Hope in the Grimderp

High Inquisitor Alexius looks as though outrage and fear have collided inside him and neither can decide which should rule his face. His fingers clutch the chain of his rosette; knuckles pale around the gold. His mouth opens once, closes, then opens again, but no words come out. For once, doctrine has not arrived quickly enough to rescue him.

Calgar stands at Guilliman’s right, one hand resting upon the haft of his weapon. His single eye has not left Halix.

Halix remains still; too composed beneath the weight of the message. He stands in his dark robes with his hands folded into his sleeves, his head inclined as if in solemn reflection. Concern shapes his face with the precision of a funerary mask. There is no panic in him, no visible offence, no rush to deny, accuse, or distance himself from the words that have just named his order as compromised.

Grief, Guilliman knows, is often untidy. Halix’s grief is immaculate.

“Replay the final segment,” Guilliman says.

The vox-officer obeys at once. His hands move across the console; runes flare; the dead voice returns.

“The rot is within the Ordo. Repeat, the rot is within the Ordo. The vessel is not the source. Vallabha lives. Gate beneath black lotus. Ritual sustained from hidden circle. Ordo access confirmed. Ordo access con...”

The message cuts away.

Again, the silence gathers.

Silence, when used the right way can reveal as much as conceal. And Guilliman lets it remain for the space of a breath. Then another. Men rush to fill it with the shape of themselves.

Alexius moves first.

“My lord,” he says, voice tight but recovering its familiar edge, “this message must be treated with extreme caution. It came through compromised civilian channels, from an agent whose identity we cannot confirm, under circumstances that suggest coercion or manipulation may have been involved. Heretics are fond of institutional fracture. They would profit greatly from suspicion between your command and the Holy Ordos.”

Calgar’s eye narrows.

“He died sending it,” the Chapter Master says.

Alexius’ jaw tightens. “That does not make the content accurate.”

“No,” Guilliman says. “And I am sure the Ordos would rather I disregard the death of a single seemingly insignificant human when it comes to the integrity of its institution.”

Alexius falters at the accurate accusation hidden in the words. Halix lifts his head then, smooth as a blade leaving a sheath.

“My lord,” he says softly.

Guilliman turns his gaze to him.

The whole chamber seems to tighten.

Halix bows, just deep enough as expected. “If I may.”

“You may.”

“The High Inquisitor is correct in one aspect. The message must be treated with caution. But caution does not mean we do not act at all.” His eyes move briefly to the hololith of Indus, to the storm-wrapped mountains below. “If Lady Vallabha is not the source, then Commander Sicarius may be descending toward a visible sanctum designed to misdirect him. He may kill every priest before him and still fail to collapse the rite.”

Alexius seizes on the argument at once. “Precisely. That is my concern. A Victrix strike force, however capable, is not a daemonological containment unit.”

Calgar’s gaze cuts to him.

Alexius presses on, emboldened by procedure, as always. “If the sustaining circle is hidden, then Ordo Malleus assets must be deployed. Hexagrammic restraints, warding reliquaries, null-shackles, exorcistic matrices. Proper tools, Lord Regent. Proper oversight.”

Guilliman does not look away from Halix. “And you can provide these.”

Halix inclines his head. “My cutter carries a compact containment suite. It was held in reserve in the event that the Indus matter proved more severe than palace politics and local cult activity. I request permission to descend toward the black lotus cistern and establish a warded perimeter.”

The words are reasonable, and it is the sensible response Guilliman should order.

Alexius nods sharply. “A sound recommendation.”

Calgar says nothing. His silence is far less approving.

Guilliman studies Halix for a long moment.

“You request permission to descend into a theatre where a dying agent has just warned me that Ordo clearance has been used by hostile actors.”

“I do.”

“You understand the appearance of that request.”

“I do.”

“And yet you make it.”

Halix’s face does not change. “If I remain aboard, I am useless. If I descend, I am suspect. There is no course before me that cannot be read darkly in the shadow of that transmission. Therefore, I ask to be judged by necessity rather than comfort.”

Alexius exhales, almost relieved. “My lord, whatever suspicion hangs over the wider Ordos, Halix has been measured throughout this affair. His intervention on Sicarius’ behalf alone should speak to his balance.”

Calgar’s mouth hardens at the subtle jab at his brother. Guilliman marks that too.

Halix lowers his eyes, as though Alexius’ praise burdens him. “The matter is not my reputation. It is the ritual. If the hidden circle exists, it must be contained before Commander Sicarius reaches the wrong conclusion with admirable violence.”

The faintest thread of distaste passes through Calgar’s expression.

Guilliman’s hands remain on the table. Beneath his palms, Indus turns. Kashi glitters. The storm over the mountain district thickens, cloud bands folding over one another like closing hands.

He can deny Halix and keep him in sight. Or, he can allow him to move and see where the movement points.

A serpent in a basket remains a serpent, but a serpent in motion shows the path to its nest.

“Very well,” Guilliman says.

Alexius straightens, relief colouring his pallid face.

Halix bows.

Calgar’s eye does not move from the Inquisitor’s face.

“You will file your descent vector with my command deck,” Guilliman continues. “You will maintain open telemetry. You will transmit every warding action before execution. You will accept passive escort beyond visual range.”

For the first time, something almost imperceptible shifts in Halix’s expression: Calculation.

“As you command, Lord Regent.”

“As I command,” Guilliman says.

Halix bows once more, then turns and leaves the strategium.

The doors close behind him with a sound like stone settling over a tomb.

Alexius lets out a breath. “A difficult necessity, my lord. But the correct one.”

Guilliman does not answer.

Calgar steps closer. His voice drops low enough that only the Primarch hears it.

“My lord… Far be it for me to question your wisdom but…You are letting him run.”

Guilliman watches the sealed doors.

“I am letting him lead.”

Calgar’s jaw shifts. “And if he leads us nowhere?”

“Then I will know he has prepared nowhere carefully.”

