I LIVED BITCH

Last he knew, he'd appealed to the Crowfather's lingering soul, asking the Old One to return you safely to the Forge Lands and the makers who were likely waiting to envelope you into their fold with open arms.

Would you still be there? How much time had passed? And what of Earth?

All questions, he realised, that would sadly have to wait. Because War was suddenly looming over him, gauntlet outstretched, inviting their eldest to stand.

As Death grasped his brother's hand and used it to haul himself from the ground, he made a silent promise.

He'd find you, wherever you were. He didn't yet know how time had moved around him while he was 'dead,' but if you were out there, if your soul still remembered him, he'd find you and keep you as close as he had before the Well was opened.

It is, as you'd told him many times, what friends are for.

--------------------------------------------------

You couldn't rightly say you know if the years have been kind to you or not. It's hard to gauge when you see yourself change so slowly, every day, little by little. More hairs growing in around your jaw, more wrinkles settling beneath your eyelids, the one at the corner of your mouth that betrays the side of your face you tend to favour when you smile.

You don't think you've changed that much. Not really. You're still the same human who made friends with a race of giants. You're still the same human who helped a dead man feel alive again. Who forced an angel to live with his crimes rather than die without ever getting the chance to mend them. Who looked a Prince of Hell in the eye and thanked him for the Demon Key.

Who called an ancient, eldritch Horseman 'friend.'

You still miss him.

It's been years... decades even, and there isn't a day goes by that you don't think of Death in some capacity.

So, it's no surprise that you're thinking about him today as you doze in your favourite chair, the one you'd lugged here from several streets over so you could position it to face the setting sun, casting golden light in through glass panes and warming you where you sit amongst the tartan cushions.

You're tired now. More tired than you were when you young. Tired of rebuilding, tired of being Humanity's mouthpiece when there's tension between the races. Tired of being dragged from pillar to post by cold politicians who think that they still have power just because they used to enjoy it in the Old World.

You're not tired of waiting though, not for Death. Perhaps because you know, sooner or later, in some unknowable way, you'll be seeing him again when your clock ticks over.

Your head begins to nod, your lap sun-warmed and comfortable, when there's a sudden commotion at the door to your home. You flinch at the loud 'slam,' like someone has just thrown it open and let the handle crash brazenly into the adjacent wall.

Your eyes fly open at the same time as your hand flies to the knife in your pocket, gifted to you by your Horseman all those years ago.

'In case of an emergency,' he'd said as he pressed the beautifully crafted dagger into your palm, it's blade borrowed from one of Harvester's jagged edges.

It's the cold that reaches you first, a bone-deep chill that sweeps into the room ahead of any entity. At first, you think it's just the autumn wind blowing through the open door... but then there's a dark shape slinking into the entryway, a pair of embers glowing side by side in the air as they duck beneath the wooden frame.

... And then you're dropping your knife to the carpet and letting out a loud, wet gasp, both hands shooting up to cup around your mouth.

You'd never seen Death without his mask before, but you'd recognise the Horseman in front of you whether he were wearing it or not. The translucence of his skin like that of a fresh corpse... The cold that rolls off his bulging shoulders in waves, as if warmth itself is trying to escape his presence... Long, matted hair pitched darker than oil... And his face, until this point, completely unknown to you, is as sallow and sunken as you always imagined it would be.

The bone-mask he used to wear now sits safely on your bedside table, entrusted to you that day he gave himself to the Well in exchange for the souls of humanity.

He's the most beautiful sight you've ever laid eyes on.

"Y/n...?" his gentle voice wafts uncertainly into the space between you, sending tears over the edge of your lashes to cascade down your cheeks and dip between your fingertips.

It strikes you that, of course he'd be uncertain...

You've... changed.

He's still him. Still Death, with all his wonderful imperfections that were always there from the moment you first met him.

Yours, however, are new. A different body, a different face, similar of course, yet... it isn't the You that he knew. Suddenly, inexplicably, you find yourself feeling just a little self-conscious as his golden eyes rake over you from head to toe, and you move a hand away from your mouth to scrape some hair behind your ear. It shouldn't matter to you, you scold yourself sternly. Your friend is alive. He's alive, and he's here and -

Death doesn't even wait for you to confirm that it is you. He'd know your soul even if you changed so much that you couldn't recognise yourself.

In two short strides, he's crossed the room and flung his sinewy arms out wide, swinging them around your back and wrenching you forwards into his chest with such ferocity, it knocks the wind out of your lungs.

"I... I-!" You can't find the words as he buries his face - his real face - into the side of your neck. You can feel the hard ridge of his nose sweep back and forth over your skin, pressing firmly against you as if he can't get close enough even with his massive hands clinging feverishly to the back of your jumper, anchoring himself to you like he expects you to disappear at any moment.

"Too long," he whispers harshly into your ear, "It's been too long..."

It's far more of a firm and unyielding statement than any kind of pleasantry. It has been too long. So, to remediate the error, Death is holding onto you like he never plans on letting any more time pass without you by his side again.

You try not to let that go to your head.

And then he's pulling his head away from you, and his fingers untangle themselves from your jumper to slide from your back and ghost shakily up your arms until he's clasping the sides of your neck and tucking his thumbs beneath your jawline, tilting your head backwards so he can stare down at you, starstruck.

For several, long moments, you're caught there, peering into his eyes as he lets his travel the new contours of your face. Only this time, you can see his thin lips, dark like a purpled bruise, stretch into a blindingly fond smile.

"Look at you..." he croaks thickly as a calloused thumb scrubs at the tear-stained skin below your eye, "I... I wasn't sure I'd be lucky enough to see this face again..."

Huffing out a wet laugh, you give your head a tiny shake and reply, "That's my line." And as you speak, you raise your own hands, guiding them around his wrists and edging them towards his exposed face.

You still have enough forethought to pause though, letting your trembling fingers hover just above the hollows of his cheeks before you ask, "Could I....?"

The Horseman only snorts, his grin inching wider as if he'd expected nothing less of you, and then he tips his head sideways, seeking out the warmth of your fingertips until you're cupping his head in one palm and using the other to carefully brush his hair away from his face.

In an instant, Death melts against you with a contented rumble from deep inside his chest, which really goes to show just how badly he's been missing you because there was a time you'd risk losing a finger if they wandered too close to his mouth.

"You stayed..." he whispers drunkenly, and for the first time, you have to wonder how long he's been looking for you.... You don't think you've ever seen the Horseman look this haggard.

"Stayed?" you ask.

"You're still here," he says, "You're still alive... I thought..." Heaving a sigh that you feel against your skin for the first time, he leans his pockmarked cheek more heavily against your hand and admits, "I thought I might have been too late..."

Bemused, you scoff, "I'm know I'm old, but I'm not that old."

"Hah," he chuckles breathlessly, his eyes hooded and admiring, "You could live to be a hundred, and I'd hardly consider you 'old."

"Well, no. But this is coming from the oldest man in the Universe."

For your cheek, you're rewarded with the soft bump of his chin where it knocks against your forehead.

The heart in your chest squeezes furiously, and your face crumples as you tip forwards into the Horseman, slinging your arms around his emaciated waist whilst he slides his hands down to the small of your back, unwilling to let any bit of him part from you for even a second.

"You haven't changed a bit," you tell him, voice muffled against his cold chest.

You feel the rumble under the Horseman's sternum travel up his throat before you hear him say, "Neither have you."

Admittedly, you blurt out a laugh. "Oh, are you kidding? I'm aging like leftovers."

Death’s abdomen jumps beneath you as he chuckles fondly and adds, “And what a privilege that is.”

“To age badly?”

For a moment there was no sound but the deep, bellows breathing of the Primarch barely muffled by the rushing of blood in your ears. Then, a long sigh.

“Very well.”

He shifted you in his arms. When you began to descend you panicked, fingers locking onto the engravings on his pauldron. 

“Wait! What-”

“Hush.”

His deep voice pulsed through you like a rolling tide. Your rigid muscles relaxed and you allowed him to set you upon his bed. The firm mattress barely gave beneath your weight. Your feet dangled. Finally, you gained the courage to open eyes that had remained tightly shut since that awful moment in your grandmother’s cell.

Sparse, heavy furniture. Clean lines. Shades of blue. A desk the size of a small land vehicle, almost totally obscured by precisely stacked columns of parchment. Somewhere data slates buzzed and pinged with incessant notifications. 

You felt your heartbeat slow.

Safe. I’m safe here.

Safe to sort through the maelstrom of emotions swirling within you.

She’s finally gone.

Most likely, she’d been gone even before Roboute’s sword fell. The look in her eyes… the voice coming from her mouth… the strength in her clawed hands. You touched your throat again and winced at the sting.

“At the end… she wasn’t human anymore, was she?” The steadiness of your voice surprised you.

Roboute had his back to you, murmuring something into his personal vox set. It should have been difficult to read body language through the sheer massiveness of his armor. But you saw him tense.

The silence stretched long before he finally spoke.

“No.”

Light, the old records were true. It hasn’t happened in over half a millennia, but now….

You whispered an ancient, terrible word. “Void-cursed.” 

“Is that your people’s term for it?”

“One of them.”

Void-cursed. Plagued by a being from the Warp. Possessed. 

Your shaking intensified. “When she looked at me, at the end, she reminded me of how Victor had looked. Like something other had crawled inside her skin.”

Roboute did not reply.

“I’ve heard stories.” You needed to talk, to process what you’d seen. “The reasons why every Light-blessed child undergoes the Dampening. What happens if they don’t.”

Guilliman turned toward you again. His face reminded you of marble. But emotion flickered in his deep eyes. In a single stride he stood before you in all his titanic majesty. Then, his armor groaned as he sank to his knees.

Even seated on the high bed, you were barely at the level of his eyes.

“My Hearts,” he placed his gauntleted hands on either side of your hips, “Listen to me.”

Something in his tone made you stiffen. 

“We must never speak of what occurred in that chamber.”

You furrowed your brows. “Roboute-”

“Never.”

You flinched. His eyes widened, then he brought one hand up to cup your face. 

“I do not mean to frighten you. Please, try to understand. To speak of… such things… carries great danger.” 

You pulled away. “The Matriarch is dead, Roboute! I was not so insensible when you brought me back to this ship. I heard the whispers. If everyone does not know by now, they will soon. For the Light’s sake, Conrad was there! He saw!”

His jaw flexed. “I am aware. That will have to be remedied.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked away. Reaching out, you curled your fingers around the edge of his gorget as if you had the strength to pull him back. 

“Roboute, what do you mean by that?!”

He stared into the middle distance. You could almost see the calculations running behind his eyes.

“Rumors can be suppressed. We will craft an acceptable story. And I do not think your cousin a fool. He will agree to keep silent. Drastic measures need not be taken.”

Your blood ran cold.

“You wouldn’t hurt him.” You whispered. “You wouldn’t.”

Those burning blue eyes turned their full force back on you. “I will do what is necessary to protect you.”

An invisible hand wrapped around your lungs and squeezed. 

“I don’t understand. Conrad wouldn’t harm me.”

“My Hearts, please-”

“You did not react this way when people whispered of Victor’s betrayal and corruption.”

“Love-”

“Granted, this is… different. But surely things are not so dire that you must-”

“Enough.”

He stood. The air in the chamber grew heavy, pressing upon your body as if the gravity had suddenly doubled. 

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch, towered over you.

“It will be as I say.”

He stood less than five feet away. Yet it felt like a chasm had opened between you.

***

Guilliman saw you retreat into yourself and regretted every word that had come out of his mouth. 

No, not the words. Rather, the manner in which they were spoken.

He would say the words again. And again. As many times as it took to make you understand. 

I must.

Still, as he looked down at your silent form, perched like a bird on the edge of a bed far too large for you, his hearts ached.

He softened his voice as much as he was able and whispered your name.

The vox buzzed.

“My Lord, the serf you requested is here.”

Guilliman sighed as he replied. “Let them through, Cato.”

The door hissed open. The young man in serf’s robes bowed low. The cart he pushed held a bowl of steaming water, clean cloths, and basic medical supplies. Guilliman motioned him to leave it. With another bow, the serf departed. The door closed. 

And they were alone again.

Guilliman pulled the cart closer. Kneeling once more in front of you, an action his armor protested, he carefully dipped a cloth in the warm water.

“Tilt your head, my Hearts. Please.”

You did, your eyes still not meeting his. 

It took an inordinate amount of focus to press the damp fabric against your throat. The smallest overcorrection and he could render you unconscious. Or worse. Twice, the cloth slipped from between his armored fingers to splat softly against your lap.

“Throne damn it.” He grumbled. “Again, manual dexterity of a Legio Cybernetica battle automaton.”

I should have removed my armor first.

A soft huff made him look up. Your lips were pressed tight, but he swore he saw the faintest trace of a smile.

Both his hearts leapt.

“I have many skills. Nursing, it seems, is not one of them.”

The smile did not return. 

He winced. “I should not have spoken so harshly. I only….”

A strange feeling. To be at a loss for words.

What could he say? 

Time and time again you had been pulled from his arms. Threatened. Harmed. Nearly killed. He knew the gray emptiness of thinking he’d lost you forever. His mind slipped back to that moment in your empty chambers. Curled on the floor like a lost child as he contemplated a future without your light to warm him.

“I cannot lose you.”

The words were raw, unpracticed. The voice a rasping wreck no one would ever think could come from a Primarch. Much less the Lord Regent of the Imperium.

“I cannot.” He ceased his paltry medical attempts. “And if the events of that chamber reach the wrong ears, if the words spoken within are learned….”

***

“You would run Anathema’s sword straight through her if you knew! We know. We know what she is!” 

“Halfbreed bitch!”

***

Roboute Guilliman was many things. A fool was not one of them. 

He knew the implication of your grandmother’s, or the Thing possessing her’s, final words. He suspected she… It… had been on the verge of revealing a secret that would have damned you in the eyes of the Imperium before someone intervened.

An intervention not entirely necessary.

I would have ended that foul hag before she spoke another syllable. 

“Roboute….”

You took the cloth from him and dabbed at the scratches on your throat. But your eyes fixed on his face.

“I don’t know what she was talking about. In the end.”

You weren’t lying. The air left Guilliman’s lungs in a rush that ruffled the loose hairs around your face. 

“That is most likely for the best, my Hearts.” He spoke before you could ask the questions he saw poised on your lips. “We will not speak of it.”

You frowned. “Not now, perhaps. But-”

“Not ever.”

This time you did not back down. Something in your face hardened, a determination he both admired and dreaded.

“Roboute, I agree with you there are more important matters than my parentage to focus on right now. The Matriarch’s death will make my succession both easier and more difficult, and power must be consolidated lest anarchy reign.”

He smiled, pride burning in his chest. “A practical mindset.”

“But,” you lowered the red-stained cloth and gripped it hard, “I know you suspect something.”

I do. And it could destroy you.

He remained silent.

You softened, pressing a hand against his stubbled cheek. “I don’t want secrets between us, Roboute.”

He almost laughed at that. Almost.

“This Imperium runs on secrets.” He didn’t bother hiding the bitterness in his voice.

“But a marriage can’t.”

A marriage.

The words sent a jolt like lightning through every nerve ending in his body.

He was going to marry you. Despite what he suspected, he would still marry you. Love you. Protect you from everything and everyone who would tear you from him. Xenos, TerraNovan, or Imperial. 

I will have your life entwined with mine and DAMN whatever blood runs in your veins!

He kissed you.

