Dawn made a promise it couldn't keep.
The sky over Colossi Valley paled by degrees, a bruised black lifting toward lead, but the light never arrived. The smoke thinned, learned a new shade of gray, and the sun stayed a rumor behind the lid of ash. The wind carried grit and prayer in equal measure. It found every wound and spoke to it.
Kael Varan walked the battlefield with his helm mag-locked at his waist and his blade sheathed. He moved as if weight were a decision: slow, deliberate, permitting himself the honesty of pain in each step. The Silent Company fanned out through the ruins, black shapes in a world that had misplaced color.
A hundred and five Astartes answered his first roll call. By the third, that number was a shape in his head he could hold without the edges cutting his palm.
They set about the work that comes after work. Bodies first. Enemy into pyres—oil, promethium, a White Scar's grim song flung to the wind to confuse whatever listened from the other side.
Brothers into lines: Imperial Fists turned to face the Palace, Raven Guard with their arms arranged as if mid-flight, Blood Angels laid with their wings cleaned of filth as best as human hands could manage.
The Silent Company had no banners left; they erected a line of broken bolters instead, muzzles pointing at the sky, and a spare helm on each like black fruit.
Kael carried two of his own. Malchion took the third, because a captain who bears all the weight breaks sooner and breaks loud. They laid the helms side by side on a slab of ferrocrete that had cooled into glass.
Kael named them in a voice low enough that the wind had to lean close to hear. Joras repeated the names into a slate that had been shot three times and still insisted on writing because stubbornness is a kind of sanctity.
"Who gets the rites?" Malchion asked at last. He said it without softness; he had never learned how to pad responsibility so it didn't bruise on impact.
"We all do," Kael said. He drew a line with a finger in the dust and ash. "Fists say walls. Scars say wind. Angels say flight and flame. We say night. They'll hear whichever they need."
He stood back. The line of dead looked like punctuation left by a sentence too long to finish. He placed his palm on the center helm—Ser Arno, who had laughed like a man trying not to cough—and let the darkness pooling around his boots rise and lay itself over the three helms like a cloth.
The shadow cooled the air. The ash settled. Even the iron stink of blood drew back a little, the way crowds make space when someone important steps past.
"Keep counting," Kael murmured. "We'll be along."
He left the helms and walked toward the ridge where the Blood Angels had made a chapel out of broken girders. The IX Legion did everything with aesthetic violence. Even their triage smelled faintly of incense; even their bandages were laid in careful lines.
Sanguinary Priests worked with a priest's serenity and a butcher's competence. They moved through liturgies of needle and saw, and the men under their hands watched the sky and did not cry out because their gene-sire had never taught them how.
Azkaellon waited at the apex of the ridge, helm off, hair dark with sweat and someone else's blood. A semicircle of Sanguinary Guard stood a discrete distance away with the patience of statues that had chosen to be men for a while. When Kael reached him, the captain looked up and the set of his mouth suggested a smile taught itself how to be solemn.
"Night's Child," he said. "You walk."
"I count," Kael replied.
Azkaellon's gaze flickered over him: the scored plates, the rough-sealed rent at his flank, the mottled bruise under his left eye where blunt trauma had reminded an Astartes that his skull contained a face. "You refuse the priest again?"
Kael tilted his head toward the nearest Sanguinary. The man's chalice glowed faintly in the ashlight. "Your angels are mending angels. Mine are busy. Besides—" He tapped the runes at his gorget. "She bites unfamiliar hands."
Azkaellon's gaze lingered a fraction too long on the silver script etched into Kael's Aegis Tenebris. The runes looked like veins. The armor dreamed when Kael stopped moving. The captain either did not notice or refused to. "The line holds," he said instead. "For now."
"For now is a good wage," Kael said.
Azkaellon's attention shifted past him, to where the Silent Company were stacking ammunition crates into a makeshift altar. "Your men… they move as one mind but break off as if answering something inside it. They do not look to banners. They look to you."
"They look to the work," Kael said. "I stand where the work is loudest."
"You stand where the dying is loudest," Azkaellon said, not unkindly.
"Same thing today," Kael answered.