The Chapter Master’s eye gleams once as he understands the true intent of Guilliman. A subtle smile blooms, uninvited on the Chapter Master’s lips.

Guilliman turns to the command deck with a single imperative.

“Track him.”

The order moves like lightning through the chamber. Officers bend over consoles. Servitors twitch in their alcoves. Passive auspex arrays rotate beneath layers of armour and sanctified plating. The hololith shifts, Indus narrowing to the theatre above Kashi.

A white marker detaches from Macragge’s Honour: Halix’s cutter.

It descends with precise obedience, its transponder active, its route filed toward a plateau east of the black lotus cistern. Proper distance. Proper vector. Proper caution.

The proper theatre.

For several minutes, the signal holds.

Then it enters the storm, and the white marker flickers.

“Signal degradation,” an auspex officer reports. “Atmospheric interference over Kashi’s mountain district. Attempting to maintain lock.”

“Do so,” Guilliman says.

The marker splits into three.

The officer freezes for half a heartbeat. “Multiple returns.”

Calgar’s hand tightens on his weapon.

The three markers become seven.

“Refraction?” Alexius asks.

The officer’s voice is strained. “Not natural. Passive relay echoes seeded through the storm layer. They are carrying the cutter’s transponder signature.”

Guilliman’s face remains still.

The seven markers become twelve.

Then fourteen.

Fourteen Halix signatures fall toward Kashi, each wearing the same clearance, each moving along a plausible descent path, each surrounded by enough storm interference to blur engine heat and mass return.

The silent interceptors move to pursue.

One false return vanishes.

Then another.

Then five more bloom over the western ridge like spores shaken loose in darkness.

The command deck holds its breath.

“My lord,” the Master of Flight says, “we are losing positive identification.”

“Continue tracking all returns.”

“Aye, my lord.”

For twenty-seven seconds, the hololith becomes a swarm of white ghosts.

Then one by one, they die.

The last return drops toward the black lotus route and vanishes.

No explosion…no distress call…no plea for aid.

Only absence.

Alexius stares at the empty place where the marker had been. “This confirms hostile interference.”

“Yes,” Guilliman says.

The High Inquisitor turns toward him. “Then he may have been taken.”

“No.”

Calgar’s voice is granite. “He wanted us to lose him.”

Guilliman looks down at Kashi.

“He wanted us to know we had lost him.”

Alexius’ mouth works, but no argument finds its shape.

The Primarch straightens.

“Seal every Ordo vessel attached to this fleet. No departures. No unsanctioned transmissions. All astropathic traffic routes through my command deck until further notice.”

Alexius recoils as though struck. “My lord, that is an extraordinary overreach.”

Guilliman turns his head and regards Alexius with a cold stare.

“Yes.”

The word falls without heat and crushes the protest flat.

Below, Indus continues to turn.

And beneath the same storm that swallows Halix’s signal, another craft descends.

Cato Sicarius’ thunderhawk falls through the clouds like a blade thrown from orbit.

Lightning crawls over its wings, pale and furious. The hull shudders under atmospheric turbulence. Warning runes flash red across the interior bay. Restraint chains rattle. The air reeks of hot metal, oil, ozone, and the faint tang of rain dragged in through armour seams and pressure vents.

Cato Sicarius stands like cold rage made flesh and clothed in ceramite. It encloses him in familiar law. The gold trim catches the red lumen-flare with each violent shift of the gunship. His crimson cloak has been secured behind him, shortened for descent and battle, its edge snapping in the forced wind of the hold like a banner hungry for war. The Tempest Blade rests at his side, its machine-spirit quiet, but not sleeping.

Around him, his chosen brothers wait: Alcaeus sits in silence, bolter mag-locked across his knees, his helm turned slightly toward Cato. Daceus checks the same magazine for the third time, more out of contempt for fear than necessity. He murmurs a battle-cant under his breath, the words almost lost beneath the gunship’s roar.

Arjun sits strapped into a restraint never made for him, a mortal held among giants. His jaw is set. His eyes are bright with fear and determination, both honest enough that Cato respects him for neither hiding nor indulging either. At his throat, concealed beneath a fold of dark cloth, the vox bead rests against his skin.

The pilot’s voice crackles over the internal channel.

“Commander, narrow-band packet from Macragge’s Honour. Degraded but readable.”

Cato turns his helm toward the cockpit.

“Play it.”

Static bursts through the hold.

Then Guilliman’s voice emerges, broken by storm but unmistakable.

“Commander Sicarius. Intelligence received from Kashi confirms Vallabha lives. Repeat, Vallabha lives.”

Cato’s hand closes around the restraint rail above him.

The metal dents beneath his gauntlet. No one dares comment.

The message continues, “Ritual confirmed to begin soon. Suspected hidden circle beneath or beyond black lotus cistern. Ordo clearance has been used by hostile actors. Treat all non-Ultramarine authority below as compromised until proven otherwise.”

Arjun’s head lifts sharply at the mention of black lotus.

Cato does not move.

“Your primary objective remains extraction of Lady Vallabha. Secondary objective, identify true agent behind it if possible. Do not allow rage to choose your route. Do not allow certainty to be sold to you by the enemy. Trust Arjun’s local knowledge. Trust your brothers. Advance.”

Static gnaws at the edges of the words.

Then, softer, almost buried beneath the storm:

“Cato. Bring her back alive.”

The channel collapses.

For a moment, there is only thunder.

Vallabha lives.

The words slide around his hearts, between grief and fury like a whetstone drawn down steel. Every image he has carried since the cavern returns with brutal clarity: Estakhr’s stone pedestal, the child too still in dead hands, Vallabha wrapped in his crimson cape, the false pyre in Cypress Garden, Adi’s terrified eyes, the rebel cavern emptied by fire and cowardice. Every failure rises, eager to be counted.

Do not allow rage to choose your route. His Primarch knows him all too well. Cato lets out a dark chuckle as he releases his hold over the restraint rail.