It was not planned. It was not gentle. 

Guilliman gripped the back of your head, digging his fingers into your hair, and pressed his mouth against yours with just shy of crushing force. Building on his most recent experience, he swept his tongue between your lips. He could have classified your exact taste if he wished. The precise chemical make up.

But he didn’t care, so long as it was you.

I could subsist on your mouth, your breath, alone. 

Only when you began to pat desperately at his cheeks did he pull away. You panted, sagging against his chestplate. He gave you precisely thirty seconds to catch your breath before lifting you by your waist and attaching his mouth to your bruised throat.

He drew his tongue over the scratches, relishing your gasp. The tang of iron stirred something filthy and animal in him. 

Throne, I wish I was out of this cursed armor!

“Tell me you are well.” He growled between kisses. “Tell me you are mine.”

Your pulse pounded wildly against his lips. “You are… ah… trying to distract me!”

“Tell me.”

“Yours! I’m yours, Roboute!”

“Mine.”

And I will do what I must to keep you.

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Faces flashed before your eyes.

Your mother. Proud and strong as she lifted you in arms corded with muscle.

“My sweet girl.”

The Abbess. Wizened face smiling gently as she rested a hand upon your hair.

“Our young bloom.”

Captain Takahashi. Dark eyes calm as she stood at your side.

“My Lady Heir.”

Frenzy. Grinning wide and wild as she defended you with her life.

“For the fucking Matron Uncrowned!”

Listener. Voice soft and cool as she calmed your fears.

“You are Hope.”

The last… a memory? Or did you actually hear her voice inside your head? Did it matter?

As you released the breath you’d been holding and opened your eyes once more, a final face eclipsed all the others. A voice that rumbled through every nerve ending in your body. Eyes that carried an impossible resolve.

An impossible love.

“My Hearts.”

Your grandmother was still speaking. 

“I know you, girl, far better than you know yourself. Your dream of alliance will shatter like all other dreams of peace in this wretched universe. When our people scream under the Imperial boot, they will long for the days when I-”

“No more.”

Her jaw clicked shut, a look of shock coming over her wasted features. You stepped forward, feeling almost in a daze as your eyes passed over her. How old she looked now. How shrunken. Like an emaciated alley cat still hissing and brandishing broken claws.

“I pity you.”

You couldn’t tell what surprised you more: the words you spoke, or the fact that you spoke them with genuine sincerity.

“I may have held compassion for you as well, once. Your life has been cruel and lonely.”

Her face twisted into a mask of baffled loathing.

“You dare-”

“Oh, sh-shut up and let her talk.” Conrad spoke for the first time, his voice shaking slightly.

You spared your cousin a brief smile, then continued moving toward your grandmother. She remained still as stone when you stopped in front of her seated form, looking down on her for the first time in your life. Something in you hardened.

“But you have taken your pain and poured it out on the undeserving.”

***

“Stop! Please, stop!”

Your cries fell on deaf ears. The cudgel rose and fell again and again. Sobs and screams filled the chamber as your maid desperately tried to crawl away, only for the guard’s foot to come down squarely on her bruised back, pinning her in place.

You writhed in another guard’s grip. “She didn’t do anything!”

“I know.”

Your grandmother stood next to you, eyes cold but for the faintest glitter of smug satisfaction.

“Then why?!”

Bony fingers gripped your chin, forcing you to look away from the beating and into the Matriarch’s face. “A lesson, girl. So you remember what happens to those you care for when you disobey me.”

***

Reaching out, you lifted your grandmother’s chin, feeling her parchment-like skin under your fingers. “Having known weakness, you took pleasure in your power over others.”

***

“The riot has been quelled, Matriarch.” The Intelligence Colonel’s eyes were carefully blank as she spoke. “We have the ringleaders in custody.”

You perched upon a stool below your grandmother’s throne. Your back ached from hours of maintaining perfect posture. The steel ribs of your tightened corset had surely broken skin by now. But you didn’t dare move a muscle. 

The Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs finally spoke through gritted teeth. “Was sending in your Black Squads truly necessary, Colonel? Dozens are dead, hundreds injured!”

“Traitors.” You saw the faintest curve in your grandmother’s lips.

“Veterans of the Ork Incursion of Amanecer! Many of them suffering from chronic wounds and neurological disorders! Their pensions hadn’t been paid in months, their petitions to be treated by Light-blessed Healers denied, what did you expect-”

“You are dismissed, Secretary.”

The man marched out of the Hall with clenched teeth and fists.

“Colonel Foster,” your grandmother’s voice was a purr, “prepare the traitors’ transport to the asteroid penal colonies.” She smiled fully then. “And make sure the Secretary’s son is among them.”

***

You stared down into the old woman’s eyes and felt the last of your fear evaporate. “And still, it was never enough.”

***

“I am Matriarch!”

From behind the door, you flinched. Your grandmother had summoned you to the Council Chamber. Yet you didn’t dare enter after hearing her enraged outburst.

You recognized the Secretary of Preservation’s voice. “Nowhere in the Articles of Government, passed down from the First Captain, are you given authority to disband a religious institute.”

“They openly flaunt my dictates! Shelter dissidents! Poison the media against me!”

The woman continued, voice steady. “All they have done falls within their rights of free speech.”

You jumped at the sound of what you knew must be the Rod of State striking wood. “The First Captain and his Officers would not have allowed such rights if they knew they would be twisted into forces for treason! The last bastion of Humanity That Was must be maintained, with an iron fist if necessary!”

“The video and text records our founders left behind suggest-.”

“Bah! The ramblings of ancients. Outdated and irrelevant.”

A scandalized gasp. “You would scoff at the very foundations of TerraNovan society?!”

“I would suggest those foundations need… revising.”

“With you being the one to do said ‘revising’, I presume?” The Secretary’s voice had lost its calm.

You could hear the venom in your grandmother’s reply. “Precisely.”

***

“You spoke often of defending the TerraNovan way of life, Grandmother, of keeping us strong. And yet you have done more to turn us into a facsimile of the Imperium than any leader in our history.”

You could hear the slightest sound in the cold, dim chamber. The constant tick of cooling and heating metal. The distant thud of footsteps in the corridor without. Your cousin’s increasingly labored breathing.

How your grandmother’s finger joints creaked as they curled into fists at her sides.

The minty freshness of her breath washed over your face. Sweetness at odds with the bitterness of her words.

“You will destroy us all.”

You waited for the shame. The fear. The feelings of inadequacy.

Nothing.

“I do not believe so.” You whispered back. “We can ally with the Imperium without being consumed. We can influence our human brethren for the better. It will be difficult, brutally difficult, but I believe we stand upon the precipice of change.”

“Then you are a fool.”

“Perhaps.” You smiled. “But if to hope is to be foolish, then I would rather be a fool than the wisest of women.”

For the briefest of moments, your grandmother’s contemptuous mask fractured. Her steely eyes softened. She reached up with one icy hand, cupping your cheek in her palm.

“You… are your mother’s daughter.”

The child in you wept. 

Then something snapped.You felt it, as if some barrier somewhere had given way all at once. A light flared in your grandmother’s eyes, the hand on your cheek curling around your throat. Her words ripped through your skull with inhuman force.

“I will end you!”

***

Guilliman sensed the shift even before he heard Conrad cry out. The foulness in the recycled air. The pressure against his psyche.

“NO.”

Beside him, Cato tensed, half-drawing the Tempest Blade. “My Lord, what-”

Guilliman ripped the chamber door out of the wall. The metal shrieked as if in pain when he forced his shoulders through the still too small opening, pauldrons grinding, halo tearing the rent even wider. 

The scene unfolded before him in the time between heartbeats.

You, on the floor, eyes wide with shock as your fingers clawed desperately at the… thing… crouched over you. It could not be called a woman. Not any longer. Its eyes bulged and blazed with madness. Its stringy hair whipped wildly about its face.

Its slavering maw lowered toward your throat.

Conrad, to Guilliman’s surprise, was not cowering in a corner. He’d latched onto the thing’s back. The tendons in his neck bulged as he pulled with all his meager strength at its twitching shoulders. His terrified eyes found the Primarch’s.

“Help her! By the Light, help her!”

Not me.

Not us.

Her.

“MOVE, BOY!”

The prince flung himself to one side as Guilliman wrenched the thing off you, sending it flying into the far wall with a crunch of frail bones. In the next moment he had you in his arms. He pressed his gauntlet against the bloody scratches on your throat. 

I am a Warp-damned FOOL.

The beast he thought he’d coaxed back into its cage after the battle howled within him once more. He pressed you tight against his breastplate.

“Enough of this. Enough! I do not care if I must strap you to my body, you are not leaving my side for the remainder of this voyage. And I will not hear any argument!”

The room trembled beneath the force of a Primarch’s wrath.

Before you could respond, an eerie cackle drew his attention back to the crumpled figure at the base of the wall. A figure that was untangling its mangled limbs like a half-crushed arachnid. A figure whose head flopped to one side on an obviously broken neck.

And still it spoke.

“So protective. So in love! How touching.”

Guilliman snarled. Behind him, he heard Cato activate the Tempest Blade. Tarchus’s chainsword was already revving. He reached for his own weapon.

The thing cackled again.

“You would run Anathema’s sword straight through her if you knew! We know. We know what she is!”

The eyes cleared, the face becoming human once more. It screamed in a voice full of horror and agony.

“Halfbreed bitch! Your mother was a whore and your father-”

The voice cut off as if a hand had wrapped around its throat. The face, switching back and forth from monster to human, bent back. And back. And back. Guilliman heard more bones splintering as its spine twisted into an unnatural arch. 

“KILL IT NOW, MY PATRON!”

The voice inside his skull rang with desperation… and familiarity. The Primarch didn’t hesitate. The Emperor’s Sword ignited and swung.

***

In her chamber back aboard the Macragge’s Honour, Indira Patel, called Listener, collapsed to the floor. Blood flowed in a steady stream from her nose. Every muscle in her body twitched and spasmed as she curled into a fetal position, fighting for breath.

A pounding on the door. She heard it open, heard the patter of sandaled feet. Felt arms lift her semi-conscious body.

“Listener! Sister! What has happened?”

Father Gregory’s voice rang with concern. Listener whispered through her exhaustion.

“We… misscalculated… the Withered Branch… a breach….”

She heard the Father’s horrified gasp. “Mother Isha, save us!”

“She… did… gave me… strength… just enough….” Listener panted. “The Bloom… the Long Plan… still safe.”

The Father let out a sob of relief. “Thank the Light!”

Listener felt darkness encroaching. Holding back the breach had taken her to the very limits of her Light-blessed abilities. She needed rest. Desperately.

But the words had to be said.

“The Matriarch… is dead. Long live… the Matron….”

She looked up at Lady Amelia between shaking thighs and with gasping breaths but the noble custodian woman looking down at her looked at her with a cold calculation that which many might take offense at the seemingly bored look upon the guardian's face. But the way she twisted her fingers inside of her... making her wail in delight... she could see the ghost of a smile upon that noble face. The buzz of the toy that the custodian ground against faded into the background noise of the creak of the bed... oh her poor bed taking this abuse from Lady Amelia.

But she wasn't really in any place to think about anything else then the way Lady Amelia's fingers were inside of her weeping cunt. How her middle finger danced on her clit... gently pressing... swirling around it... oh it was with the same terrifying precision that the Custodian did Everything with.

"Do you hold back your cute little wails to try and curry favor with me? To try and show how strong you can be dearest dove?" Lady Amelia coos down at you with that melting warmth. The musical chuckle that comes from her as you ashamedly look away, "Oh yes how strong you are. But I come here to listen to you sing."

Oh how you moan and cry out as she pinches and plays with one of your nipples causing you to buck into her fingers more. You do not last long underneath her torment.

"Oh there you go singing all pretty for me." She says feeling the way your walls squeeze her fingers as you grind out your orgasm against them.

***

He stood side by side with the entire Second Company in the cavernous Strategium. Around him, every one of his Ultramarines remained in perfect parade formation, like an army of blue-clad monoliths. Unmoving. Barely seeming to breathe.

Titus’s own lungs struggled for air as the messenger read the Primarch’s decree aloud.

“... in conclusion, the Lord Guilliman hereby lifts the restrictions preventing the Ultramarines from forming intimate interpersonal relationships with mortals. Company Chaplains will formally evaluate and approve sanctioned marital bonds. The production of legitimate progeny should be seen as the desired outcome and encouraged. 

The Primarch believes these new allowances will strengthen the mental and emotional health of the Ultramarines and bind them more closely to-”

Titus had stopped listening at that point. The blood rushing through his ears had drowned out every other sound.

Sanctioned.

Legitimate.

Encouraged.

No more hiding. No more suspicious glares. No more denying what burned within his chest.

She would be his. And he, hers. In the eyes of the Primarch and the Emperor Himself!

He had to find her. Now. He would present her to the Chaplain and begin filing the necessary forms. Free her from serfdom and uplift her to a station she deserved.

His Lady Wife.

***

The memory rolled over him with the crushing tonnage of a Predator tank. Titus forced his eyes open, staring down at the smiling figure pressed tight against his armored abdomen. Her fragrance had intensified, mingling with the heady perfume of the flowers scattered about this vast chamber.

He struggled to form words.

She beat him to it. 

“It was the most wonderful day of my life, when we were bound in marriage before the Company. Dear Sidonus stood at your side as witness.” She laughed, the sound ringing like bells in his ears. “I still swear the old man shed a tear, no matter how vehemently he denies it!”

“Sidonus.”

His closest brother. His loyal right hand. They’d fought side by side through innumerable battles until….

“He… on Graia….”

Sidonus had died on Graia… had he not?”

The figure nuzzled her face against him, seeming not to mind the harsh ceramite of his armor. “Yes, Graia. You’ve told me of that battle a thousand times, one of your greatest victories. Think back on it, my love.”

I remember… I remember….

***

“Courage and Honor!”

“For the Emperor!”

“Hail, Captain Titus!”

Titus strode through the hanger of the strike cruiser Righteous Fury, listening to the acclaim of his battle brothers. The foul traitor Nemeroth’s ichor still clung to his gauntlets. His body ached from the final, desperate battle. But he walked tall.

A hand came crashing down upon his pauldron.

“Well done, Captain.”

Titus pivoted, his eyebrows lifting. “You should still be with the Apothecaries, Sergeant.”

“And miss your triumph? I think not.” The gray veteran grinned. “Besides, it will take more than mere impalement to keep me down for long.”

“I can well believe it.”

Titus eyed the rents in his brother’s chestplate. A close thing. A very close thing, indeed. He remembered the anguish of seeing the traitor’s talons tearing through his oldest friend. It was not a wound Sidonus should have survived. 

Yet, here he stood.

“What has become of Leandros?”

Sidonus’s face darkened. “The boy still has much to learn. Thank the Emperor his foolish accusations were dismissed. I don’t like to think what might have happened if he’d managed to contact that Inquisitor.”

“Well,” Titus allowed himself a smile, “it matters not, now.”

***

“You’ve led the Second Company to victories uncountable since then, my love.” The figure released her grip on him and glided to the great viewport. “Look at the fleet the Primarch entrusted to you!”

He did.

Voidships hung in perfect formation as far as his eyes could see. Battle barges and strike cruisers, their hulls gleaming in the light of the nearest sun, engines glowing as if in eager anticipation of campaigns to come.

The figure turned and pressed her back to the viewport. The look in her eyes pinned him in place.