A White Scar rode in from the north without the formality of roads, chassis and rider black with soot. He dismounted in one motion and spoke to Azkaellon in High Gothic that had learned how to run. "Enemy lines collapsed to the second battery. They left teeth behind. We are picking them from the ground."
His eyes skated over Kael—curiosity, appraisal, the quick mathematic of an ally under unusual light—then returned to the captain. "We ride in an hour."
"You'll have our wings," Azkaellon said.
"And your shadows?" the Scar asked, looking again to Kael with a grin that made the ash seem to remember warmth.
"When you call," Kael said.
The Scar put fist to chest. "Then the wind owes you a favor."
He left the way he had arrived, like weather deciding it had somewhere better to be. Azkaellon watched him go. "They make it look easy."
"They use speed to hide the cost," Kael said. "We use quiet."
Azkaellon glanced sidelong. "And what do we use?"
"Beauty," Kael said, and did not let it sound like either compliment or accusation.
A priest came with a bowl of water that had learned taste from iron and smoke. He offered it first to Azkaellon. The captain stepped aside. "Our guest."
Kael drank, mouthfuls small and deliberate. He passed the bowl back. The priest lifted it to his own lips without flinch and then handed it to Azkaellon, who rinsed blood from his chin like a man washing off dust before dinner. The ritual tasted like civilization rehearsing itself in a ruin.
Below, the Silent Company performed their own rites. Malchion squatted with three Scouts whose faces hadn't had time to finish changing into what they'd be the rest of their lives.
He unpacked a battered tin that had belonged to men before any of them and filled it with rations that could be convinced to resemble stew if bullied. He made them eat with spoons instead of hands. Joras walked the lines with a length of stained cloth and cleaned lenses, because seeing clearly is a creed.
A pair of Imperial Fists approached the Silent Company's altar with the wary dignity of men skirting a neighbor's god. They set a cracked Aquila there and stepped back.
One inclined his head to Malchion, not as equal or inferior, but as a man giving another man a hard truth to carry. Malchion nodded, and the nod said: It will be here when you need to find it again.
Kael felt the ship before he saw her. The Watcher Above brushed the back of his mind like a patient hand—present, orbiting, one engine coughing but not complaining. She passed out of cloud, a dark wedge against a gray lid.
Her lights were dimmed out of respect. Every so often a pulse went through her frame and through Kael's bones, as if the two rhythms had decided to share.
"You pilot a shadow in the sky," Azkaellon said, following his gaze. "Appropriate."
"She pilots me," Kael said.
Azkaellon folded his arms, considering. "Tell me a thing plainly," he said at last. "Do you believe we win?"
Kael looked at him. The captain's face had been built for the tragic. It wore resolve like jewelry. "I believe we pay," he said. "I believe payment makes some things possible."
Azkaellon's mouth made that not-quite-smile again. "A priest once told me victory is a coin paid to the dead. Some days I think he meant it as comfort."
"He did," Kael said. "He was wrong. It's just arithmetic."
"Arithmetic can be worship," Azkaellon murmured. He looked toward the walls. A slow breath left him and took nothing with it. "I do not fear death, Kael Varan. I fear ugliness. Not in flesh. In endings."
Kael's black eyes tracked a line of smoke insolently straight against the churned sky. "Then end beautifully."
Azkaellon's laugh was weary and human. "I'll try."
A bell rang. Not a chapel bell—no one had those anymore—but a length of pipe struck with a spanner by a mortal with grease to the elbows and a devotion to ceremony. It summed the camp: attention, respect, water, food. Men came. Astartes stood aside and let the little ones go first because simple decency scales up just fine when taught young.
A Raven Guard walked up the ridge toward them, his gait soft enough not to wake the dead. He stopped just short of familiarity. "My lord," he said to Azkaellon. Then to Kael: "Varan."
"Corax?" Kael asked.
"Gone before he arrived," the Raven answered. The corner of his mouth tilted. Their humor always tasted of mourning. "He sends a message without words: Cut quietly where they do not look. We will oblige."
Kael inclined his head, small and exact. Respect, not submission. The Raven left exactly no footprints and joined a knot of his own, who were teaching a handful of mortar crews how to vanish with their guns instead of dying with them.