“Black lotus,” Arjun says, voice rough. “The old cistern beneath the temple quarter. If the cult uses that route, then they are moving through the city’s bones.”

Cato looks to him. “Can you reach the rebels from there?”

“Not from the main cut. From the lower waterworks, yes. There is a fork before the old ritual road. One path takes you deeper. Another bends toward the rebel warrens, if the stones have not collapsed.”

“If?”

Arjun bares his teeth in something that is almost a smile. “Kashi is old, Commander. She keeps some doors open out of spite.”

Daceus gives a low chuckle. “I begin to like this city.”

“You would not, my lord, if the ones who truly run her these days decide to like you back,” Arjun says.

Despite the storm and the plunge and the words still burning through the hold, the brief exchange loosens something in the air. A human breath, found for one second before battle consumes it.

Cato steps closer to Arjun.

“When we reach the fork, you take the waterworks route. Find whoever remains. Gather them. Approach the ritual site from the far side.”

Arjun’s eyes narrow. “And if they are too few?”

“Then you become enough.”

“That is poor mathematics, my lord.”

“It is what works in war.”

Arjun absorbs that, then nods once.

“The signal?” he asks.

“Courage.”

Arjun looks at the Ultramarines around him, then back to Cato.

“And honour.”

Cato holds his gaze. “You do not attack until my command. If the vox fails, you wait for the agreed count from first contact, then move.”

“Will this work?” Arjun asks, suddenly sounding much younger than the age he projects to the world.

Alcaeus’ helm turns a fraction, as though observing what Cato’s reply would be.

Cato’s voice lowers. “We will make it work.” His words are girded in steel as he fixes the younger man with a steady gaze. And then, he adds, as though sensing something Arjun has left unsaid, “Arjun. I will bring her back. I swear it on the Emperor. But I will not have you or anyone else come to harm. So, you are not to die proving the courage you have already shown.”

For a heartbeat, the rebel has no answer. Irritation flashes first, because pride must defend itself. Then surprise. Then something quieter and more difficult. He looks away before it settles openly on his face.

“I will try not to inconvenience your strategy with my death.”

“See that you do not.”

Alcaeus sits motionless as ever. Daceus, meanwhile coughs into his gauntlet before fixing his helmet over his head.

The pilot’s voice breaks the silence through the vox channel, “Twenty seconds to landing, brother commander. Hostile fire from ridge emplacements. Auspex unreliable. Mountain cut visible.”

Then on cue, the Thunderhawk drops hard.

Impact rounds detonate against the outer shields. The hold flashes white. Arjun’s restraint jerks against his chest; his teeth snap shut with an audible click. The Victrix do not move except to rise as one.

Cato draws the Tempest Blade; its power field ignites with a blue snarl.

Light pours down the blade and catches on every helm, every oath-paper, every scar carved into armour. The gunship’s red lumen gives way before that cold azure burn. In its glow, Cato appears less like a man descending toward battle and more like a judgment the mountain has delayed too long.

“Brothers,” he says over the squad channel, “the enemy waits beneath Kashi with lies, rites, stolen authority, and Lady Vallabha in chains. We answer with discipline. We answer with steel.”

The Thunderhawk pitches.

He does not sway.

“Lady Vallabha lives. We bring her out. And whatever sustains this cult, we extinguish it in the flames of our wrath.”

Alcaeus rises. “Courage and honour.”

The Victrix answer, one by one, their voices filling the hold.

“Courage and honour.”

Arjun’s mouth tightens.

Then, quietly, he says it with them.

“Courage and honour.”

The retros fire and the Thunderhawk slams into the landing zone with a force that reverberates through the gunship’s insides. The ramp drops before the shock has fully passed through the hull.

Night and rain rush in as above, somewhere beyond the clouds and false signals, Halix vanishes into the black lotus path.

And below, Cato Sicarius steps into Indus with the Tempest Blade burning blue in his hand.

Cato’s armoured boots strike the rocky ground of Kashi’s mountains as lightning tears open the sky, and rain lashes his armour like thrown gravel.

The mountain cut yawns before him, black and jagged, its mouth lit from within by a faint, sickly glow. Wind drives sheets of water across the landing zone, turning dust to mud beneath ceramite boots. Behind him, the Thunderhawk’s engines scream, heat boiling rain into white vapour along the ramp. Above, another fork of lightning turns the world briefly silver.

Then the first cultist emplacement opens fire.

Rounds spit from the ridge. Auto-gun flashes blink between wet rocks, and a heavy stubber coughs above the cave mouth, tracers stitching sparks across the Thunderhawk’s flank.

But Cato does not slow.

“Suppress the ridge,” he orders, and his brothers answer before his voice has finished echoing through the vox. Bolters rise as they answer the firing with their wrath.

Shells tear through stone and flesh. The ridge vomits sparks, dust, and blood. A masked gunner tumbles from his nest and vanishes into the rain. Another emplacement swings too late toward the Ultramarines’ advance. Retius Daceus puts a bolt through the gunner’s chest, bursting him backward in a red mist and taking the weapon’s feed mechanism with him.

Arjun flinches once at the violence, suddenly feeling inadequate in the presence of the Emperor’s Angel in action. Then he ducks low and runs after Cato, one hand clamped over the vox bead at his throat, the other gripping the curved blade the rebels gave him before departure. Mud splashes up his legs. Rain plasters his hair to his skull. Between giants, he looks painfully mortal.

However, he does not fall behind. Cato marks that without turning.

“Left approach,” Arjun calls over the short-range channel, breath sharp and steady. “Drainage shelf beneath the cave mouth. Cultists will expect you to take the main path.”

“Will it hold our weight?” Alcaeus asks.

Arjun glances at him. “For men, yes.”

Daceus cuts down a cultist sprinting from behind a boulder. “That is not an answer, boy.”

“We never got the chance to test with Astartes, my lord. They’re quite rate to come by, I fear.”

As Daceus chortles at the irreverent reply, Cato angles his helm toward the left.