“To think, the man who will one day ascend to lead the Ultramarines is my husband.” She laid a hand on her belly. “The father of my child.”

She gasped softly and he found himself lurching forward a step. “Sera-”

“It’s all right, my love.” Her smile all but blinded him. “It seems our baby is as proud of you as I.” She stretched out a beckoning hand.

Titus marched toward her on stiff legs. He didn’t resist when she took him by the gauntlet, laying his hand over the taught swell of her abdomen.

“Can you feel them?”

Even through the armor, he could. A tiny pulse of pressure beneath his fingers. Both his hearts stuttered.

The figure’s voice dropped to a breathy whisper. “You never said anything. Made no demands. But I knew, I knew you longed for this.”

For a moment, something flickered in the depths of her eyes. Something dark and satisfied.

“Do you remember the day I told you?”

I remember… I remember….

***

He did not comprehend the words at first. He stared, unmoving, unthinking, at her little hand. A hand placed low on her torso. Directly over her womb.

A womb no longer empty.

Vaguely, he knew she’d been visiting the Apothecarion more often of late. He’d assumed to lend aid to the medicae. She was his Little Healer after all.

But… this….

“You are certain?” He barely recognized his own voice.

She beamed up at him, more radiant than he could ever remember seeing her before. More radiant than she’d been on the day she swore herself to him.

“I am. The Apothecaries confirmed it. The treatments worked, Demetrian!”

A loud click resonated as his armor’s knee joints locked, supporting the weakening limbs within.

“A child.”

She threw her arms as far as they could go around his waist. “Our child! A family of our own!” 

“My child.”

This… was impossible.

This… was illogical.

This… was… 

Everything he’d ever wanted.

***

“Everything you’ve ever wanted, Demetrian.” The figure repeated as she returned to him, palms laid flat against his stomach. “Every unspoken dream, every hidden longing, all before you.”

Those bottomless eyes stared into his soul.

“After all, there is no one more deserving.”

Titus pulled away. 

It hurt. Every step backward tore something from him, leaving raw wounds of bleeding WANT. But still he retreated.

He needed to think. To process. Everything he’d seen and remembered swirled within his mind in a miasma of bewilderment. Obscuring. Blurring. He could pierce the undulating veil. He must!

But… do I want to?

That word again. Want.

What do I want?

Had he ever asked himself that question before? Had anyone ever asked it of him? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t believe so.

Not Metaurus, when he chose a boy to become an Ultramarine. And that boy obeyed.

Not Calgar, when he promoted a Sergeant to Captain after Trajan’s death. And that Sergeant obeyed.

Not Thrax, when he stripped a Captain of his command and brought him into the claws of the Inquisition. And that Captain obeyed.

Imprisonment. Torture. The Death Watch. Demotion. 

He’d faced it all with bowed head and stoic obedience. Because that was what an Astartes did. 

It had been engrained into his innermost being during his ascendance, the indoctrination that wiped away the man he might have become. That buried every desire except duty and service and hate for the enemy so deeply it could never arise again.

Or so he’d been told.

Then you came.

A small woman with gentle eyes and gentler hands. You resurrected the man in him, made him feel things he’d long ago forgotten. You fanned the spark of compassion life’s cruelty had never quite been able to extinguish until it burned bright once more. You opened his eyes to the good in this dark universe.

You loved him.

And you suffered for it. Dragged into a life of servitude. Witnessing pain on a scale most mortals never did. Preyed upon by those against whom you had no possibility of defense. 

Because he was not allowed to love you. Not in the way others could. Not in the way that would give you a future. Not in the way that would shield you from horror. 

What he could give was not nearly enough.

Titus gritted his teeth.

This was a lie. He knew it now. Perhaps he’d always known.

The memories? False.

This ship? False.

His resurrected friends? False.

This woman…..

He looked at the figure again. She was beautiful. The image of you. Happy, hopeful, full of life. She looked toward a future and saw nothing but honor and love and family. She lived in a world where that was possible.

Unlike him.

His gaze lingered on her belly, on the child that could have been if things were different. If he were different. If life was less grim.

For the first time in his long life, Demetrian Titus felt moisture well in his eyes. “Everything I ever wanted.”

The figure smiled. Soft. Beguiling. Understanding.

“Haven’t you earned this, Demetrian? Something of your own? Something no Chaplain, no Codex, no duty can take from you?”

She stepped close again.

“Nothing can touch you here. No one can hurt you. No one can hurt the ones you love. Don’t you want that?”

The moisture spilled over, running down his scarred cheeks. “This is not real.”

A wave of the figure’s hand, and Titus’s armor vanished like smoke. She caressed his bare, scarred torso, her touch so feather-light it sent shivers over his leathery skin. 

“What is reality, my love?”

He sank to his knees before her. Her eyes drew him in, promising comfort. Promising peace.

“You’re so very tired, Demetrian. Lay your burdens down. Let those memories become our truth, our reality. Nothing else matters.”

One impossibly soft palm cupped his cheek, the other drew his hand to rest upon her belly once again. He inhaled her fragrance like oxygen.

“Everything you desire is right here. All you need do is claim it. Claim it, and forget.”

He leaned into the caress, eyelids sliding to half mast. She was right. He was tired. Soul weary. He’d been tired for so long.

“Forget…,” he breathed.

“Claim it.” Her inhumanly beautiful face lifted toward him, painted lips parting. “Claim me. I am all the reality you will ever need.”

The unbreakable Ultramarine surrendered.

***

“NO!” 

Atius’s howl of anguish echoed through the chamber as Demetrius Titus slipped beyond the Librarian’s reach.

***

“YES!” 

The daemon threw its head back in writhing ecstasy as desire more intense than any it had feasted on before flooded its foul being.

***

Deep in the defiled bowels of the Resilient, in the company of a bleeding friend and a monstrous enemy, you, the real you, sobbed with a despair you could not explain.

Fulgrim at first could only assume you weren't there of your own volition. Any implications of you returning his affections could be easily attributed to you playing the fawn; Of attempting to be whatever he wanted you to be to stay alive. But, Fulgrim has yet to even catch a glimpse of this yet, perhaps...

Fulgrim snorts to himself and nearly spills a droplet of his wine in the process. A full dinner sits in front of him, but he's been too into his own thoughts to touch much of it.

Maybe you are just as off as him, or at least as off as an unaugmented human brain can become. Perhaps you've fallen for your captor, provided the theory of you not being there of your own free will is correct, which was a fair assumption.

Who would think otherwise? A woman choosing to go aboard the Nightfall? Choosing a towering, lithe primarch who's behavior changes like a summer storm, who smells like rotting flesh stuck between his armor plates and who's behavior is mercurial, almost childlike? It was hard to imagine him holding a woman's hand with a tender grasp, or leaning to kiss one's lips with a gentleness appropriate to such an intimate and romantic gesture.

"Is something not to your liking my lord?"

The quiet voice of his servant jolts Fulgrim out of his continued thoughts; what had been a whole line of thinking for him had been only moments for them. They must've heard his snort and assumed it was directed at his meal.

"Oh, not at all. I was only lost in thought."

The servant lets out a breath and walks off. Fulgrim takes another sip of his wine, and leans his head slightly onto his left shoulder.

If this is true, Konrad is paranoid and selfish; He will almost never let someone catch a glimpse of you in the flesh. But Konrad likes him, at least more than some of the other primarchs, perhaps if he played his cards right, he could sneak a peek. Maybe even speak to you. If he see this with his own eyes, so much of his curiosity would be sated.

And what gossip it would be; Ferrus and Sanguinius would be struck dead once Fulgrim told them.

You were First Officer to the Shipmaster, the lady Marmeladov. She was an aged woman, yes, but not dulled, or made any less a sight to behold by her many, many years. In her infinite wisdom, she commanded an egress from the oncoming assault via the command dais; a raised platform of polished metal and stone. An impossible, unachievable egress—or at very least, enough of one to bank starboard, attempting to round on the vessel and give a clear fire pathway.

She was not quick enough to cripple the enemy Cruiser, even if the hits had landed.

The punishment followed immediately thereafter, streaks of artillery racing across the void, lighting up the holo-display's threat recognition.

The Sword-class Frigate escorting your ship tried to intercept the barrage, valiantly taking the Gloriana's attack—you watched through the huge, armoured viewport windows as her void-shields burned back in waves like gossamer, and saw the flash of her reactor collapsing—the air within the vessel causing a rare combustion within the void. It birthed a new star in the endless dark for a fathom of a second, as fire tore through her in her death throes.

Marmeladov seized the opportunity given by a thousand, thousand lives thrown to the nothing and sent a lance at the approaching enemy Cruiser. Only for your ship to be jolted by a hulking laser-battery stampeding across the port side, as the Gloriana took another pot-shot over the ghastly distance it was quickly reducing.

High on the command deck, elevated above the crew on a vaulted loft, you had the perfect view of the slurry of internal dialogue recounting how the void shield seethed at the blow, still standing.

Servitors twitched at their stations on the platform below, some freezing mid-task, others repeating the same motion over and over as if caught in a loop—then, you watched them drop dead under the strain of the machine spirit's protests.

A return volley of lance-fire jetted from your ship, but the angle was wrong; your crews could not account for the enemy Cruiser's steep approaching angle.

Still, the hit caught an accidental mark against the looming Gloriana, even if it only glanced off her immense shielding.

Nigh in tandem, a ghastly lurch rattled your vessel again, sending the void shields to breaking. But the blow upon your ship was not from the assailing Cruiser. It was, instead, the Gloriana's immense artillery that decisively crippled your protective cocoon, slowing you down while the massive vessel charged closer. Marmeladov nearly fried the ship's thruster vectors desperately trying to outmanoeuvre the incoming Gloriana's hulking ram—causing the carcass of your escorting Frigate to be devoured in place of you.

Then, everything got even worse.

Scrawled in plating the size of hive-spires across the Gloriana's bow, the wretched signage of the VIIIth Legion came into view. Just as the traitor Cruiser jammed its snout into the side of the launch bay, bearing with it turned-heretic, skin-wearing abominations.

In response, your vessel's machine spirit screeched. The cogitator interfaces, wired directly into the ship’s systems, sparked up with her anger.

Some fool in the gantry barked a prayer to the Emperor of Mankind. It redoubled among other staff, murmured here and there—not officially, never officially—but often enough that it became a background hum beneath the battle. Wasting time on faith in a situation like this never even occurred to you. There was only action, only following through on your Shipmaster's rapid contingency response. Only her commands to seal as many bulkheads between the bay and everything else as quickly as possible.

There was no decisive reason to board, not when a meagre display of broadside firepower—let alone a few laser-batteries—from the Gloriana could've killed everyone on the ship anyway.

You realised what Marmeladov already knew. Nothing could stop what worse death was coming. No amount of coordination or codifying logistics could stand against the tide hellbent on crashing.

Even then, Shipmaster Marmeladov tried to do something—detonate the artillery stores, have the soldiery collapse as many bridging walkways as possible—but the Night Lords buried their claws in, regardless.

It was simply sport for them.

Howls began to rattle up from the deck plates. Horror running rabid and rife in the innards, still far away enough to maintain proper process, but near enough that the itch of terror had begun to creep up everyone's backs.

The intership vox cut in, then cut out, and finally vaulted across a channel in a flurry of crackles, from one station to another. One section of the ship reported boarders. Another reported nothing at all; then stopped responding entirely. Internal pict-feeds were brought up on the secondary hololithic displays, but instead of clarity, they showed disjointed, flickering scenes: a corridor empty one second, then filled with something tall and jagged the next.

Attempts to hail the Astropathic choirmaster fell dead as the hundred separate vox-links quickly became an overlapping cacophony of gunfire, las-discharge, wet tearing, and screaming. It all blended together as the other officers coordinated sabotage efforts; as much as they could when their proxies were faced with trans-human man-flensers. The orchestra of communications grew louder and louder until each line cut to static, one by one.

They all went out the same way: wet crunching, the scrape of armour against the plated floors, until finally, came the fizzing of dying vox.

Then, at last, silence reigned supreme.

Your Shipmaster insisted upon a last stand, as she was wont to.

First, a remote tripping of the actions. She tried—and tried—and tried, again and again, to override the Ship-spirit's prerogative, but the old girl would not abide the risk of taking her master down with her. Too many years spent with a single person at her helm had made the great vessel fussy over how she died. Ever a stubborn thing. Too spiteful to perish as anyone commanded, itching for a confrontation rather than a gutting, but the great ship would get no say in a matter already decided by the armoured parasites crawling about in her guts.

And so, another contingency was enacted.

In a command deck full of fear-frozen fellow officers and elite staff, it was you who volunteered to manually engage the detonations of the bridge.

No one protested, even knowing it was suicide for you. Namely, because it was suicide for everyone on the deck. The entire structure would crumple in on itself—and yet the task had to be done. Deny the traitors their spoils. Deny them access to the records. Deny them their man-flesh pelts. Take them all down with you.

Your peers opened the blast-doors enough for you to slide through the middle parting, detonator in hand.

The very instant you were out, you were doused in amber warning lights flashing in swirling arcs, warning of a reactor meltdown. Shadows festered in the hallway at the end of the long, open gantry as the lumens flickered in and out of life, painting the cavernous passageway, broad enough to march a whole human regiment through, in strobing confusion.

The ship groaning was no anomaly. It would do that constantly, regardless of whether she was hurt or not: ever a deep, metallic chorus of creaking machinery, thundering engines, and the distant roar of her reactors.

Truthfully, that noise never stopped.

Now, though, it was overpowered—by agony.

There was no sense to the way screams travelled up from the depths below as you crossed the overpass. It had only worsened as you stepped over the threshold into the familiar halls and stopped in your tracks. Somehow, the clamour chased up the pipes, down the vents, and back from the command deck. Sobbing. Wailing. It grew louder and louder, until it all sounded, for a moment, like laughter. Wild, braying laughter. The ship's many veins and capillaries of hollowed steel warped the echoes of panic into every variable of emotion, disfiguring the torture of the lives onboard into senseless racket. Even the ship's architecture made it worse. The arched buttresses, ribbed vaults, and walls covered in worn reliefs allowed for echoes to carry into infinity.

The sound stopped so suddenly you didn't realise it at first.

It wasn't until you noticed just how quickly quiet had swallowed your surroundings, that you swung your gaze back ahead.

Then came the most gutting sight of all.

A ways down, where the winding corridor bent to a junction, you first saw them: saturated in glistening crimson, and tall enough for the strange, back-swept, wing-like protrusions of their helmets to almost scrape the wide passageway's roofing.

The foremost one with the tallest crest had a halberd ending in a grizzly, meat-wet chain-blade rested upon its pauldron.

The lumens flickered for a moment, then returned. It gave the abominable illusion of halos, as plume after plume of heavy condensation vented from their helm grills; accompanied by the chittering, khch-khch-khch of inter-vox-communications bouncing off the walls towards you.

Seeing them, even so far away, had laced you with such a complete and utter wave of mortification that taking a blind step backwards had felt more akin to falling off a canopy deck—as if the ship's artificial gravity had jolted to a sharp corner axis momentarily, before the stabilisation gimbal evened out.

The lumens flickered out again, and when they came back, the midnight-clad monsters were looking directly at you.

Again, the lights seized, leaving you in the dark longer than before. Power armour was by no means a silent thing. It was a sarcophagus of loud metal and hissing servos—which left little room for misinterpreting it growing closer—especially as the racket of sabatons scraping against the decking in a forward rush echoed near.

