was turning his glove glossy. He made a fist. The dark flinched, then flowed back into him like a tide that had remembered its chores.
Joras slammed a plug into the wound, sealed it with a hiss, and injected a burning calm into Kael's thigh. The world steadied. The pain stood up straight and saluted.
"Captain," Azkaellon's voice came through the rubble of channels. "Your tower—signal collapse across their assault grid. We're pushing them back to their guns."
"Good," Kael managed. His tongue felt carved from tin. "Keep them honest."
Azkaellon's tone softened by a hair's breadth—dangerous in a man like him. "Rest while we earn you that luxury."
Lights went out at the edge of Kael's vision and came back stubbornly. He let Malchion drag him into the lee of a cracked support, where the wind didn't carry quite as many knives.
The sky above them was a black bruise. The air tasted of copper and ozone and the ghost of perfume. Somewhere close by, a White Scar sang a song that had too much horizon in it for this place.
"Vox," Kael said.
Malchion frowned behind his lens. "You need a medic, not—"
"Vox," Kael repeated.
Malchion put the bead to his ear. Kael changed channels with the twitch of a jaw muscle the armor still agreed to read.
"Sigillite," he breathed.
Static at first. Then a voice older than the ridge, worn thin and hard as bone. "You sound terrible."
"You sound old," Kael said. "We both make do."
"Report," Malcador said.
"Colossi holds," Kael said. "For now. Angels glitter, wolves ride the wind, and the men who love walls are learning to love rubble. I killed a tower. It screamed like a cathedral with opinions."
A quiet that might have been laughter if the owner had remembered to let it. "You buy minutes better than most."
"Dorn makes walls from them," Kael said.
"Dorn is not the only one building," Malcador murmured, voice gone distant, almost reverent. "Listen."
Kael didn't know if he shut his eyes or they did it for him. The dark inside his helm emptied. A pressure rose under his skin—not the warp, not the rot, something cleaner and more awful.
For a breath—a long, terrifying, tender breath—he felt a presence like the ocean under continents. The Emperor, bound to a machine that was a throne and a tomb and a promise, stared at the night and did not blink. The gold was cold. The love was not.
Kael's breath hitched. The shadow at his boots lay down like a dog that has been shown its master and is happy for it.
"He sees you," Malcador said, and the tone had nothing of games or knives in it. "Not in time. Outside of it. The way we look at constellations. He doesn't call. He isn't allowed. But he sees."
Kael found that his hand had closed around the feather of black plate at his throat. He didn't remember moving it. He let it go like a man letting go of a friend's shoulder.
"Good," he said, because thank you was for later, and later wasn't guaranteed. "We'll give him a few more minutes."
"Do that," Malcador said. The line thinned, then steadied. "And Kael."
"Yes?"
"Keep your darkness on a leash. It likes you too much."
The channel died. Kael opened his eyes. The world returned: smoke, angels, dirty laughter hunted down and made to stop, White Scars cursing in poetry. Malchion looked at him like a man reassessing the weight of a thing he already carried willingly.
"Orders?" Malchion asked.
"Same as before," Kael said. He pushed himself up the wall inch by careful inch until his boots remembered the ground. The pain helped. So did the cold. "We hold. We hurt them. We count."
Joras passed him a half-crushed water vial. Kael drank. It tasted like metal and victory diluted fifty-to-one.
"Captain," Azkaellon said on open vox, the battle's edge shaving the silk from his voice. "They're breaking. Another push and we take the guns."
"Take them," Kael said. "Break their hands on the levers. Make them relearn every motion."
"And you?" Azkaellon asked.
Kael looked out across the valley. The Iron Warriors' lines were coming apart in quiet ways first—the pauses between steps off by fractions, the fire missions late by two heartbeats. Grace failing. The Emperor's Children already fled in pretty disarray, their dead perfuming the air with a sweetness that made honest men angry.
"I'll be here when the bill arrives," Kael said. "I sign for this line."
Azkaellon's laugh returned, smaller this time, inside armor. "You claim so little and pay for so much."
"So do we all," Kael said.
The last hour of the night was a gray grind—work without glamour. They advanced trench by trench, slab by slab, cutting wires and throats and the cords that tied ideas to the ground.
The Iron Warriors withdrew in good order until order frayed and they left their wounded behind. The White Scars rode them until the engines cooled. The Blood Angels planted standards in the muck and stood a while, breathing.
When dawn came, it didn't. The sky brightened by a suggestion. The smoke learned a paler color. The Palace's walls shone a little through the haze, the way teeth do when a man smiles despite everything.
Kael walked the length of their new line with malice for every gap and kindness for every man too proud to ask for water. He touched helms. He recorded names. He knelt once, alone, by a chunk of black-blooded metal that had once been part of the Watcher Above's skin—gift from a low pass that had shaved another day for them to stand in.
He said nothing to it. He did not need to. The ship answered with a slow, affectionate pulse down the chain of their shared nerve.
Azkaellon found him there, helm under his arm, hair damp with someone else's blood. He looked at the shard, then at Kael, and the corner of his mouth made a shape more human than a man like him should risk.
"You fight like a man who knows he will be remembered wrong," the Captain of the First said.
"I'm content to be remembered at all," Kael answered.
Azkaellon inclined his head. "We will speak again, Night's Child."
"Preferably not at a funeral," Kael said.
Azkaellon's eyes softened and hardened in the span of a breath. "Preferably," he agreed, then turned and went to relieve his angels, whose wings did not look heavy until you considered all they carried.
Kael watched him go. He let the five seconds open and close and show him nothing but the next step and the next. It was enough.
"Captain," Malchion said quietly. "Orders?"
Kael lifted Veilrender, the edge nicked and honest. He sheathed it with the care of a man putting a friend to bed. He looked down the line at men who would die for words not worth the air it took to speak them and for one word that always was.
"Eat," he said. "Drink. Clean your blades. Count your breath. In an hour they'll try us again."
"And after that?" Joras asked, because some men need to ask and some leaders need to answer.
Kael's black eyes took in the valley—the broken towers, the burned earth, the gold and the ash.
"After that," he said, "we do it again."
He sat on the edge of the world while the angels sang low in a language that could hold both love and violence without flinching. The White Scars laughed because laughter was armor. The Watcher Above drifted in her high orbit, a cut of night against a lid of smoke.
The Emperor's presence flickered like a distant lighthouse through weather not meant for ships.
Kael closed his eyes for the length of two heartbeats. When he opened them, the math still worked. That was enough to stand.
He stood.