The wind shifted. Somewhere in the valley a loose sheet of metal clanged a complaint, then learned to be still. Kael's five-second sight opened like a reluctant eye. The futures dragged past: a White Scar falling with a laugh in his throat, a banner burning, a Mortarion-thing's shadow sliding over a district that still remembered childhood. He held the view without blinking until it blurred and closed.
"You flinch," Azkaellon said quietly, not a question.
"It's louder today," Kael said.
"Warp-sick," the captain murmured. "The air feels… tuned wrong. The music after a hymn stops and something keeps humming."
Kael's mouth tugged. "You speak like a poet when you're tired."
"I am always tired," Azkaellon said, and there was no self-pity in it, only inventory.
They walked the line together. Men straightened instinctively—or not; exhaustion makes hierarchy honest. Kael paused at each knot of labor and made small corrections with gentle hands: a seal checked, a cable moved, a firing angle adjusted by five degrees because in five seconds a shape would run through it.
He asked names and got serials and sobriquets: "Iron Danyel," "Gaius Two-Knives," "Khal of the Seventh Wind." He told them to drink water like a threat and they obeyed like a prayer.
At the Silent Company's makeshift altar, three mortals stood with their backs to the world. Nostramans—the kind who had learned to keep their heads down so hard that their necks had become habits. They wore void-leathers, plates salvaged and decorated with paint made from ash and machine oil.
One held a ledger. One held a wrench. One held a knife he was teaching his hand to love without shaking.
Kael stopped. The one with the ledger looked up. He had the black eyes of Nostramo: sclera swallowed, iris a rim of darker velvet. He met Kael's abyss and did not look away.
"Captain," he said. Strange to hear the old gutter-note in a voice that had learned High Gothic's cleaner bones. "We set your stores. We bled the ordnance. We stitched what would be men and burned what wouldn't. We made a list."
He handed the ledger over. The columns were disciplined, the handwriting a machine's patience taught to flesh. Veyra had written like that. The memory pressed against Kael's ribs. He didn't move to make space.
"Name," Kael said.
"Vass," the man replied. "Vass ion-Nanor. Watch-deck three. Once."
Kael read the list slowly. He did not need to. He did it anyway, the way you walk a room you slept in as a child and touch each wall as if it could still keep the weather out. He closed the book. He set his palm on the cover.
"Stand with us," he said simply.
Vass's throat worked. He nodded once, a movement so slight it might have been a trick the wind played with his spine. "Aye," he said, and put the knife away like a man agreeing to help hold a door shut against a storm.
Azkaellon watched the exchange with a tact as deliberate as any blade stroke. When they moved on, he said: "You collect shadows."
"They collect me," Kael said. He touched the feather of black plate at his throat. Its edge was cool. Memory sat down beside him and did not need to speak.
They reached the edge of the valley again. The field had settled into its new shape. Iron Warriors lines smoldered where geometry had died. Emperor's Children dead perfumed the air in a way that made decent men angry. White Scars rode pickets wide as patience. Blood Angels stood at prayer with their helms off long enough to let faces remember grief.
A Sanguinary Priest approached with a sealed ampoule. "For your pain," he said.
"It keeps me honest," Kael replied.
The priest's eyes creased in what passed for approval. He left the ampoule on a crate anyway, because grace doesn't require consent.
Malchion found them there. He had cleaned his armor with a rag that had once been a banner. It was not disrespect. It was utility sanctified by need. He nodded to Azkaellon with the born soldier's equal parts respect and irritation for beauty that survives war.
"Captain. The Watcher will give us one more pass before she sleeps. Joras is lying to the guns so they'll work harder."
"He learned from a good man," Kael said.
"Veyra?" Malchion asked. The name put an ache in the air around them.
"A good woman," Kael said. "Better than any of us." He looked up at the ship. For a breath he felt the dataslate under her palm, the scratch of the pencil, the neat columns, the humming under her breath when the stress needed a place to go that wasn't a man's throat. He closed his eyes before the picture could make his face say something other men didn't need to see.
Azkaellon did not press. The best of commanders learn when not to ask.
"An hour," Malchion said. "Then the Scar wants to ride. He's right. We should loot their teeth before they remember they are wolves."