You ran back toward the command deck, pushing yourself past the burning in your lungs and managing to reach the far side of the gantry.

It was good that you had, because they had quickly approached the rigged section of corridor threshold. One stopped right beside the spot where a steel-wall plate hid the payload's receiver.

You saw now that it had hands nailed to its pauldrons. And Skulls. Skull helms—helms strung to its hips.

What fresh hell must it have crawled out of?

It stopped, and it stared.

Then, it looked right at where a fat swathe of thermoplastic explosives sat, albeit hidden behind clusters of wires and sheets of metal. Regardless, you took the opportunity handed to you with a hale and whole certainty. The destruction would boil the entire corridor, along with those abominable things. It'd send you flying no matter how far you got to the command deck.

But the detonator in your hand did not respond. No matter how many times you mashed at it with your thumb. The mechanism was dead.

And with it, the terms of your fellow crew's deaths were no longer self-made.

Failure was a bitter draught, but there was still one option. Even if it was no longer a complete denial. You only had the thought of escaping beyond the reach of the monsters.

A wave of nausea clawed at your gullet, and you swayed; stumbling but staying on your feet.

You drew your las-pistol from the holster at your hip.

The skull-faced abominations grew closer down the long bridge. They were eager, hunched like predators, and hastening their paces.

You raised the barrel to the soft flesh beneath your chin, and the one at the front with red-tinted mitts tilted its helm at you.

But in that eternal hesitation, the realisation that your crewmen would not know the plan had failed—not until the traitors were on the deck with them—wormed its way into the forefront of your thoughts.

It took little more than that to send you turning your aim from yourself, and to the things ahead instead.

One, two, three bursts of las, bathing the free fall into the ship's guts around you in hellish flashes of molten after-burn. The wretch at the front took the brunt of the marks, but the heavy armour around its torso practically ate the hits.

You aimed higher, going for the head, taking step after back-pedalling step, keeping your reticule straight.

Each successive strike boiled a strip of paint off the brute's helm.

It broke into a sprint, then.

You kept firing, still trying.

Round after round raced at the thing coming for you, striking it, but not slowing it. Your weapon glowed, raging with the rapid fire; but you tried again—again—again—until the power-cell shrieked.

Through your gloves, you could feel the boiling core raging into death. White-hot plasma foamed at the barrel's mouth, leaving you without any means to keep up the act.

You turned.

And ran.

The clang-clang-clang-clang of heavy, plated feet landing and pushing off the grated bridge behind you, triggering some latent memory of an auspecs lock-on warning. Especially with how it grew faster, and faster—closing in, almost on target. Almost on you.

But the thing had too much distance to cover.

You threw yourself into the tiny crack left open of the blast-door, and screamed for Marmeladov to let the great metal wall slam. Shut it—shut it—shut it—make the monsters claw at a meter of steel in their faces.

In a flurry, you ran to your Shipmaster's side, heaving in great gulps of air as panic filled your heart.

You had scarcely got a word out, but in the end, that didn't matter in the slightest.

The blast-door screeched as warning klaxons flashed across the overhead hololith displays, turning the once-disciplined chamber into a raucous hellhole.

Your head had whipped around so fast it stung for a second, and you watched as gauntlets ferreted into a gap in the middle.

For a moment, the sheer insanity of the situation made you wheeze in disbelief.

You glanced to the floor of the threshold, and wedged in the closing panels was a single ceramite boot.

One man rushed to the doorway, holding a las-gun, firing wildly at the opening; clever, and yet mad.

The revving tip of a monstrous glaive came down on him like a guillotine in an instant—sending a deluge of insides spraying outwards on the fall. Then it withdrew, clutched in the red-plated hand of the one you'd shot at. The beast really had been right on your ass as the doors had shut—or hadn't shut—evidently.

You stumbled back in horror, clutching your fried las-pistol as the man crumbled to his knees in a slough of blood.

The rest of the chain-glaive wielder's armoured forearm managed to fit in the steadily widening gap.

A smoke-bomb was tossed from behind it. Everything was swallowed by the haze absurdly fast. In a panic, you pelted your fried las-gun at whatever horrible shadow you thought was moving closer in the smog. The empty weapon pinged off ceramite with a ringing chime. Ceramite, inside the command deck, could only mean one thing. They had made it inside, and they had come for you all.

You forced yourself to swallow a scream.

But the others hadn't swallowed theirs.

That screaming was suddenly everywhere.

Marmeladov had risen from her throne beside you, but could not get far with the ports plugged into her temples. She was yelling for you to find cover, to run—frantically reminding you of the distance to the escape pods. She strained on her leash to the vessel, and you had to resist the urge to unfasten her from the interface. If she were wrested from the cables of the dying spirit, the ship would kill her on the disconnect out of one last show of possessive spite.

She shoved you to flee from the dais, and it pained you to take the step back from her.

But your Shipmaster's orders were law.

You ceded, even if it was agony to uphold her command.

In the carnage, you barely managed to catch yourself from falling off the steps.

You steadied and turned just in time to see one of the hulking, armoured monsters barrel straight toward Marmeladov's junior lieutenant, Dmitri. It seized him by the throat and lifted him effortlessly, his boots kicking above the floor. For a heartbeat, he was still alive—eyes wide, trying to speak—before the gauntlet'd grip tightened. Bone gave way with a crack so wet your guts twisted. His body was discarded, limp, across a far console that shorted out in a cascade of sparks.

The killers were too busy toying with the others to notice you run.

But that proved no easy feat when their bolters started to roar.

Each bullet was a contained detonation, tearing bodies apart from the inside. It hardly even looked like they were aiming; like they were just firing for the fun of it. A man heroically scaling the loft ladder with a rifle in hand was hit mid-rise over the cusp of the floor; his torso ruptured out behind him, ribs and armour fragments surely raining onto the terrified serfs and menials below. Another round floundered across the deck, ricocheted, and exploded at knee height, dropping three crewmen in a spray of bone and shredded uniforms.

The shooting made the lingering blooms of smoke churn, swathing the deck in heavy belted plumes around you. Your mind had stuck on the reek of it: the stink of phisolene, and hot gunpowder—acrid and vile, enmeshed with the smell of burnt flesh—thick on the tepid air like a disease.

It took everything in you to gather your bearings through the chaos and find the vague shape of an enclave, in the form of an auspecs console not far behind you, silhouetted by the haze.

The Second Officer, Rodion Razumikhin, was already there when you weaselled behind the cover.

He had a sidearm clutched to his chest, and he stunk of piss, which was not entirely unexpected. He was never a man of great brawn, nor a good marksman. His mind was his most valuable asset, that, and his ability to appropriately delegate actions among the lesser officers.

He looked at you through filthy, ash-covered hair with eyes bloodshot with tears.

You understood that too, truly.

The only thing that had kept you from that very same hysteria had been adrenaline and anger at it all.

Marmeladov had always cautioned you for your temper; and she was right, being the smarter, wiser woman she was.

You peeked over the cover you and Rodion had both ducked behind, only to see a giant beast standing before Marmeladov's throne.

Impulsively, you'd lunged for Rodion's las-gun, tore it from his fear-clammy grip and stood from behind the console, aiming for that high-crested monster's head.

It hit dead-on enough to make the thing's helm jolt from the blow.

Which made it stop and take a step back from the command dais.

You saw it had both taken out one of Marmeladov's eyes, and shattered her leg. A single, simple kick from one of its huge boots, just to cripple her in her throne even more, no doubt.

Seething at what the beast had done to her, you kept firing; and yet it did nothing, just like before.

It stood there and watched you, as the rest of its abominable comrades continued flensing your colleagues—your friends.

You loosed volleys until the weapon steamed, another las-gun almost dead at your hands once again. All you had needed was one to pierce. Just one. If any of them were to fall, just that one monster's death would have satisfied you for an eternity.

But it had turned to you now, attention hale and whole upon your form.

It lowered the halberd and pointed the huge weapon at Marmeladov.

You hesitated, then.

The beast tilted its head.

Behind the huge glaive tip obscuring her face, for a second, you glimpsed Marmeladov's gaze on you still; tears streaming out of her lone, surviving eye.

You choked back a sob, your aim on the monster faltering as your vision tunnelled and fixed on her.

In that momentary, fleeting lapse, you heard Rodion's death-scream far too late to realise the figure towering over you from behind. Huge gauntlets dug into the back of your heavy coat, and you shrieked at the sudden weightlessness that seized you—kicking, seething, cursing—caught like an animal by the scruff and held aloft.

The red-handed one approached, then, forgetting your Shipmaster for a blessed moment. Hoping to keep the attention off her, you increased your swearing and thrashing, clutched at lens-level with it.

Then a sickening trade occurred, wherein you passed between murderous hands, under more khch-khch-khch of their helm-voxes.

You could hear Marmeladov crying, pleading for mercy—but it was not for herself. She was pleading to the deaf ears of the butchers to at least make it quick for you. That act sent you clawing up at the Night Lord's gusset in a frenzied rage. The suit lining the inside of the ceramite had not looked much different from an imperial flight-suit—so you dug your nails in under the helm-seals and tugged.

A long, throaty hisssss came from both the power-armour and its' occupant.

Abruptly, it dropped you.

Air rushed out of your lungs in a heavy thud as you landed squarely on your back, wheezing hiccup after hiccup of torturous oxygen back in.

The red-gauntlet'd one you'd been clawing at looked down at you, twirling its halberd idly as you suffered—only to stop fast with the glaive in a backwards hold. The toothless end of the long handle pressed into your spasming chest, pinning you in place on the deck.

You snarled up at it, squirming wildly enough that your flailing arms knocked the grip of your fallen las-gun.

Palming blindly, you grasped it and brought it up—but not at the beast.

Instead, just as before, you cozied the hollowed barrel into the soft underside of your jaw.

The high-crested murderer apparently did not like that.

All notions of restraint were damned and gone as you pulled the trigger, a hateful sneer painted across your face.

At once, your head swam, whipped to black-speckled serenity for a moment. But not backwards in a warm, wet spray, like it should've when obliterated by a las-round at point-blank.

No, your head was strewn sidelong, looking out across the deck of the body-strewn deck. The entire left half of your skull blistered with acute agony, throbbing and flickering your vision.

You could hardly even feel the red gauntlet that reached down to grab you by the front of your uniform. You couldn't even hear the standard-issue, mass-produced attire buckle and tear almost immediately. The cold of the vessel did not seem to bite your flesh entirely, even as the monster adjusted to tug you airborne by your coat's lapel, instead.

You were up in the high-crested thing's grip, dangling like a little girl's doll. Bleeding, dazed—rendered inert. Distantly, you wondered if this was how servitors felt with their skulls emptied out—but your brain refused to render so much as a single, rockcrete thought beyond that as it throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed. Grey began to blotch your sight, and it only grew harsher in severity. Those patchy wells of ash fluttered and flickered across your retinas, backgrounded by a quiet so absolute you could only distantly perceive that it cut in and out in long, swelling waves of far-off noise.

Your head rolled back, only vaguely catching shape of Marmeladov through the visual snow creeping in—before the monster's shadow blotted her from view and everything fell to serene, sunless nothing.

It was your hearing that returned first, although it granted only a constant ringing in your ears. Then came feeling, but the only immediate sensation you found yourself plagued by, surpisingly, was blotches of cold.

It was a strange way to discover there was no afterlife. Nor a bright glade, nor a shining palace filled with golden light.

But that was to be expected when death hadn't claimed you as it should've.

You remembered that you gave a pitiful attempt at inhaling, which led you to find that nothing seemed to fill your lungs for seconds. Seconds that felt like minutes—or hours—or years.

Finally, the air surged in with an aching strain, and a creaky, shallow exhale slipped free from you a moment thereafter.

You had tried for another, but began coughing. Blood clogged your nose, making you snort and splutter to clear it, but that decision was quickly regretted. Because, situationally, the stench you found was by far the most jarring one you had come to meet in all your years of Void-faring. Your nose was flooded with the smell of offal and disinfectant. It was beyond organic necrosis. It was more intrinsically terrifying. It was the rank odour of a Medicae chamber.

Against the very laws of nature, the chilled creak of your lungs surged against the pressure in your chest.

A lurch had seized your diaphragm, alongside a bitter rush of air, gasping in shock at the realisation you could breathe properly again.

You were alive.

Then, you were promptly unconscious once more.

When you dragged yourself out of that depthless nothing again, you were here—caged in a monster's quarters.

It has been some time since then.

So far, you had learned the red-handed beast's full name was Jago Sevatarion. But that was no chance uncovering. He had told it to you, in fact—just like he had told you he was the Legion's beloved First Captain; but all you really saw was some gestalt nightmare rendered incarnate.

For a time, that's all he was: a torturer, a gaoler, and a butcher. All pieces culminating to a big, mad, man-thing full of deranged loyalty toward a bigger, madder man-thing; one that Sevatarion couldn't help but boast about. The Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze—father, father, father—the Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze. A large portion of Sevatarion's traitorous, bootlicking rants orbited his name and his genius... or well, names, more accurately. You have discovered there seems to be many, many, many versions of the same turncoat son of the Emperor, and you were only privy to this due to Sevatarion, who never stopped painting a pict of an unending gamut of contradictions.

It is all, ultimately, a condensed reality you're told by force. Every story he spoke at you when you didn't flinch under his knife.

When it was not about his insane but allegedly genius gene-sire, he raved about a system well outside the Ultima Segmenta—a planet in a chain of numbers—about the killing he did on it—the cousins he butchered. The Primarch he watched die.

The Primarch your Shipmaster served.

The Primarch you had served through her.

You wondered if that was why they had chased your ship down. All that savagery just for meagre gratification, like a sick pervert fondling himself while peeping on someone's daily schedule.

Still, there was something truly horrible about the notion of these behemoths waging war on each other. Never mind the sick glee in Sevatarion's tone as he recounted a throat he had spent a minute sawing through with a stolen blade so dulled from endless killing it was practically a deck plate.

He complained, then, about how thin the skin was. How easy it was to slice open a helmet-less fool's trachea. But through those retellings of a carnage you can scarcely fathom, you took a mental note.

Astartes have vulnerable throats.

He prattled on even more after that, but you were no longer really listening.

Even his voice was horrible.

His accent was somehow nearly comedic with the level of menace it carried. Something about the lower register and the over-correction of sounds, especially his w's—which sounded closer to v's—to say nothing of the fact that he somehow made i's more like y's. Culminating in an accent alike the bow of a ship grating against the hull of another. You didn't get to cover your ears, though you wished you could; it was hard to manage that act of defiance belted down on a chopping block, after all.

Rather unfortunately for Sevatarion, when you're constantly stuck in the den of a rabid beast, the terror of him fondly reminiscing lost its lustre quickly. Especially when a majority of the physical torture doesn't stick, and he only has himself to curse for that miscalculation. All because of your brain damage. Having patches of complete neurological insensitivity across your body was exactly the blessing on a Night Lord's flagship one would think it was.

Still, Sevatarion got bored rather easily.

You're absolutely covered in bruises and long, thin cuts. They were scabbed now, but not all entirely painful when you'd earned them. Some had stung to ripe agony, some had not even registered beyond the press of a blade. He'd checked where your insensitivity extended to after you'd absentmindedly ripped a few fingernails out trying to claw his hand off your wrist.

Thanks to Sevatarion, you discovered your neuropathy was self-contained to extremities, largely.