The main cave mouth lies ahead, broad enough for a gunship to scrape through, half-hidden by wet creepers and broken prayer flags. It is too obvious, too open… The cult has left it lit, and that alone is insult enough. Braziers burn green beside the entrance, untouched by rain. Around them, skulls hang from copper wire, each marked with a blackened lotus drawn upon the brow with soot.

An invitation. A trap.

The drainage shelf that Arjun had indicated is barely visible beneath the slant of rock. Water pours over it in a silver sheet before disappearing into a crack in the mountain’s side.

“Take the shelf,” Cato says. “Daceus, mark pursuit. Alcaeus, with me.”

His brothers shift formation as though the command has been waiting in their bones.

Cato reaches the shelf first; his boot finds stone beneath water. It groans as he puts more of his weight on it but holds. The cliff face presses close on one side; the drop falls into rain and darkness on the other. The glow from the main entrance flickers behind them, throwing long shadows across wet rock.

Arjun hesitates for half a heartbeat at the ledge. When Daceus reaches for him, perhaps to haul him across bodily, Arjun bares his teeth.

“I can walk, my lord.”

“Then walk faster, boy.”

As they progress further into the darkness of the mountain, the shelf narrows midway. Cato is forced to turn sideways, one pauldron scraping stone hard enough to throw sparks through the rain. His armour grinds against the mountain, harsh and intimate, as the inbuilt servos whirl and whine to compensate for the effort.

Below them, something screams. The sound rises from the ravine beneath the shelf, layered with hunger and laughter. Arjun’s face tightens. Daceus looks down, then returns his focus to the path.

“Ignore it,” Cato says.

“I intended to,” Daceus answers. “With great conviction.”

They reach the crack in the mountain.

It is no natural fissure. Cato sees it the moment he steps within. The edges have been cut, long ago, by hands older than the Mechanicus. The stone is worked with shallow carvings nearly erased by water and time: lotus petals, river waves, wheel patterns, fragments of script in the elegant curves of Indus’ sacred languages. Once, this passage belonged to something holy. Or something that believed itself so.

Now black ash fills the grooves.

Eight-pointed marks smear over the old symbols in oil and blood.

Cato’s grip tightens on the Tempest Blade.

The passage ahead descends sharply.

Behind them, the Thunderhawk lifts with a roar, banking through tracer fire. Its guns answer once, a brutal flare across the ridge, before it rises into the storm and disappears. The sound of its engines fades, swallowed by rain, mountain, and war.

The silence that follows is immediate and heavy. The mountain closes around them. They are truly on their own now.

Arjun leads them now. He moves differently beneath stone. Above ground, he is a rebel captain among giants, brave and small in the open violence of the landing. Here, in the underways, something in him settles. His hand brushes the wall as he walks, fingers touching seams, hollows, old watermarks. He listens with his whole body, pausing at turns before sound reaches even Cato’s enhanced hearing.

“This route feeds into the lower pilgrim cisterns,” Arjun says. “Before the palace sealed half the old shrines, pilgrims used these paths during monsoon floods. Later, smugglers used them. Then rebels. Then no one, once the cult began marking the doors.”

“No one?” Alcaeus asks.

“No one sane.”

Daceus’ helm turns. “Then we are well suited.”

Arjun gives him a sideways look that might have become a smile in another world.

The tunnel narrows even further before it opens into a low gallery supported by lotus-carved pillars. Water drips from the ceiling in steady threads. Small lamps sit in wall niches, none burning with ordinary flame. Each gives off a dim blue-green glow, cold as corpse-light. Under that illumination, petals become claws. Carved dancers acquire too many arms.

Cato scans the chamber.

Empty… Too empty.

“Hold.”

They all halt as one. Arjun freezes.

Water. Armour. Breath.

Then Cato hears it: a scrape beneath the drip of water.

His blade comes up on instinct.

“Contact.”

The floor splits at the word. Hands thrust through the old stone grating, grey and slick, fingers hooked like roots. Corpses rise from the drainage channels beneath the gallery; their limbs wired together with copper and ritual thread. Some still wear court jewellery. Some wear the torn clothes of palace servants. Others are only stitched skin over bone. Their mouths are sewn shut, yet chanting leaks from them, low and wet and wrong.

Arjun swears in his mother tongue.

The first corpse-servitor lunges for him.

Cato cuts it in half before its fingers reach flesh.

The Tempest Blade tears through dead tissue and copper wire in a burst of blue light. The body collapses in two directions, both halves still twitching. Alcaeus crushes the skull beneath his boot. Daceus fires point-blank into another corpse rising at his flank, the bolt detonating inside its chest and painting the carved pillars black.

As they fell the unnatural foes that rise up to drown them, more come. They spill from channels, from behind pillars, from recesses that looked like shrines a heartbeat earlier. Slow, tireless, clawing for armour joints. Teeth break against ceramite. Dead hands scrape at seals and cabling.

“Keep them off Arjun,” Cato orders.

“I am not entirely helpless,” Arjun snaps, ducking beneath a grasping arm and driving his blade through a corpse’s throat.

The head lolls. The sewn mouth keeps chanting.

Arjun stares at it. “I retract that. This is offensive.”

Cato steps past him and drives the Tempest Blade through the corpse’s skull. The chanting cuts off.

“Head or spine,” he offers in advice.

“Yes, Commander.” The boy gasps as he watches a corpse drop from the ceiling onto Alcaeus’ back. Alcaeus reaches over one shoulder, grips its skull, and crushes it in his gauntlet.

The fight ends quickly; the gallery is left strewn with twitching pieces until Alcaeus and Daceus finish them with methodical brutality. Water runs dark around their boots. The cold lamps flicker, then steady again as though nothing has happened.

Arjun stands near one pillar, breathing harder than he wants anyone to hear. Blood, none of it his, streaks his cheek. His blade drips onto the stone.

Cato looks at the dead. Some of them are fresh, too fresh.