"Make it forty minutes," Kael said. "Let the men eat one true bite. Let them know they were alive between deaths. Then we go."
Malchion's mouth made an expression he rarely let others see. "Aye."
He left. Joras arrived the way small explosions arrive: sudden, and everyone accepts it because there's no arguing with physics. He had a stack of detonators and a coil of wire over one shoulder like a pilgrim's rope.
He jerked his chin toward the north. "Left two klicks—an Iron Warriors ammo spur half-buried under what used to be a saint's statue. We borrow it before they remember where they left it."
"We borrow with interest," Kael said.
"I brought a ledger," Joras replied, deadpan, and was gone before humor could make a noise.
Azkaellon watched him go. "Your one-handed man is a joy."
"He is an accounting," Kael said. "He makes the world pay the correct price."
They ate. The stew Malchion bullied into being learned to be food by sheer intimidation. Men chewed and swallowed and blinked like waking animals. The White Scars shared a flask that smelled of storms and home.
A Raven Guard spoke a story about trees to three mortals who had never seen one. A Blood Angel wiped grime from a broken glass icon and set it upright where men would pass. No one prayed loudly. The air carried enough requests already.
Kael sat on a ruined tread and unfastened his left gauntlet. The skin beneath was pale as old paper, scarred with small ovals where needles had gone, lines where blades had been, a single circle where something had burnt him to the core and he had learned he could keep burning and not mind. The shadow crowded his hand the moment the plate came off. It curled around his fingers like a cat too familiar.
"Enough," he said softly.
It receded, slow and sulky, and pooled at his boots. He flexed his hand. The ache traveled up to the elbow and made itself comfortable in his shoulder.
"Does it… want?" Azkaellon asked, watching with a poet's caution.
"Everything wants," Kael said. "This only admits it."
He refastened the gauntlet. The seals hissed. The ship hummed in his bones again—a reassurance, a leash, a love. He stood.
"Time," he said.
The Silent Company rose with him. A hundred and five men reached for their helms. Lenses lit. Servos purred. The scrape and click of the preparation ritual became its own music. Somewhere a mortal coughed until the cough forgot what it was for and left.
Azkaellon's angels formed wings at the valley's lip. White Scars engines shivered into readiness. The Raven Guard simply stopped being visible. The line took a breath.
Kael lifted Veilrender. The blade drank light. The reflection along its edge was the cleanest thing in sight.
"We hold to hurt them," he said. He did not raise his voice. He never had to. "We hurt them to hold what matters. We don't confuse the two. We count. We keep counting."
"Night remembers," the Silent Company answered, low and unanimous.
Azkaellon stepped close enough that their armor brushed. It felt like two different stories meeting at a comma. "We have your flank," he said.
"And I have your shadow," Kael replied.
They moved.
The valley's floor took them without protest. The gray light thickened around them. The world smelled of wet iron and warm oil and men. Above, the Watcher Above cut a long arc west to east, a patient knife drawing a careful line across a throat too big to bleed right away.
The air tasted of something else too—something ancient and clean, like cold stone and candle smoke, like a chapel before the first hymn.
Kael's five-second sight opened and did not show him a battle. It showed a hall of gold where dust fell like gentle rain. It showed a figure on a throne of light whose face could not be remembered by any language. It showed a hand lifted—not to bless, not to command, merely to be seen.
He blinked and the valley returned.
"Do you—" Azkaellon began, and then stopped, as if interrupting a prayer.
Kael did not look over. "I do."
They ran.
The White Scars' laughter went ahead of them like weather. The angels' wings were a sunrise that might yet remember how. The Silent Company moved like a shadow pulled taut, a line drawn and redrawn until it cut.
Behind them, under ash and iron, Terra rumbled. Cities shivered in their foundations; cathedra remembered the weight of kneeling. In the upper dark, fleets bled fire into fire. In the Palace, the Emperor burned, and the burn learned the shape of endurance.
No summons came. Not yet. The reprieve ended the way all reprieves end: with men getting up and doing the next thing on a list that never ran out.
Kael counted the steps. He counted the breaths. He counted the brothers.
He kept counting.