Unfortunately, it hadn't stopped him from checking routinely these last few visits. He carved into you like a piece of steak to see if the blind spots were growing. As proof of a disgusting concept, he had cut deep horizontal lines at the threshold of each patch, giving himself markers as to where any effort of torment was rendered null and void.

Only then had he let you scamper off into the fresher to lick your numb wounds.

Well... the fresher, at first. But he'd ruined the door soon thereafter. Surely not because you'd impulsively believed it was Night Lord-proof and called him a very, very colourful rainbow of things. He'd bashed the panel in and dragged you out of the false hideaway by the scruff while you tried to bite off his nose. Then, he'd dislocated your fingers, leaving you to fumble around for a few hours; which led to the revelation that it's not easy to pick up a ration bowl with all your digits mangled.

He'd gloated that there were no more places to hide as he set them back. You'd barely managed to fight back the urge to tell him he was wrong. You could fit under his unused cot, or under the holo-projection table, or stow away in the armoury he kept locked, if you could get in.

Still, that didn't negate the fact that your world—which was once a great vessel in a greater woman's charge—was now reduced to the cubby hole of the very thing that stole you away.

You're in rags tied together by two pinwheels and some floss, and the smug bastard was in polished, high-laced boots. It made you miss your uniform dearly. The—for lack of a better word—uniformity of it. The heavy reinforced heel, the tight-fitting undershirt beneath your buttoned jacket and your nice, warm coat.

Honestly, the room was altogether not that bad. Certainly cold, yes, yet there was a surprising lack of human leather hanging around than expected. The only real vulgarity was the tray of knucklebones on the counter of the holo-projection table, which could, hypothetically, be a xeno-animal's.

You knew very well they weren't, though.

You had guessed as much from the first short glance you had at them twenty-three meals ago; and then four meals later, you'd spent a few hours sorting them into matching pairs.

You'd been keeping time, despite the monotony. Sevatarion returned maybe once or twice a standard Terran week, equaling out to seven meal cycles. Whenever he did, you endured those tortures that were quickly growing mundane... and, when he wasn't wielding a dagger and a hypothesis, he ran his mouth about anything and everything. You're not sure which was worse, anymore; truly, you can't really tell the physical agony from the mental. It was always an odd fusion of the two. The only good thing to come out of being forced to converse with him was that he made no call for honourifics, nor titles, like 'sir' or 'my lord' or 'master' although, even if he had made such a demand, you'd have never have stooped to such a level. All the better he hadn't then, ultimately. One less thing to be punished for, though he hardly needed a reason in the end.

He hit you when you didn't respond.

He hit you when you did but he didn't like the answer.

He hit you because he could.

And yet, as of right now, Sevatarion has been oddly quiet.

Currently, he is sitting cross-legged on his cot—the one you have never seen him sleep in even once during your captivity—attending to his disassembled bolter.

You glare while he works, shooting daggers at him in your imagination.

"Something on my face?" Sevatarion rumbles after a long time of saying nothing, yet it's strangely sans a typical baiting edge.

You stay silent at first, scowling.

He grumbles expectantly, and you know he wants a response.

"I'm hungry," leaves you at last.

"Hungry?" Sevatarion scoffs, his focus remaining steadfast on the barrel as he carefully slides a cloth-covered metal rod down it, "You're hungry?"

"Yes," you grunt.

"You've only just eaten," he hisses, pulling the rod out and discarding it mindlessly onto the floor behind him, before pointing toward the empty metal bowl sitting in a little tray-hatch mechanism by the entry blast-door.

"No," you bite out, "I haven't."

"I don't know what grand feasts your old station granted you," he raises a brow, and fixes the action back into place before eyeing down the iron sights, checking his work. "But you're going to keep eating that slop, and you're going to be thankful for it."

"It's not that it's gruel," you say bitterly, "It's that it's not enough."

"You want more?"

"I'm starving."

"...and you think that I ought to care?"

"You're clearly keeping me alive for something," you clench your fists by your sides impotently, "Or are you making this up as you go?"

"I'm only keeping you alive because I haven't decided what I want to make out of your skin, yet," there ought to be more malice to his tone, but it just sounds half-arsed and disinterested—like he's only saying what he thinks will scare you because he can't think of anything more creative.

It occurs to you that this is probably a game to him.

He is keeping a puzzle in his quarters, no different to the ones you once had in yours. Where they had been small, and metal, and made for the sole intention of fighting with, he has in you the same, only larger and made of flesh.

You are a toy to this monster.

"Need to piss," the aforementioned monster announces to thin air and, just like that, any continuity to your thoughts vanishes entirely.

He tosses his bolter heedlessly across the cot and is on his feet in less than the blink of an eye, making a beeline to the fresher. Thanks to the lack of functioning door, you hear—in horrible detail—the long, wet stream of him relieving himself into the vac-toilet.

You look at the fresher, and the shadow he casts under the dull lumen above him. Then, you look at the bolter. It's a sudden glimmer of hope on a string, and you take an ever-so cautious step toward the cot.

It's too easy.

It's too obvious a chance.

Unease hits you like a blow to the chest, acutely aware of how you feel your skin crawl innately.

Sevatarion is leaning against the arch of the fresher doorway when you whip your head around.

"Go on," he hums. "Fetch."

You take a step back, sneering as you say, "There's no rounds in it."

"There might be," he says with a huff, lying rather badly for once.

You frown and stand a little straighter.

He seems to realise you're not going to take the chance and strides back over to his cot, dropping his immense bulk down on it with a small grunt.

Sevatarion simply sits there for a while, doing nothing while he ignores you staring at him, until it apparently irks him enough to speak.

He sighs loudly, purposefully being dramatic, "Well, now I'm bored."

"Good."

"No, not good," he grumbles. "You were supposed to fall for that."

"And I didn't, so what now?"

"I suppose we are going to have a chat," he says, with a strangely bubbly lilt overriding his irritation.

It's a fight not to run across the room and claw madly at the blast-door like a trapped animal. You hate his 'chats' so, so much. It's an excuse for him to vomit up whatever inane stories he wants, and they're always abominable. They're hardly even stories. Every one of them is just some advanced form of psychological torment or violence-based circle-jerking. It's him gloating, and gloating, and gloating eternally; like a recaf-station pissing contest turned up to a quintillion.

Sevatarion says nothing for a while before he offers, "I'll make it interesting this time. Maybe even let you in on a little secret," his black eyes almost sparkle with the conspiracy he offers up, "You know, a bit of gossip—you officers love that stuff, don't you?"

You scowl at him and eye the shut door while thinking of how clawing blindly at the metal sounds like a perfectly good idea.

"Have you ever heard of Eight-Hundred-and-Nine Five, before?"

You're actively trying to stop listening.

"No?" He says for you, before you'd really have time to answer if you'd ever wanted to—which you didn't—even if he's right. "Lucky you, it's a shithole," he digresses quickly, gesticulating while he does so, "But that's besides the point... Naraka, the Captain of the thirteenth company, brought her to heel. Without a single drop of blood, which, for us, is very impressive. The lot of them wouldn't tell a soul how they did it," he tilts his head and raises a scarred brow, a sly, conspiratorial look mapping across his features as he offers, "Would you like to know how?"

"Do I have a choice?" You mutter to yourself, unsure of where exactly this tirade of his is going, but in no position to escape his yammering as per usual.

A slow, creeping smirk rises on Sevatarion's face, replacing the slyness with rabid glee as he leans forward. "Naraka fucked the Planetary-Governor insensible and plastered it live over every pict-feed you could imagine," he barks, grinning like a madman suddenly.

You blink, stunned almost immediately. The concept is impossible, the Legiones Astartes surely do not—

"Twelve Night Lords in one night," he adds dryly, still smiling, "Talk about a close proximity bombardment."

You're only distantly aware you're cringing at him, and then the reality that he's very likely talking out of his ass hits. He's probably spinning stories to discomfort you as a way of amusing himself as usual.

"You're vile—" you snarl, "—and a liar."

"For once," he shoots back, "I'm actually not lying."

"Firstly, that doesn't even make any sense," you hurriedly bite out, squinting at the giant black-eyed deceiver as he pouts crookedly at you. "How would that even work? You mean to tell me that the entire planet went: 'How lewd—everyone quickly—surrender,' and that was that?" You start flailing your hands around in an absurd pantomime to match your tone, then stop abruptly and cross them over your chest, "Secondly, since when do Astartes even—"

You remember exactly what the thing you're arguing with is just as the words leave your mouth, and promptly stop talking.

"Oh?" Sevatarion all but leers, "Do go on."

You glare at him, "No, no—I don't think I will."

"But you were posing such a clear, sensible argument," he tuts, clicking his tongue for effect. "Surely, you wouldn't want to lose."

You stand from where you'd been leaning, clenching your fists by your sides in impotent irritation once again. You move to walk aimlessly to the right—remembering a little late that there's only wall that way—and pivot on your heels leftward, toward the broken door of the fresher.

"I don't care," you call out from where you're standing, stubbornly facing the pulse-shower cubicle.

"Come on," he barks, letting the taunt drag out painfully. "Let's try breaking this discourse down to it's bare components. Simple principles. You remember those from bootcamp, don't you, little officer?"

Oh, he's an insipid bastard of a man-thing—he's got such a vile, condescending way with words. You hate that he calls you little. He knows you do, and he does it even more because of it. Everything he says is a sarcastic leer, a double-edged cheap-shot, a mouth-breathing snark. It makes you wish, on everything you've ever loved or owned or respected, that you had the great strength to beat him to death.

"I'm not dignifying this inane lie," you snap at the open doorway, knowing he's probably sitting there smirking like the smug, over-sized prick he is.

You hear him clicking his tongue again in that annoyingly chiding way he's all but perfected, "All I'm asking is if you really think we don't fuck?"

It's bait on an industrial lure, tied to an adamantium-reinforced rod resting in Sevatarion's greasy, bloodied mitts.

"That is to say... I have," he adds with a snort, and he pauses for a moment before he continues, "Plenty of times, actually."

He's completely delusional.

No one could handle an Astartes—you can't even imagine the proportions of their mass being factored in sexually. Maybe somewhere out there in the galaxy, at least one lunatic follower of the Lectitio Divinitatus might've barked up an Astartes' tree. You can rationalise someone going for the pretty, noble ones with long, flowing hair... but to bark up a Night Lord's?

Someone would dare risk a broom-closet jaunt with a mad son of a madder father?

No one would want to fuck one, except maybe a suicidal moron, let alone fuck him. If Sevatarion has fucked something—which you doubt—it was probably by rape. And they probably died afterwards. For their sake, you hope they were dead beforehand. Being in the same room with him is torment on its own, so the thought of being under him grants you a glimpse into an otherworldly agony. He'd be insufferable. He's even visually off-putting, just to top it all off. A good part of Sevatarion's face is a mess of scars. His mouth's crooked. He slouches like a hunchback. His hair looks like shit. There's enough bags around his big, mean-looking, beady eyes to fill an entire embarkation-deck. To say nothing of the fact he smells a bit like a woman's sanitary bin—sure, he's well-muscled enough to make a baseline dock-worker look like a lanky teenage girl in comparison, but that's where any objective attractiveness ends. Which, ultimately, means the only things remotely palatable about Sevatarion are his big arms and big arse.

And so, you swallow the proverbial hook and come storming out of the fresher, waggling your finger at him in a fury.

"Now, I know you're full of it—" you growl, taking hurried steps to get up in his face as your temper boils over against your better judgment, "—and I'm too hungry to go along with this groxshit."

"I'm not lying," he's still sitting, and yet he's at your standing eye-line. All pitch-black sclera and furrowed brows, an arm's reach from your own.

You roll your eyes and snap, "Yes, you are!"

"I know something that could resolve both those issues," he says, face flat and expressionless suddenly, "Give me your mouth."

"What?"

"You heard me," Sevatarion's face contorts from a statue's into a bared-teeth, cadaver grin, "I'll get you another ration if I get your tongue on my cock."

"You're joking," stunned, you blink repeatedly, hoping despite yourself, that it's another one of his daft games he's playing at, "This is one of your sick jokes."

"I don't joke around about proving others wrong," he says through his sharp jaws.

"So, so..." you start, flabbergasted, "...you want me to whore myself out to the butcher of my crew-mates? My Shipmaster?"

"It's not like their opinions matter," Sevatarion's smile finally falls away to a leering smirk, "They're dead."

Vitriol mangles your voice into a ragged hiss, "Yes, and you made sure of that, didn't you?"

"Not my fault your Cruiser didn't scamper away fast enough," he scoffs.

"You have no concept of integrity, do you?"

"Not even a scrap."

"There's something deeply wrong with you," comes your hissed reply.

"You can't even imagine," Sevatarion breathes out in a strangely tired manner.

You can imagine.

In fact, you'd love to tell him every little detail of how deplorable you think he is. How conniving, how utterly stupid and violent—how he's a slimy wretch that only exists to smirk at his own snide comments and skin babes in their cradles.

Irrationally, you fail to rein in the urge to spit at him, and it almost appears as if he wholly expects the saliva that flies in his direction.

He doesn't even flinch.

It lands well enough, right on the corner of his mouth; he grumbles, and—and licks the corner of his lips clean.

You recoil in disgusted disbelief, so unsettled enough by his behaviour that the words you wanted to yell in his face come out a decent bit quieter than you intended, "I'm... I'm not sucking you off."

"Then you'll be going hungry," he says, and pointedly spits on the floor.

It lands just shy of your foot and sizzles against the steel-plated floor, filling the room with the slightest reek of sulphur. A fresh wave of horror dawns upon you. His saliva isn't saliva. It's—it's acid—

"It's that simple," he states, at last.

It's a threat in and of itself, even as the liquid fizzles out impotently and leaves a pitted black stain on the metal.

You weigh your options: Claw at a chance to remain even slightly able to control your situation, but debase yourself wholly—or drag your heels the entire time and rely on his whims for nothing, but slowly start starving away. Both outcomes would bear fruit, both would be torment. There's no fork in the road that leads to a solid victory. It will be a fight the whole way, no matter which path you take.

At least with assenting to this, you keep some condition on your bones.

You sigh, and don't bother to keep the frown from your face as you drop to a kneel.

"Finally, you make a sensible choice," he rasps.

Up close, you realise belatedly that his pants are some sort of blackened leather. Human, perhaps, but for some reason you don't think so. It feels impossible to manage such a tedious stitching job with a person's skin. You think back on all the grazes and nicks you've had and how easy your flesh tears. How did they make anything with it, let alone pants? But you've never stitched anything beyond a patch in your life, let alone skin, so your assumptions fall to a moot point conclusion.

Loose leather draws tight around his huge thighs as he adjusts his seating, and interface ports—like the ones you'd seen on the Shipmaster's temples—distort the leather in solid, rounded mounds.

You completely disregard the distortion higher up his legs, leaning left and resting upward in a long, sweeping shine of distended black.

The pants are low and sit up on his middle-hip, which is largely out of place compared to Imperial standards. They are weirdly proportioned, too. They make his long legs look thicker than they actually are. It's nothing like standard officer uniform, which is high-waisted and cinched in. You suppose both would look absurd on a body so densely muscled.

You have no idea where to even start to undo the catches.

His terrible taste in attire actually explains a lot about the wretched tunic he's forced you to wear.

You're about to go on a mental tirade about the shortness of your tunic, before your attention snags on him undoing the latch of his pants.

They part disgustingly low, and disgustingly easy. It's sleazy—especially when your eyes trace down a coarse line of hair that's somehow darker than the leather.