A woman’s severed hand lies near his boot; fingers still stained with turmeric around the nails. Palace household. Taken days ago, perhaps hours. The cult is using everything left behind.

Every corpse. Every symbol. Every grief.

“Let’s move on,” Cato says, voice colder than before.

They descend. The route becomes less a tunnel than the memory of one. Walls buckle inward. Roots pierce the ceiling. Old water has eaten steps into slopes slick with moss. Arjun guides them through places where the path seems to end, pressing hidden stones, lifting loose slabs, turning aside prayer wheels green with age.

Once, they pass a row of small statues set into the wall: all women, all seated in meditation, palms open, faces serene. Each one has been defaced. Black lines run from their carved eyes like tears. Iron nails pierce their mouths.

Cato notices Arjun’s face going still at the sight.

“Saints?” he asks.

“Queens,” Arjun says. “Older than compliance. Some older than the current Maharaja’s line. The people still leave flowers for them in secret. All fell to the Cult.”

Daceus studies the ruined statues. “The cult must fear their memory if they went out of their way to do this.”

“No,” Arjun says. “It feeds on memory. Each of these women had once been what our Lady is now.”

Cato says nothing as he thinks of Vallabha in the rebel caverns, speaking of lives stolen, deaths repeated, children taken from her arms. He thinks of his own voice answering her with the cruelty of disbelief.

This is madness.

The words come back to him in the dark, almost in a mocking tone. His hand tightens around his blade until the leather creaks.

They reach the fork an hour later, though time feels unreliable beneath Kashi.

The tunnel widens into a circular chamber where three paths meet under a broken dome. Rainwater drips through cracks far above, falling in bright threads into a shallow black pool. Around its rim, lotus petals have been carved into the stone. Half remains intact. The others have been scored through and reshaped into jagged star-points.

Two archways descend from the far wall: the left is narrow, old, half-choked by roots and collapsed brick. Faint air moves through it, carrying wet earth, smoke, and distant humanity. The right is broad and smooth, descending with unnatural regularity into the deeper dark. From it comes a pulse of chanting too low for mortal hearing, though Cato feels it in his teeth.

Arjun points left. “Waterworks. They bend toward the rebel warrens if the lower wells are still open. From there I can reach whoever survived.”

His voice changes on the last word. Survived.

Cato hears what is beneath it. Adi. The old women. The fighters who bowed their heads in shame when Vallabha was taken. The cavern emptied of her presence.

“And the right?” Alcaeus asks.

Arjun looks toward the broader descent.

“The old ritual road.”

The chamber seems to grow colder as he speaks. Cato steps to the right archway and studies the stone. The walls are too smooth, polished by repeated passage. Fresh ash marks the floor. Bare feet, many of them. Robed hems dragging. Something heavier has moved recently through the centre, leaving twin grooves in the damp residue.

A prisoner’s bier.

Or chains.

Cato’s vision narrows.

‘Do not allow rage to choose your route.’

He breathes once.

“Arjun.”

The rebel captain turns.

“You take the waterworks.”

Arjun’s jaw tightens. “I should guide you to the ritual site.”

“You have guided us far enough. Now gather your people.”

“You do not know those deeper roads.”

“I know enough.”

“No, you do not.” Arjun steps closer, anger sharpening his voice. “These tunnels lie. They fold back. They use sound. You may march straight and find yourself where you began, or worse, where the cult wants you.”

Cato turns his helm toward him.

“Then I will cut through where they want me and continue.”

“That is arrogance, Commander. Those words are brave, but it is still arrogance.”

Daceus makes a soft sound over the squad channel. “The boy knows you well, Sicarius.”

Cato ignores him.

Arjun presses on, “I am serious. If I leave you here, you may never reach her.”

“If you do not leave, the rebels never will.” Cato growls.

That stops him.

Cato steps closer and touches the small sealed vox bead that Arjun holds at his collar. It is a thing cased in dull black and no larger than a fingernail.

Arjun looks at Cato with an unwavering gaze as though he is beginning to understand the astartes’ plan.

“The channel is narrow and shielded,” Cato says. “It may fail in the deeper stone. If it holds, you wait for my signal.”

Arjun touches the bead at his collar, “And if it does not?”

“You count from first breach. The third hundred heartbeats after bolter fire reaches your position, you attack.”

“Heartbeats?” Arjun asks, incredulous.

“Count quickly if frightened.”

Arjun simply stares at him, unsure if that was a joke that left Cato Sicarius’ lips.

Daceus and Alcaeus turn away with great dignity.

Arjun ties up his collar tighter, securing the vox bead to his throat. His fingers are swift, though Cato notices the tremor in them. Anger. Grief. The burden of returning to survivors without Vallabha beside him.

“The signal phrase,” Arjun says.

“Courage.” Cato begins.

“And honour.” Arjun finishes.

The words settle between them, no longer merely Ultramarine battle cant. In Arjun’s mouth, they become something borrowed and reforged for the tunnels beneath Kashi.

Cato places one hand on Arjun’s shoulder. The gesture is brief, heavy, and wholly unexpected.

Arjun stills beneath it.

“Remember what I said. You are not to die proving courage you have already shown.”

For a moment, the rebel captain looks younger than he is. Caught without armour around some hidden part of himself.

Then he scoffs, because he is Arjun.

“You give terrible farewells, Commander.”

“That was an order.”

“That’s even worse.”

Cato removes his hand, his eyes beneath his helm shine with a subtle mirth even in these dark times.

Arjun looks toward the left passage. The darkness there carries the faint scent of smoke and old wells. He adjusts his grip on his blade, then looks past Cato toward the right-hand descent.

“Bring her back,” he says.

Cato’s answer is immediate.

“I will.”

Arjun studies him, as if weighing whether to challenge the certainty. Then he nods once.

“Courage,” Cato says.

Arjun’s expression changes, just slightly.

“And honour.”