A long, fat swell of erection flags out of the pants and up onto his navel along with it.

It is distressingly large.

Suddenly, every ounce of his behaviour makes complete and total sense. If you were his size, with a dick this big, you'd be a prick, too. But that realisation still doesn't even get close to remedying any of the deep-seated loathing you have for him, though.

He holds his cock by the base, tilts himself, and slaps the side of his fat shaft against your cheek.

"Open your mouth," he rasps.

Begrudgingly, you oblige—and he takes full use of the allowance, adjusting himself to rub the underside of his swollen glans across your tongue.

"Lick," he says next.

And you do.

It's vaguely salty, though that's not unusual. His isn't the first dick you've sucked, after all. Well, he's the first Astartes, at least... but he tastes pretty standard, if for the heavier smell of something distinctly earthy pervading your senses. It's almost reminiscent of a hot, chemical dampness, like an engine room when the sprinklers go off.

His hand comes to rest on the crown of your head abruptly, "Now, suck."

It's a unique sort of panic that suddenly chills your bones. You feel stuck, unable to breathe—like you're locked in the stuffy, muscled cage of his thighs rather than kneeling between them.

The stubborn part of your brain digs itself heel-deep in the dirt and refuses to budge.

You pull your tongue back and frown, "No, just tongue."

"You offered your mouth," Sevatarion notes flatly. "Stop being difficult and suck."

"You said tongue."

"You know what I meant," he snarls abruptly, jutting the tip of himself against your lips with a small buck.

Still frowning, you rear back and grit out, "I bite."

"You're going to bite the cock that feeds you?"

You scowl up at him, "You said—"

"You're not that stupid," he interrupts, glaring down at you with his eyes squinted into black slits, "You wanted more rations, I gave you a way to earn it, and you agreed to this."

"I bite," you say again, mulishly, trying to pull away even further, only to be reined back in by his fingers bunching up a handful of your hair.

"Just gives me an excuse to rip all your teeth out, I guess."

"Wouldn't undo what I'd do," you say with a heady defiance, frowning at him from your low spot with the fat heft of his member to your cheek.

"After your teeth go," he starts, talking as if you're not there and he's simply plotting aloud to a hidden audience. "I think I'll let the Atramentar use you as a chew-toy."

You're confused, "The... what?"

"My brothers," he clarifies, pausing his weird recounting of nonsense events as if he's cluing you in for your next lines of script. "You've met them already, little officer."

"Who?"

"You said you remembered the deck," he pouts, his tone almost like a sing-song for an absurd moment, "You said you remembered what happened to your friends."

For a moment, you're too bemused by his change of behaviour to even think straight. He only talks like this when there's a knife in his hand, and you're on his cutting board, and—oh, oh. He's being serious. He's not raving, he's genuinely plotting aloud like it's a torture session. An interrogation. Like he had the first time you were sliced bloody. He's fuming. Suppose it's expected of an entitled man-thing whose dick isn't being slobbered on after the promise of it happening.

You don't even bother replying at this point.

You know better, now.

"I imagine they'd love to see you again," he says with an airy huff, "Wonder what they would do to a stubborn little shithead like you—maybe they'll beat the twelve-in-a-night record..." The mask of impassive detachment drops on his face is a cold, cold statue, "Or maybe they'll just eat you alive."

You cringe.

"Don't like the sound of that, do you?" Sevatarion's mangled lip curls, breaking the straight-faced horror into a clear pict of irritation, "Play nice, and a sore jaw's the worst you'll be dealing with."

He jostles himself by the base, letting the thickness of his cock sit up straight in the webbing between his pointer and thumb.

"Now," Sevatarion spits, his voice a rough thing as he shifts his hips so that the tip of his length rests on your lips again. "Warm this up for me, would you?"

You begrudgingly open your mouth and close it around him, and Sevatarion is quick to take the ground offered. He starts rolling his hips, keeping you in place with a huge palm right across the back of your head.

There's too much of him to fit, and the grip you take around the lower half of his cock barely manages to keep him from sliding too deep. His cock's hot, too—it's unnatural, it's—it's as if his ambient temperature is five degrees higher than your own.

It's a struggle just to breathe steadily through your nose, to say nothing of the war you're waging against your own gag-reflex. It's almost impossible not to choke while he fucks your mouth. You try to steady yourself by placing a free hand on his leather-covered thigh, and garble out a curse when the spongy tip jars into your epiglottis.

You jerk, and your hand around his cock slips—covered by his—and then it's not. It's sliding up, and then a thumb slips into your mouth alongside his own cock; adjusting, hooking over your bottom teeth.

The manoeuvre locks you in place, with a mouth forced wide.

He's doing it to make a point, he's doing it for insurance, he's doing it to all but face-fuck you.

The entire situation is a mess.

He keeps pumping his hips, and you make awful, half-choked protests at each of his choppy thrusts forward.

His short-cut tunic hides a majority of his upper body away, but you catch glimpses of scar-mottled flesh with every rock of his hips forward.

Your jaw aches under the strain of Sevatarion's pace and his hold, and there's spit and pre-cum sloppily roping down your chin. It's not as if he cares, though. He's acting like no more than a rutting animal, taking every chance he can for himself.

You thrash backwards, and surprisingly, he lets you off him—the hand in your mouth withdraws, whereas the one on your head stays.

"A-At least... l-let me do it myself," you harrumph loudly, throat irritated by the numerous attempts to fuck into it.

"With no teeth?"

You nod sluggishly, beyond frustrated with the fact that you have to cede.

"Good," he says with a long, satisfied hum. "Let me back in."

You do, rather hatefully.

It takes every bit of composure you have to not go back on your promise and nip the fat, rounded end of his cock off out of spite. As if by some cruel irony, that thought arrives at the exact moment you accidentally allow too much to slide in.

Pointedly, you gag and try to drag your head back, despite the big mitt on your scalp. He, surprisingly, lets you cough up a stringing mess of bubbling saliva.

"I'm just too big for you," he tuts, with a heavy, faux sincerity, "Aren't I?"

You try to mentally talk yourself out of giving in to the urge of sticking him back in and chomping once again. Instead, you try to focus on getting him off. The sooner it's over, the better. You gather back enough willpower to lick over the tip of him, watching the pumping of your own hand around the middle. The salty flashes of pre-cum across your tongue aren't at all helping you disassociate, though, so you eye the rest of him.

He's lifted his tunic up to his stomach with his free hand, fully displaying the menagerie of brutal-looking old wounds he has. It's all solid, gene-forged muscle, but there are hints his underbelly is actually soft in places. You wonder where the skin's thinnest aside from his gullet, and where a blade could punch through best. You let your gaze drift, going from his belly button to the long, dark trail arrowing down from it to his groin.

"Your head's too small to fit me," he notes with a gravely chuff of amusement, "Too much space wasted on useless brain matter."

You try to sit up a little, letting his leaking cock lean against your cheek as you do.

The manoeuvre stings your ego almost immediately, because the wretched press of your own thighs as you adjust your angle feels horribly wet.

You can't be—you refuse—there's no way this is happening.

You wriggle again, just to be sure, and a dull, persistent throb makes itself known alongside a vile slickness. The realisation makes you freeze, and leaves you staring blankly at his navel as he keeps petting your hair.

"Oh, you're not talking back anymore?" Sevatarion ventures, purposefully nasty. "Am I not worth the words? Or are you just... too busy?"

"Busy... tryin' t-tuh—get t-this over with," you sloppily manage, irritated—refusing to let his awful voice register, just pressing forward, pulling back—letting rigid heat fill your mouth to the brim and slide out. Trying to ignore the smell of sex pervading your nose, with the same nonplussed discipline you'd maintained hearing other cadets fucking in the barracks. Let him tire himself out with his rambling, and hopefully finish faster. It feels like it's been hours. How long do these overgrown fools last? It can't be for a lack of trying. You're trying to make it good, so he's done quicker, and you're fed sooner. Fuck, you're hungry. At this point you'd swallow the monster's load if only to rob him of an extra meal. It's vile and it makes your stomach twist in disgust, but it is ultimately for survival. You'd do just about anything to spite him and live a little less starved, at this point.

"Zec te jaesha yahsshan," ["I like how you look when you lick,"] he groans suddenly, and it breaks you from your reverie—you glance up with his cock still in your mouth as he says, "Juthica te vey athasavi darnitha na." ["Keep staring at me with those angry eyes."]

You furrow your brows, unsure if you'd misheard him and were simply hallucinating a string of gibberish. Then it clicks. He's yapping the lunacy he thinks passes for language. The one he'd had before he was elevated to sapience with Gothic. Nostraman. It's harsh in his mouth despite the flowing, almost smooth sounds some of the words make. As if they're mangled by his overgrown lungs and his sandpaper gullet. It might've been a lovely thing on a human's tongue, but it garners nothing but a feeling of discomfort on his. He's probably saying something vile, laden with threats and insults. It's probably another one of his disgusting stories. Hell, it's probably very creative slurs. They don't count if you can't make sense of them. You learned that very early in your career. But that fact never meant you couldn't retaliate as if you did understand.

You let his cock slide out and scowl up at him, baring your teeth, "S-Stop speaking that drivel or I'll—"

He doesn't react like you thought he would, he just pets you more and interrupts you, "Or you'll what? You'll stop?" He ruffles the top of your head, urging you to take him back inside your mouth with a long, heavy stroke through your hair. "You'll give up your meal just because you don't like my mother-tongue?"

You try to shake him off, and for a blessed instant the hand's gone. Until it isn't, it's—it's holding you by the chin, and his thumb is prodding at your lips. Sevatarion forces it in behind them, but you keep your jaw clenched, leaving him to trace against the front of your gums.

He huffs out an exaggerated sigh, "Fine, but you should know... I was close," and immediately, his taunt works. You loathe yourself for it, but still let your maw open just a little.

With that, his frown quickly evaporates into a lopsided smirk, and he starts pumping his thumb into your mouth like he's done with his cock for the past hour.

"Jus' fuggin geh i' ovah wif," you garble out, your words mangled around his probing.

"That's the spirit," he rasps, straight-faced.

Sevatarion traces your back molars, then doubles back and depresses the top of your tongue.

"Varre vel ar'sun yoshun ivi?" ["Who's my wild little slave?"] He says, and you parse out what sounds like a questioning inflection in his tone as he slides his thumb in down to the webbing and groans, "Jasca, jasca, te ashilla." ["Yes, yes, you are."]

You gag, about to give in to instinct and let your jaws close down hard on the invading digit, but it retreats rather abruptly—replaced by the tip of him nudging your lips, trying for an entrance again.

You don't let him in.

Instead, you sneer and pump your fist up the length of him with long jerks.

Gritting your teeth in anger, you hide the seething scowl painted across your face against the base of his cock. You start to lick—but pull back prematurely when the coarse black hair around it irritates your cheek.

So instead, you lap at the underside, veined but far less annoyingly textured as the base. The only issue is that the angle makes his cock sit up against your forehead, and you try to ignore the obscene proportion of it quite literally weighing on you.

He tugs you back, then growls, "Te niateyia'shia, jaeshai ma jarcu vel." [You're disobedient, but I like the fight.]

You're about to protest to whatever nonsense he's grumbling, but it's clear your stalling has gone on long enough. You hatefully allow him to line his cock back up to your mouth, before sliding himself back in.

Sevatarion makes the next few thrusts messy on purpose, punishing you for ignoring him earlier.

Soon, you're gurgling curses around the meat of him with each breath you manage to steal, while he rams into your mouth in earnest. It's hard to even think with him carrying on like this, let alone breathe properly, but watching his chest rise and fall manages to let you wander off mentally enough to bear it.

Huge lungs surely reside behind those big muscles, you've heard there's more than one set in there—thanks to a Medicae novice's idle ranting a few years ago. You try to remember any other curious facts about Astartes, but the only thing that comes to mind is that they have two hearts. You can't feel two heartbeats on your tongue. Maybe only one of his hearts pumps blood to his cock, then.

You glance up higher, seeking his face next.

And almost start crying tears of joy when you find he's started chewing on the collar of his tunic. It shuts him up, and you're finally free of the incessant filth he lets leave his lips. He's shut his eyes, too, and with them, the rest of his face relaxes in a completely new way that makes a majority of the lines smooth out with it.

He's... much easier to deal with like this. Much easier to look at, too. It's almost bearable, even if he's still bucking into your mouth and screwing up your rhythm.

Taking the risk, you rock a little against yourself again.

You're definitely wet, now. No need to check twice. It's far gone enough that you can even feel your clit in the mess where it's sandwiched between the tight press of your thighs.

It's impossible to veer away from the urge to roll your hips, especially when Sevatarion's heavy breathing covers your own.

The motion of you bobbing your head forward synchronises with your grinding with agonising perfection. It's a spark in your vision that glimmers with every wet slide of his cock into your mouth. The fat length of him jerks a little, appreciatively, when you let your tongue swipe the underside on the back-draw. If only he'd been this quiet from the start. You'd have given him a good reason to work with you on this.

He pets you like he had earlier, letting you pull your mouth off him with a slimy gasp and lap at the side. There's a thick, raised vein webbing across it, and he hums contentedly behind the fabric in his mouth with still-shut eyes when you let the flat of your tongue drag a wide lick across the surface. He tugs your hair a tad to give you the message he wants back in, and you grumble, but acquiesce and take the length of him into your mouth again.

Sevatarion's not being a prick, currently—and to prove a point, you actually allow him to fuck into your maw this time. It frees up your neck and lets you focus on much more important matters. Namely, the rush of bliss your heel grazing your cunt gives you—you're hyperaware of the pressure, fleeting as it is—and you wonder, in some mad desperation, if he'd notice your hand leaving his thigh and travelling south. Maybe he'd turn your distraction into some even more twisted debasement as punishment, or if he'd just let you. You suspect the foul butcher would take it as an invitation to get his cock really wet.

Strung out on both air and sense, the prospect doesn't send you into a rage as it should. Funnily, it's just like Sevatarion said: he's too big. From the sheer swell of meat in your mouth, you have a hunch he really, truly, wouldn't be able to fit, no matter how hard he pressed in—so maybe there's a victory in that. You imagine his face all screwed up with that sulking, sour look of his as he were to try.

It's a satisfying pict of the imagination, thinking of him suffering; one only made worse by your continued rocking. You hope it's agony for him, you hope he whines—his gnarled maw all twisted up, rutting his fat cock against you vainly—he'll let you steal a hiss out of his lungs when you fuck yourself down to the hilt...

Hold on, wait.

What?

The sinew behind your eyes aches as your mind backpedals, but the hand on your head tightens in your hair.

Wait, no—you... you don't want to fuck him. He's abominable and soaked in the blood of your peers. He's a beast. You don't know where these thoughts are coming from.

You swear you don't want to—you don't want him—bouncing you on his lap, holding you up in those huge arms and dropping you on him again, and again, and again.

Where is this coming from? Why are you...

You're not even aware of the fact that he's opened his eyes until you hear him moan, and you look up.

You see him digging his teeth into his bottom lip. Something is trailing down his philtrum in a thick, dark line.

Is.. is that blood?

He rolls his pelvis, and you gag, trying to snatch another look—before your attempt is thwarted by the hand dragging you forward.

The shock from the sudden amount of dick in your mouth makes your sight glue head-on.