He turns and disappears into the waterworks passage, swallowed by roots, shadow, and the soft rush of hidden air.

For several breaths, Cato listens to his footsteps recede, then they are gone.

The chamber feels emptier without him.

Daceus checks his bolter. “The boy’s got spirit, Cato. He’ll be fine.”

Alcaeus looks toward Cato. “You trust him.”

It is no question. Cato turns toward the ritual road, letting the statement settle before answering.

“Yes.”

The answer surprises him only after he has spoken it. His brothers don’t comment on it, thankfully.

The right-hand archway breathes cold across his armour. Somewhere deep below, chanting pulses through stone.

Cato raises the Tempest Blade, its blue light spills across defaced lotus petals and blackened star-marks.

“Formation,” he says.

Alcaeus and Daceus move around him.

Behind them lie the fork, the waterworks, Arjun, and the last chance of rebels moving unseen through the city’s bones.

Ahead lies the old ritual road.

Ahead lies Vallabha.

Cato Sicarius steps into the deeper dark, and the mountain closes its mouth behind him.

The old ritual road receives them like a throat closing around its prey. The archway narrows after the first dozen steps, stone pressing close until the astartes must move in disciplined file. The air grows colder with each step, a cold that slides between armour seals and settles against the flesh beneath.

Cato leads on, the Tempest Blade burns blue in his hand. Behind him Alcaeus and Retius Daceus follow, bolters raised, boots falling with such measured force, their echoes run ahead, return changed, and fade into deeper dark.

For a time, nothing moves. The cult should send defenders. Ambushes. Traps. Gunfire through murder-slits. Screaming zealots frothing themselves toward death. Cato would understand that. He would welcome it. Steel answers steel. Flesh answers bolt-shell. Faith, however twisted, still bleeds when cut.

The old ritual road instead, only offers silence; the walls watch them instead.

At first, the carvings are old Indus work. Lotus petals. River serpents. Women seated beneath trees, palms open, heads crowned by wheels of flame. Lines of scripture flow around them in graceful curves, so worn by water and age that even the lumen-enhancement in Cato’s helm struggles to separate word from stone. Arjun had said these paths were older than the palace, older than the Maharaja’s line, and now Cato believes him. There is a weight here no crown can claim.

Then, the defacement begins.

Black oil fills the petals. Serene faces are split from brow to chin. Wheels of flame are scored into jagged stars. Old hymns are overwritten with newer hands, clumsy at first, then more confident as the descent continues. Sanskrit curves warp into hooked runes. Avestan invocations break under marks that sting the eye. This is no random vandalism. This is a correction, a perverse rewriting. The patient cruelty of men who do not merely wish to kill a faith, who wish to force it to speak in their tongue before it dies.

Daceus pauses beside one carved queen whose mouth has been pinned shut with three iron nails.

“Charming hosts,” he says over the squad channel.

Alcaeus angles his bolter toward a side niche. “No movement.”

“Not what I meant.”

Cato looks at the defaced face, at the iron driven through stone lips, and thinks of Vallabha in the rebel caverns, speaking of lives stolen, deaths repeated, children taken from her arms. He thinks of Akshara laid out in quiet dignity. He thinks of the young court woman burned beneath Vallabha’s jewels so Kashi might be made to mourn a lie.

The cult does not merely murder people. It uses them… their memory, their flesh, their grief, their language, their faith.

Everything is fuel.

“Move,” he says.

They continue. The passage widens into a shrine hall half-swallowed by mineral growth. Pillars rise from the floor like old trees; their bases lost beneath shallow black water. Small lamps float across the surface in clay bowls, each flame burning green without oil. They drift without current, forming circles that widen and contract as the Ultramarines enter.

Cato lifts a fist, halting his brothers behind him.

For a moment, there is only silence. Then, they hear it… something whispers from the lamps.

Breath first. Then syllables. Then names.

‘Alcaeus.’

‘Daceus.’

‘Cato.’

The whispers come in voices no machine can catalogue. Male, female, soft as a child’s, hollowed with age. Each name is spoken with terrible familiarity, as if by someone standing too close behind the listener’s ear.

“Ignore it,” Cato says.

“Gladly,” Daceus answers, though his bolter tracks the floating lamps.

The circles tighten as the lamps drift toward the centre of the flooded hall, green flames merging into a single reflection. The black water trembles.

Something beneath it moves.

“Contact below,” Alcaeus says.

The water erupts.

Bodies rise with awful, rehearsed grace, standing from the black pool as if lifted by strings. Skeletons bound in the same copper wire and red thread. Fresher dead with grey faces, painted sigils, hair floating like drowned weeds. Their mouths hang open. From each throat comes the same chant.

“Vessel returned. Sword returned. Gate remembered.”

Bolters fire and the hall becomes a cacophony of thunder and fire.

Shells tear through dead flesh, bone cracks, ribcages burst as the corpses fold, break, fall back into the pool, then rise again unless spine or skull is destroyed. Cato moves through them like the Emperor’s Wrath given form, the Tempest Blade cutting blue arcs through green-lit dark.

Alcaeus fires with steady economy. Daceus wades into the pool up to his greaves, gripping one corpse by the throat while firing point-blank through another’s face. Cato crushes a priest-crowned corpse beneath his boot until its chanting stops.

The last of the dead rises from the centre of the pool.

It is that of a child.

Small. Barefoot. Water streams from limbs too thin for life. A garland of blackened marigolds hangs around its neck. Its eyes have been replaced by polished obsidian. In its hands, it holds a clay lamp.

The Ultramarines do not fire as they feel their revulsion sharpen into a breath of silence.

The child opens its mouth, and it speaks with Vallabha’s voice.

“Cato.”

The sound pierces the hall more cruelly than any blade. For a moment, the silence drags on before Cato crosses the distance in three strides and cuts the thing in half.

The lamp falls into the water, and its green flames gutter out.

Darkness surges around them once more, broken only by the blue burn of the Tempest Blade and the red target-runes in their helms.

For a heartbeat, no one speaks.

Then Daceus says, quieter than before, “That was unkind.”

Cato looks down at the black water where the child-thing dissolves into ash, thread, and bone.

“No,” he says. “It was deliberate.”

His voice is cold, just like his wrath.

They leave the shrine hall behind, and press on deeper into the path beyond that is marked with hanging bells.

Hundreds of them.

Small bronze bells, temple bells, hand bells, anklet bells, fragments of larger bells broken and strung from wire. Some are ancient, green with age. Others are new and bright. One still has a strip of red thread tied to its handle, the sort, a child might knot there after a festival prayer.

None move. And then as if on cue, they all ring.

The sound begins as a tremor at the edge of hearing. It deepens as the Ultramarines pass beneath, layer upon layer of metallic whisper. It rings nearer, as though every bell rings inside the skull.

Daceus snarls and swipes one aside with the back of his gauntlet.

His hand passes through it as if through smoke, even as the ringing remains.

“Warp phantasm,” Alcaeus says.

“Thank you,” Daceus replies. “I was concerned it might be good news.”

Cato keeps walking.

The bells whisper barely decipherable words as they pass.

Late.

Failure.

Again.

The words repeat in different tones. A woman sobbing them. A child laughing them. A priest chanting them. Guilliman saying them with icy disappointment. Vallabha whispering them as she whispered his name through the wall aboard the Invictus Resolute, trapped in sleep and grief.

Late.

Failure.

Again.

Cato breathes in and out, as he remembers his Primarch’s words: ‘Do not allow rage to choose your route.’

Paying no heed to the taunting voices, he walks.

Eventually the sound falls behind, still ringing, still speaking, unable to halt what refuses to listen.

They pass through a broken gate and enter a corridor lined with prayer niches.

Each niche holds ash, some hold bones.

One holds a nose-pin made of gold.

For some inexplicable reason, Cato stops before it: the pin is shaped like a fully bloomed lotus.

For one impossible instant, the world narrows to that tiny glint. Gold against grey ash. Delicate petals. The faint suggestion of pearls. Placed carefully, waiting to be seen.

Vallabha had worn one like it in Kashi’s banquet hall.

Later, she had worn it in memory more than ornament, a piece of herself kept bright against every attempt to make her less than human.

Daceus sees where his commander’s gaze has fallen.

“Commander?”

Cato reaches toward the niche.

Alcaeus catches his wrist before he can touch the ornament. The grip is light, as though he only sought to remind his brother of reality.

Cato turns his helm very slightly, and Alcaeus meets the look without apology.

“Trap.” The single word lands cleanly.

Cato looks back at the niche.

The gold lotus shifts, and its petals open.

Inside, something wet pulses like an eye.

Cato withdraws his hand swiftly as the eye blinks.

Then every ash-filled niche along the corridor opens and the walls walls breathe out grey dust in a choking wave.

“Seal helms,” Cato orders, though every warrior has already done so.

Ash strikes their armour and clings. Auspex runes flicker. Shapes move in the dust. Living cultists this time, barefoot and masked, bodies painted black and red, knives held low. They move without battle-cries, striking at joints, vents, cable bundles, the thin places even power armour must possess.

Cato kills three in the first two seconds.

Alcaeus tears one from Daceus’ back before the blade can find the helm seal. Daceus breaks another against the wall and fires through two more shapes moving in the ash.

A fourth cultist dodges Cato’s blade with impossible agility, mask turning toward him as if in delight. The cultist’s mouth is visible beneath the painted veil, lips split in a smile.

“The blue sword returns,” the man hisses.

Cato drives the Tempest Blade through his chest.

The cultist laughs around the blade. Blood pours from his mouth.

“To the womb of the mountain.”

Cato twists the sword and tears it free.

The body falls. From the ash, other voices take up the phrase.

“The blue sword returns.”

Bolter fire answers.

“To the womb of the mountain.”

The cultists die swiftly, messily, with no poetry left in them once the body opens. Yet the words remain. The passage carries them. The walls repeat them. The old road seems to have learned the phrase and now murmurs it from stone to stone.

Cato hates it with surprising purity.

Because it includes him. Because the cult seeks to fold him into its rite, to make his rescue part of its prophecy, to turn love into a mechanism, duty into a lever, rage into oil poured upon their altar.

No.

The word does not leave his mouth.

It does not need to. By the time the ash thins, the corridor is carpeted with bodies.

The Ultramarines stand unbroken, though no longer untouched. Daceus’ helm is scored across the cheek-plate. Alcaeus has black ash caked over one side of his armour, dulling the blue until he seems half-buried already.

Cato looks at each of them.

“Report.”

“Functional,” Alcaeus says.

“Annoyed,” Daceus says.

“Then we continue.”

No one argues.

The tunnel beyond the ash corridor changes again.

Old stone gives way to black basalt veined with red mineral lines like arteries. The floor slopes downward in a smooth spiral. The air warms by degrees. Incense thickens, sour and fatty, like flowers left to rot. The chanting grows more distinct, though the words remain just beyond comprehension, as if the mind refuses to hold them.

They pass yet another mural carved into the curve of the spiral wall.

Cato slows. The image is old and newly ruined.

At its centre, a woman stands beneath a banyan tree, hands raised, face serene. Around her, four shadows kneel. They are bowing to her… or are set to devour her. Time has softened the original meaning, but the cult has supplied its own. Each shadow has been marked in fresh pigment: red, blue, green, blackened purple. Above the woman’s head, someone has carved a gate opening inward.

Beneath the mural, in Low Gothic, newly cut:

SHE RETURNS. THE SWORD REMEMBERS. THE FOUR SHALL SPEAK.

Daceus reads it and exhales, “I preferred the bells.”

Alcaeus mutters a warding oath.

Cato stares at the carved woman.

The cult has not given her Vallabha’s face. Not fully. The shape is older, more symbolic: a queen, a vessel, a memory rewritten over centuries. Yet the tilt of the head has been altered. The line of the jaw. The hair. Small changes made by recent hands.