Sevatarion's cock twitches abruptly, then starts pulsing hard as molten heat fills the meagre space of your maw. With it, a long, haggard groan slides from his gullet. The thigh you were using as a sure, stable fulcrum starts shaking alongside the sharp, upward stutter of his hips.

He holds your head there for a moment while you gurgle. His cock's in deep enough that tears start to well up involuntarily in the corners of your eyes, and your vision jerks with the reflex to convulse. Your taste-buds are covered in bitter tasting spend. It's gross, it's thick—it's hot like tar. It's too much to keep a mere mouthful of, and you choke loudly, and fuck does your entire postnasal cavity burn.

When he finally lets go of your head, you pull back violently.

Your mouth's still full of semen, your nose feels like it's full of bile, and you're two seconds away from retching. Any plotting you'd had regarding eating the mess of cum bloating your cheeks immediately evaporates.

"Mmm... now be good and swallow that, little officer," he moans, looking absolutely debauched. The collar of his tunic is covered in slobber, his face is flushed all the way up from his neck in some weird, mauve-tinged blotching; and he's showing off a crooked grin that makes him look even more like an rabid beast than usual. There's... nothing on his top lip, no proof of the blood you thought you saw— "Go on... swallow what didn't go up your nose."

You let the thick, milky slurry of cum drain straight out of your mouth and onto the floor with a deliberate disregard.

He raises a brow and grumbles as his finish paints the ground between his legs.

"Swallowing wa–ah—" you start, but cough, "W-Wusn't... part of the deal," and it's not easy to find a level voice as you focus on spitting out the leftovers.

"Next time you're going to be," Sevatarion shoots back smoothly.

"I w-won't."

"Yes, you will."

"N-Nuh... it tastes bad."

"I don't care," he suddenly detonates, his scar pulling taut as he sneers. "You'll gargle my load to the tune of the Iter Imperiale, if I fucking tell you to."

"I'll spew it b-back up on your lap," you snap in return, stand, and consciously try not to make any tell-tale changes in your walk—despite the warm-wet glaze of excitement slathered between your thighs.

"I really should just kill you," he sighs, finally.

You fight not to acknowledge the blacked-out eyes burning holes into your back, as you head to the fresher to rinse your tongue. Sure, not having a sightline on him that makes your skin itch, but you can't bear the taste of him any longer.

You harrumph loudly, turning the handle before leaning down to start lapping at the rusty-tasting water jetting out of the tap in erratic bursts of varied water pressure. After spitting a few times, you roll your tongue around and find it blessedly cum-free. So, you lean over to the vac-toilet, grab a handful of paper, and wipe your mouth dry.

Then you pause, and reach down to wipe between your thighs with the same crumpled tissues before tossing, and then actioning the venting of the bowl. It's the best you'll get for a destruction of proof. You smile triumphantly, swallowing down the distant spice of metallic water lingering in your maw, before you call out, "I want that extra ration, now."

Silence reigns for a good while, and you stand a little straighter—unsettled by the fact he does not answer.

Carefully, ever so carefully, you pad backwards and peer out from behind the dented door of the fresher.

Across the room, Sevatarion is sprawled on his back, still half off the cot with his softened cock hanging out of his leathers—his eyes are shut, and despite the crease between his brows, the rest of his face is slack as it'd been when he was not too far off from blowing a load.

You realise this is what an Astartes looks like asleep.

You didn’t realize you’d spoken aloud until a low hum resonated through you. It lifted at the end, sounding almost confused.

“Why would you think that?”

Your head lifted. You couldn’t help it.

Firelight danced over Taliesin’s face, painting the ridges of his weathered features in alternating orange and black. He would have looked like one of the stone statues in your village’s small chapel if not for his eyes.

Golden and slightly luminescent, like a predator’s. But carrying none of a predator’s hunger. Only warmth in which you desperately wanted to bask.

“I can’t…,” you breathed, “... I shouldn’t!”

His head tilted slightly, once again reminding you ludicrously of a giant canine. You didn’t know if he intended to shift his great weight forward, but the slight movement made you flinch all the same.

Something in his eyes broke your heart anew.

“I will not hurt you.”

How many times has he told me this?

You looked back down at your knees. “I… I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He was quiet for a long while. You heard his breathing, ponderous and deep. You found yourself trying to match it, your heartbeat slowing, the roar of blood in your ears quieting. Despite everything, the panic guttered as quickly as it had ignited.

Leaving only a soul deep ache.

The words slipped past your lips before you could think to bite them back. “I’m broken. He… broke me. Sometimes… I almost forget. Like at the river. But it comes back.”

Tears slipped down your cheeks.

“It always comes back. I’m not… not strong enough. Not worthy. You shouldn’t… shouldn’t….”

“Stop.”

It was not a rebuke. A sigh like the roll of the tide against a shoreline washed over you. It carried the weary sadness of entire worlds. You shivered, but not because of fear.

Do Angels truly feel so deeply?

The insects continued in the night. The fire kept up its crackling. And tension hung in the air like fog.

“Rest, Little Cat.”

The presence retreated, ground trembling under his footsteps. Somehow the maelstrom of despair in your chest had faded. 

You didn’t know how to describe what remained.

***

Taliesin stood over you in the pale light of dawn. They should have started moving hours ago. The mountains loomed foreboding overhead, and he did not know how treacherous the journey would prove, pass or no pass. Best to get an early start.

But he couldn’t bring himself to wake you.

You lay curled on your side, knees bent to your chest, hands tucked beneath your head. For once, you had not cried out during the night. Your face was smooth and peaceful.

It made something in his chest twist.

You look so young. So innocent.

He frowned as he recalled your words from the night prior. The self-loathing he’d sensed beneath them. He knew that feeling. He deserved it.

Not you.

It was not a sentiment many other Chapters would share. The Salamanders, certainly. He’d heard tell of their compassion toward even the victims of the Archenemy. Most Lamenters had. Chapter lore spoke of the Great Shame of the Badab War, when the two Chapters had found themselves on opposing sides. Veterans of that damned conflict told of the respect between them even then. 

Taliesin had always hoped to encounter the Sons of Vulkan someday.

His eyes slid to your back, the knowledge of that cursed mark eating at him. 

If not the Salamanders… the Blood Angels themselves… or perhaps a particularly understanding Ultramarine…. 

He thought of what would have become of you if you’d encountered the likes of the Black Templars. His fists clenched.

They would have cut you down on sight and called it mercy.

Hadn’t he almost done the same?

As he had the previous night, he sank to one knee next to you. You’d regained some condition in the time since he’d met you. He no longer feared snapping your limbs with a mere touch. Time under this world’s sun had returned color to your formerly translucent skin.

It looks so soft.

He stood with a jerk, jaw clenching.

“Little Cat.”

Your eyelids fluttered.

“Little Cat, awaken.”

They flickered open. He braced for the bolt upright, the instinctual flinch back from his armored form. Instead, you simply blinked up at him. You did not smile. But you did not grimace, either.

He felt some of the tension bleed from his shoulders. “Forgive me. We must go.”

Taliesin’s hands twitched inside his gauntlets as he watched you push yourself upright. “Do your feet yet pain you?”

You took a few, hesitant steps. “Not as much.”

“Good.”

He stepped back.

Distance, Lamenter. Distance.

“There are some rations remaining. Eat.”

As you gnawed on the meal bar and sipped river water he’d made sure to boil over the flames (he’d remembered just in time how sensitive mortal digestive systems could be), Taliesin eyed the forested slope rising steeply above them. No scent of predators or other threats wafted to him on the breeze. The calls of small avian creatures were the only sounds.

He raised his bare face to the sun now peeking its way over the mountains. The warmth pleased him.

“It will be a good day for travelling.”

You sniffed the air. “No rain nearby.”

He arched an eyebrow and you quickly looked away.

“I… I think.”

He wanted to question you. 

On what planet were you born? Was it as… green… as this one? Was the terrain mountainous, forested, both? Did you have family?

A grimace twisted his lips. His desire to hear your soft, sweet voice was entirely selfish. He didn’t deserve it.

Unworthy.

The similarity to your own words last night sparked unease. But now was not the time to dwell upon trivialities. 

“Let us go. Do you require my assistance?”

“No!” 

The sharpness of your reply surprised him. “Very well. Follow… please.”

***

You hadn’t lied about your bandaged feet. Not really. They felt much better than they had the previous day. But as you scrambled up the slope behind your giant protector, you found yourself wishing yourself back in his arms.

Stop it!

Gritting your teeth, you pressed through the steadily increasing ache. You did not deserve his touch, or his pity. So you would learn to do without it.

I was strong once. I can be again.

The thought sent a surge of determination through you. And more than a little fierce glee. He… had kept you weak. Forced you into helplessness and frailty. Every step you took now, every rock over which you scrambled, every steep slope you pulled yourself up by grasping tufts of grass, you did to spite him.

I may be tainted… but I will not lay down and die. 

“I… will… not!”

“Little Cat?”

Ahead, Taliesin had turned toward you. You felt heat flood your face as he looked down on you with that same glaze full of concern.

“I’m… all right.” You panted. 

Again, not exactly a lie. Your lungs burned as they had during your panicked flight from the cannibals. The muscles in your thighs screamed. You gritted your teeth in disgust at your pathetic body. 

“Your cortisol levels are rising.”

You had no idea what that meant.

“I’m fine!” You snapped, then cringed.

Anger is not allowed. Anger brings pain. Oh, Throne! I can’t believe I just-

“Hmm.”

That was all. Taliesin paused atop the slope, eyes scanning the approaching treeline. He didn’t appear the slightest bit annoyed by your outburst.

He wouldn’t be. Not him.

The surety of the thought surprised you. Taliesin wouldn’t punish you for your anger. So you let yourself feel.

“I used to… be able… to do things… like this..” 

You wasted valuable oxygen by talking. But you couldn’t make yourself stop.

“I could climb… without… bleeding.” A tuft of grass loosened in your grasp, and you slid back a few feet. “Argh! I could run… without… falling.”

You slammed your hand against the moist ground. “I wasn’t… useless!”

“I believe you.”

The words made you pause. Taliesin’s golden eyes regarded you, not with pity, but calm assurance.

“Reach up and to your left.”

You did. Your fingers curved around an embedded rock the size of your fist. It didn’t move beneath your weight. 

“Good. Now pull.”

A grunt burst from your chest as you hauled yourself the last few feet up the slope and flopped to the ground at Taliesin’s feet. For the first time, your heart beat like a wild thing from exertion rather than fear. 

Exertion. And pride.

“I did it!” You smiled up at your Giant in Yellow Armor.

“You did.” He smiled back.

You lay there in the grass for a few moments, staring up happily at the Emperor’s Angel. The position felt familiar. Images of that glorious moment by the river flooded your mind.

I wish I could touch him again.

The happiness seeped from you like blood down a drain. Looking away from those beautiful golden eyes, you rolled up onto your knees. Trees, the same as the ones from the forest the two of you had journeyed through days ago, swayed in the breeze just beyond Taliesin. And beyond them….

“Ugh. More climbing.”

You swore you heard the giant chuckle.

***

Taliesin was proud of you. 

It was a new feeling. He’d felt protectiveness over mortals before, often. Fondness as well. 

But pride?

He watched you eye the mountains. You frowned, lips pressed together until they protruded slightly. He remembered seeing a serf woman instruct her young son to aid in removing the gathered refuse from their hab compartment once. The boy had made that exact expression.

Pouting. It’s called pouting.

His own lips twitched in amusement. Guilt followed swiftly.

I should not find enjoyment in your displeasure.

“Do you see the gap in the peaks?”

Your eyes narrowed and you shook your head. He knelt beside you, trying to get as close to your eye level as possible. The restrictions of his armor made it difficult.

“There.” He pointed.

“Oh!” 

“I believe that is the pass. If so, we will not need to scale the peaks.”

Relief flooded your features. He felt the same. Hauling himself alone over the sheer rock walls would be difficult enough. He was no Raven Guard. And he had no means by which to secure you to his body.

The image of you tumbling to your death made something tighten within him. He stood.

“Do you require more water?”

You nodded, and he passed you the canteen he’d filled with purified river water. A few rivulets escaped your lips as you gulped, trickling down over your throat. The sight held an odd fascination. He looked away.

“You have done well this far.”

The color deepened across your cheeks. He’d seen the effect before, usually following something he’d said to you. 

“What is the meaning of that?”

You cocked your head in confusion.

Before he could think better of it, he brushed an armored finger across your reddened skin. “The increased blood flow to your facial dermis. What is its purpose?”

Your eyes widened. The color went from a subtle shift to a far more vibrant tone. Pulling back, you scrambled to your feet, seeming to look anywhere but his face. 

“Forgive me. Have I offended you somehow?”

“N-no… it’s… you shouldn’t….” You pressed your palms to your cheeks, as if hiding. 

The image was oddly adorable.

“It does not cause discomfort?”

You backed up a few steps as you shook your head. “I… I’m fine.”

“Hmm.” 

It seems there is much I still do not know about mortals.

Taliesin watched you turn away and brush nonexistent dirt off your poncho. A familiar melancholy ache pulsed behind his hearts.

I wish… I could learn more of you.

​Statistically, a spontaneous genetic aberration of this magnitude should have plateaued or resulted in a population bottleneck due to the sheer metabolic cost. The fact that these phenotypes not only persist but maintain an aggressively stable equilibrium within the global gene pool suggests a powerful vector of unnatural transmission.

The most telling aspect, however, is the sheer structural precision of the dual-glandular pheromonal pathways and synchronized estrus cycles. It bears the unmistakable hallmark of the Master of Mankind’s genetic handiwork.

You theorized the entire species-population was an active test bed, an isolated crucible where He engineered a viral vector to achieve permanent germline integration. The hyper-endocrine states and rigid physiological stratification aren’t random, they are a highly calculated experiment in hardcoded compliance, utilizing a syn—

The civilized thought was violently torn away, swallowed whole by the sudden, red-hot roar of your hindbrain.

​You didn't decide to move, the reptilian core of your nervous system took total control of your flesh before your conscious mind could even begin to ask why. Your fingers ripped into the hilt of your dagger as your spine instantly locked into a defensive coil, mid-step.

​Only then did the air reach your lungs before it quickly died, curdling into something thick and sticky in your lungs, like wet wool.

A crushing pressure slammed into your chest—an alpha presence so violently absolute it made the hair on your flesh stand on end. The catecholamine rush was palpable as it dumped through your veins. Your omega instincts screamed at you to run, to bare your neck, to present like good prey.

You crushed the urge viciously and kept walking at the same measured pace, hand still heavy on the pommel of the blade.

Heavy footsteps echoed behind you. Deliberately. Each one vibrated straight through the stone floor.

You stopped, turned, and faced him.

Vulkan stood at the far end of the corridor, silhouetted by the faint magma-glow of the chamber behind him. He was immense. Even from 50-yards away, the sheer scale of him stole breath from your lungs.

Wearing only a loin cloth and bare from the waist up after long hours at the anvil, his obsidian skin glimmered with sweat. Every breath he took made the thick slabs of muscle across his chest and shoulders shift like living armor.

He didn’t speak at first. He simply stared.

You felt the crimson gaze drag over your body like a physical touch. Your heart hammered so hard you were certain he could hear it. Fear, electric and exhilarating, flooded all five of your senses. This was no mortal alpha. This was Vulkan. The strongest of the Primarchs. A living volcano. One wrong move and he could end you without even meaning to.

So you lifted your chin and gave him your coldest, most defiant smile.

“Following me now, Lord Vulkan?” Your voice echoed cleanly off the stone. “How very undignified for a Primarch.”

He took one step forward. Then another. The temperature in the corridor rose noticeably.

“I have been patient,” he rumbled, voice low and tectonic. “I have given you every opportunity to accept the old rites with dignity. Instead you mock them. No, you mock me. In public.”

You let out a low scoff, and took a step toward him instead of away. “Because they are archaic barbarism dressed up as tradition. And you…” You let your gaze rake deliberately over his colossal frame. “You keep pretending you’re above them while your scent betrays you every time I’m near.”

Vulkan’s jaw flexed. A muscle ticked in his thick neck. He took another step, now close enough that the heat rolling off his body washed over you like an open fire-pit. His scent continued to bombard you in waves, mutating the longer you stood in his space.

The initial strike was pure Nocturne, carrying dry static notes of scorched stone. But as his heat bled into the air between you, the scent bled with it, thickening into the rich tang of molten metal before finally giving way to its true, dominant core.

And it didn't stop. It continued to unravel into a heavy, dark alpha musk so dense you felt it on your tongue. Your thighs clenched involuntarily as a rush of slick threatened to spill.

Don’t show it. Don’t you dare show it.

“I am trying to be better than the old ways,” he said, almost to himself. His massive hands flexed at his sides. “I have died and returned for the sake of humanity. I will not become a slave to base instinct… not even for an omega who taunts me at every turn.”

You stepped even closer, now within arm’s reach, and looked up at him with open challenge. The top of your head barely reached the bottom of his abdomen. The size difference was dizzying.

“Then maybe you’re not as strong as they say,” you whispered, voice laced with venom. “Maybe the great Vulkan is terrified that if he touches me, the noble mask will crack and everyone will see exactly what kind of alpha you really are underneath.”

For three long, agonizing double-heartbeats, nothing happened.

Vulkan’s flaming eyes bored into yours, dilating until the deep black of his pupils swallowed his stare entirely. His massive frame seemed to swell, his chest heaving with deep, ragged drafts of air that left his lips parted, baring the white line of his teeth.

You watched the noble protector war with the ancient drake inside him, watching his civil facade fracture from the inside out. A violent tremor rippled through his massive shoulders as the dense musculature of his upper body locked down. Deep within the meat of his chest, a telluric rumble took root.

Then you twisted the knife:

“Or maybe you’re just too weak to take what you want.”

The snap was instantaneous.

A savage roar tore out of him as centuries of control shattered. One enormous hand seized your waist and lifted you clean off the floor as if you weighed nothing. Your back slammed against the warm stone wall hard enough to knock the breath from your lungs.

“Enough,” he snarled, voice no longer human.

You locked every muscle in your face, refusing to let the spike of raw panic show. Instead, you glared straight into his molten red eyes and sneered.

“I’m not scared of y—”

He cut you off with a brutal motion. His other hand ripped your remaining clothes away in one savage tear. The stale air kissed your bare skin for only a millisecond before the incandescent heat of his body engulfed you.

Vulkan curled you upward with terrifying strength, folding your body almost in half against the wall. Your thighs were wrenched wide around his waist before he crushed them together, trapping the searing, impossibly thick length of his cock between them. The underside of his massive shaft nestled perfectly into the cleft of your ass, dragging over your perineum and forward through the tight, slick channel of your pressed thighs. The burning head slid all the way up your soft belly, smearing your own traitorous omega slick and his heavy pre-cum across your skin.

A broken groan tore out of him.

No. No—no—no. This is wrong. They are my mortal. My duty is to protect—

The noble thoughts were immediately obliterated, swallowed whole as the alpha drive ruptured from the deepest trenches of his mind like a hydrothermal vent fracturing the seabed.

Omega. Defiant. Mine. Breed. Claim what the fire has given you.

“I should not do this,” Vulkan snarled aloud, voice wrecked. His forehead dropped against the stone beside your head as his hips rolled in a slow, devastating thrust. The entire calid length of his cock dragged through the tight sleeve of your thighs and ass, the heavy head gliding well past your sternum. “I am Vulkan. I endured death itself. I am not… I will not become this.”

Yet he didn’t stop.

He clamped your thighs even tighter around his girth with one enormous hand, the other sliding down your lower back to cant your hips upwards, keeping you perfectly folded and helpless, feet dangling uselessly in the air. Every powerful stroke ground him from the cleft of your ass all the way up your stomach into your ribs — he was using your entire lower body like a living toy.

​A sick, shameful heat detonated deep in your gut, tangling violently with your terror. He was too fucking big. Your mind convulsed at the sheer physics of it. If he shoved himself inside you here, right now, he would stretch you to the point of tearing.

He would have to split your anatomy open just to make room for his mass.

There was nowhere inside your flesh for your organs to retreat; he would fill you until you choked on him.

The musk pouring off his skin continued to hit the deepest parts of your brain, turning your vision glassy as your lower body betrayed you completely, weeping another shiny, pathetic stream of moisture that slicked between the both of you.

You dug your nails into his thighs hard enough to draw glowing orange blood and hissed, “Then stop pretending to be noble and just rut me like the beast you are, my lord.”

Vulkan’s entire body shuddered. A savage growl ripped out of his chest as the last chains of his restraint snapped.

“Damn you,” he snarled, hips suddenly slamming forward harder. “Damn you for making me want this.”

His rhythm turned brutal. He rutted against your curled-up body with renewed, barely controlled power.

​“I swore... to be the protector,” he choked out, his flaming eyes burning down into yours as he delivered a massive, hip-snapping thrust right between your knees, the sheer girth of him stretching the skin of your thighs. “I swore... to hold the line... against the monster.”

​He rocked back, the dark obsidian of his knuckles tautening into smooth, glossy glass as his grip locked like a hydraulic, forcing himself to stay back, to not breach the tight, weeping heat waiting just below him. Then he drove forward once more in a desperate, friction-heavy strike.

​“But you—”

​He ground hard against your slicked thighs.

​“—You are the catalyst.”

​Another heavy, breathless slide.

​“You smell of the sacred flame.” He hammered against your closed legs, picking up the pace, his breathing a scorched hiss. “So narrow... so slick... yet you dare... look at me... with war in your eyes.”

Another heavy, unyielding plunge buried him into your soft flesh.

“You’re mine.”

His grip tightened, crushing your thighs somehow even harder around his throbbing length as he lost himself in the sensation of you. The searing heat of his cock was almost unbearable, every vein and ridge dragging over your most sensitive places with relentless friction.

Inside his mind the war still raged, even as his body betrayed him:

They are not livestock. They are a person. They loathe this tradition—

They are dripping all over my cock. Their omega body was made for an alpha this strong. Push inside. Knot them. Fill them until they break.

Vulkan’s breathing was ragged now, deep growls punctuating every savage grind.

He pressed his forehead harder against the stone, trembling with the last remnants of resistance.

“Tell me to stop,” he snarled, voice desperate and broken even as his hips kept ruthlessly using you. “Tell me now, little omega… before I lose what remains of my honor and take you completely.”

His thrusts grew more violent, the wet slap of skin against skin filled the vaulted hall as the noble Primarch fought, and failed, to hold back the beast within.

A guttural roar tore from his chest as he rutted against you with savage abandon. His colossal hips slammed forward with enough power to jolt your entire body against the wall.

And you... your body had stopped processing sensation correctly.

Heat blurred into pressure. Pressure dissolved into instinct. Somewhere beneath the suffocating flood of pheromones and friction, your higher reasoning was beginning to fragment at the edges.

You understood with sudden horror why omegas submitted.

Not weakness.

Exhaustion.

“Emperor's blood—” he snarled, voice completely wrecked, deep and guttural. “I can feel your hole winking against my cock, greedy little ember. Sucking on me every time I thrust.”

He folded you even tighter, knees nearly at your shoulders, your body bent in half like scrap metal under a hammer. One massive hand twisted your thighs together so tightly around his girth that the pressure made his cock bulge obscenely between them. The other hand slid down the hiked curve of your spine, over your hip, until it engulfed the entire length of your thigh, lingering only to radiate heat throughout your entire core before indulgently pressing his thumb into the sensitive cleft above your hamstrings. Dangerously close to the tight ring of muscle below. He grabbed a whole palmful of the generous flesh and began kneading. His grip was so massive you rocked with every grope as he found new ways to mold your cheeks around him further. He couldn't help but admire the way the fat and muscle spilled out from between his fingers while the rest of your entire lower body was used as his righteous cocksleeve.

Schlap. Schlap. Schlap.

Mind breaking sounds filled the corridor as he rutted like a feral drake in full heat. His massive cock pistoned between your pressed thighs and ass, the heavy shaft grinding roughly through the tight channel he forged. Your slick was pouring out of you now, flooding down his length, coating his balls, and dripping in thick rivulets onto the stone floor.

Your eyes wavered. Vision blurring at the edges from the overwhelming sensation and scent pouring off him.

You could barely think anymore.

Your own omega signature flooded the subterranean air in sweltering waves. It was sweet and heavy with ash. Vulkan inhaled it like a dying man and lost what little sanity he had left.

“Throne— yes,” he snarled, nostrils flaring, crimson eyes wild and glazed. “That’s it. Flood the corridor with your scent. Drown me in it. You hate it, don’t you? Hate how wet your greedy hole is for your Primarch’s cock. Hate how good it feels when I use you like this.”

His cock throbbed violently between your thighs, the ridges catching and dragging against your raw nerves with every frenzied stroke.

“I should be ashamed,” he growled, voice cracking into something unhinged. “I should be on my knees begging your forgiveness… but I can’t stop. You feel too good... Do you understand what you are doing to me?” Vulkan rasped. “I have held dying worlds together with steadier hands than these.”

Another brutal grind. His balls, heavy and tight, slapped against your back with wet, meaty sounds. Sweat rolled down his obsidian chest and dripped onto your skin, mixing with the mess between you.

Your scent kept pouring out stronger with every thrust. You hated it. You hated how helpless and aroused it made you feel.

Vulkan fucking loved it.

He buried his face against the side of your neck, inhaling greedily, tongue scorching then laving over your pulse as he kept rutting like a madman. “More,” he snarled against your skin. “Give me more of that scent. I want the entire mountain to smell how badly you need my cock. How badly you need to be fucked raw and knotted until you can’t even remember your own name—”

His rhythm turned erratic, desperate, hips snapping with terrifying strength, muscles flexing and bulging as he fought the final urge to impale you.

“Do you know what Nocturne teaches its sons?” Vulkan murmured against your throat. The sudden calmness in his voice made your pulse stutter.

“Control is the only thing that separates strength from cruelty.”

His hips jerked violently against you.

“And I am losing it.”

Vulkan’s voice dropped into a dark, pleading growl right against your ear:

“Tell me to stop, little flame… or spread your legs wider and beg your Primarch to ruin you properly. Because I’m so close to saying fuck my oaths and forcing every last inch inside you.”

The stone behind you cracked.

A hairline fracture split through the obsidian wall beside your head from the force of his restraint alone.

Vulkan froze when he saw it.

For the first time since he touched you, genuine horror crossed his face.

“Emperor…” he breathed, realizing another inch of lost control would have killed you.

His massive body trembled with the effort of holding back that final line, unable to fully stop himself from grinding against your soaked flesh.

You hardly noticed.

Because you were breaking.

The relentless drag of his monstrous cock between your thighs, the burning texture of every gene-forged ridge, the obscene sounds, and the suffocating alpha scent were tearing you apart. Tears of overwhelming sensation and humiliated arousal stung at the corners of your eyes, but you refused to let them fall. You refused to break so easily.

You hated how good it felt.

You hated yourself more for what you did next.

With a shaky, furious breath you wrenched your hips up even more, practically inviting the brutal slide of his cock even deeper into the cleft of your ass. The new angle made the shaft grind harder against your entrance on every pass.

You glared up at him through your lashes, voice raw but still laced with venom.

“Is this the legendary fire of Nocturne?” you spat, voice cracking as another heavy thrust dragged every textured inch across your core. “The strongest of the Emperor’s sons reduced to grinding his cock between a mortal’s thighs like some desperate ash-whelp in heat? Pathetic.”

Vulkan’s pupil-blown eyes flashed with something wild and delighted. A dangerous chuckle rolled through his chest even as his hips slammed forward harder, folding you tighter.

“You vicious little ember,” he growled, voice like tectonic plates shifting. “Still spitting sparks while your body weeps molten slick down my shaft. Most omegas would be broken and babbling by now. But not you.”

​He adjusted his leverage, burying his fingers deep into the soft tissue of your outer thighs until the tips bit against your femurs, gathering your lower body into a single, helpless cylinder. He leaned his entire transhuman bulk into you, bracing his forearm against the cracked stone above your head until you were pinned beneath the sweltering shelf of his chest. Every restrained roll of his hips carried the weight of carnal force barely contained beneath volcanic stone. The sheer intensity forced your traitorous body to weep slick just to protect your skin from being scorched raw by his transit.

You let out a choked moan that you tried to turn into a sneer. Tears finally slipped free.

“Keep pretending then,” you hissed, squeezing your thighs even tighter in open challenge, daring him. “Keep playing the noble forgemaster while you soak me in your pre-cum. We both know the truth, Vulkan. You’re terrified that if you actually push inside me, you’ll never want to leave. That this proud Primarch will become nothing more than a mindless breeding drake for one sharp-tongued mortal.”

Vulkan’s rhythm finally faltered for half a second. Then he snarled, and slammed his hips forward with restored savagery.

“Terrified?” he rasped, leaning down until his burning forehead nearly touched yours. His breath seared your cheeks. “No, little flame. I’m reveling. I have slain leviathans and walked through death’s own forge, yet nothing has ever tested my restraint like you.”

He pulled back only to ground the thick, ridged crown of his cock hard against your entrance, stretching the tight ring threateningly before dragging it back up between your thighs with a sodden sound.

“When I finally claim you,” he growled, voice dropping into some horrible and ancient register, “I will forge your body around me so completely the mountain will remember your screams. I will stretch that tight, stubborn hole until it molds to the shape of my cock alone. You’ll feel empty for weeks afterward… aching for the only alpha strong enough to fill you.”

His thrusts grew faster, more erratic, the blistering heat of his shaft rubbing you raw in the most exquisite way. Your defiant tears kept falling, but your gaze stayed locked on him.

Vulkan’s eyes burned with wild joy as he watched you fight to hide how badly you needed him.

“Keep fighting me,” he snarled, lips brushing your ear. His next words came even quieter, which somehow, frightened you more.

“You have no idea how long I have denied this.”

His hips stilled against you for the first time since he had pinned you to the wall. The sudden absence of motion felt almost unbearable.

“If I lose control completely…” The words emerged slowly, forced through the same pressure that kept volcanoes dormant. “Your body may not survive the claiming instinct.”

The confession hung between you in the heat-thick air.

Vulkan shut his eyes briefly, jaw tightening.

“And the most shameful part,” he admitted softly, “is that some part of me still wants to risk it.” His hand flexed against your thigh. He drew back and then pressed the swollen head of his cock against your entrance once more, holding it there with agonizing restraint.

“So go on then, little flame,” he murmured.

His burning gaze lifted to yours again.

“Insult me one more time… and see what your Primarch becomes.”

---------------to be continued?--------------

Tysm for reading (*´ω｀*) ... i am ridiculous.

A/n: Hello, more mean men are coming and mournival frat au enemies-to-something-else has eaten through my brain like a prion. School is so hard but im regressing so good. Silver linings?