Enough.

His hearts beat once, out of rhythm.

He looks away.

“They know we are here,” Alcaeus says.

“They knew before we landed,” Cato answers.

The spiral ends at a door.

No… It resembles a door only because the mind wants edges for what waits there.

The passage stops before a tall archway carved from the black basalt itself. There is no gate, no panel, no visible mechanism. Only darkness hanging inside the arch, flat and complete. The Tempest Blade’s light reaches it and dies at the threshold. Bolter-mounted lumens vanish against it. Auspex returns fail, flickering into static the instant they touch the space beyond.

Around the arch, four lines of script spiral inward from the surrounding stone, each cut in a different hand, each filled with a different substance.

One line is dark red and wet.

One gleams blue-white like crushed glass.

One is green with rot, furred at the edges.

One is black-violet and glistening, beautiful in a way that makes the eye recoil.

Cato lifts his blade. The darkness does not move and yet, he feels it notice him.

Alcaeus and Daceus form around him, bolters angled outward. No enemy emerges. No corpse rises. No bell rings. The silence is total.

Then Vallabha’s voice speaks from beyond the arch.

No scream. No plea. Only his name.

“Cato.”

His brothers go still.

Daceus’ bolter rises toward the darkness. “That is not her.”

“No,” Cato says.

The denial costs more than he wants it to.

The voice comes again, softer.

“Cato.”

The darkness within the arch ripples.

For a heartbeat, Cato sees nothing.

Then he sees too much.

Blood on chains. A woman’s hand reaching through smoke. A child’s cry cut short. Cypress trees burning. A lotus pond under moonlight. Vallabha’s eyes filled with fury. Vallabha’s eyes filled with tenderness. Vallabha’s eyes empty in death. Vallabha’s eyes watching him as if she has waited across lives and knives and ash for him to finally arrive.

The images vanish.

Cato stands before the arch, the Tempest Blade burning in his hand, armour streaked with ash, his brothers waiting behind him.

The road ends here. The test begins here.

Alcaeus steps closer. “Commander.”

The single word steadies the air.

Cato does not look back. “Hold formation. If I falter, you advance.”

Daceus’ voice comes rough over the vox. “If you falter, Commander, I will assume the mountain has ended.”

Cato breathes once.

Guilliman’s warning returns.

Do not allow rage to choose your route.

Do not allow certainty to be sold to you by the enemy.

Trust your brothers.

Advance.

Vallabha’s voice waits in the dark.

Cato steps toward it.

The arch swallows the blue light first. Then the blade. Then the hand that holds it.

Behind him, the old ritual road falls silent.

Before him, the four shadows open their eyes.

Me: How many Chaos-adjacent references can we fit into one chapter? My Brain: ALL OF THEM!!

More shenanigans to come! I swear I don't enjoy making Cato Sicarius suffer but.... it is fun!!

The hotel lobby is plush and lit in that ethereal way that makes everything seem distant and calm all at once.

There are people crossing the carpeted floor, some heading to their rooms, others already prepared to face the world outside those gilded golden doors.

Very few pay attention to me as I sit there, observing them all.

And I don’t blame them. When I first came to this city, to this land, almost fifty years ago, I hardly drew any attention to me. It was so different to how things were back home.

Back home… a subtle prick of grief I felt in my heart as I remember the place I came from.

A land of veridian plains and sky that was truly blue. Here, most days I don’t see the sky. And what reflections of the great beyond I see is a dull grey at best.

I let out a subtle sigh as I see a small child approach me. She must be around five, maybe six. She is dressed for the season: a puffer jacket lined with fur that is slightly large for her small frame. The most vivid pink beanie that has a purple pony embroidered to its rim, a subtle sheet it emits as she turns her head to cast a furtive glance behind her. Her auburn hair is the colour of the sacred flames back home.

When she turns back to me, her smile is the most beautiful thing I have seen in a long time: innocence that feels so out of place in the world we are in.

Her little hand reaches out to touch mine. Her fingers grasp mine in a gentle touch as she grins at me; she is missing a tooth and where in others it would seem a flaw, on her little radiant face, it becomes her…

Just as I let her touch warm my own hand, a sharp voice calls for her by name. It is her mother.

She is also a woman of beauty: she has the same auburn hair her daughter has inherited, her attire is classy and whispers wealth. The huge diamond on her fingers glint in the hotel’s many lights as she grasps the little girl’s hands and gently takes her away from me.

“Remember what we talked about? No wandering away.” The woman chides her daughter in gentle censure.

The little girl, much to her credit, looks genuinely sorry as she nods before turning to look my way.

“She seems so lonely. I thought I’d cheer her up.”

Ah, such a pure, loving soul! Such a priceless thing in this sea of greed, apathy and hatred.

The woman smiles understandingly as she turns towards me, her eyes roving over my being before she turns to the young girl.

“Let’s go. Can’t leave daddy waiting now, can we?”

With a gentle kiss to her capped forehead, the woman leads the child away from me; and just as they round the corner, the little girl turns back to throw me the same gap-toothed smile.

It reminds me so much of the children back home. Oh, how they used to come to me with their mothers and their grandmothers! How they would have the same light of innocence and pure love in their eyes… how their souls gleamed in a sea of fluttering flames.

Now, here… on these distant shores, I stand… alone, bereft and with not a soul to speak to.

The morning meanders on into the afternoon when the hotel manager trudges towards me with a person who seems like the new housekeeper.

“I need you to be careful with this one here.” He says, pointing towards me. A strange sort of ire rises in me as he speaks of me as though I were… I were…

“Looks old, this one!” the new housekeeper intones. From his accent, it is clear he is also not from these lands. Another soul far from home then.

“Yeah… Mr. Milton won her in an auction at Sotheby’s fifty years ago. Apparently she’s seven hundred years old. Late Chola period bronze. They say the techniques for casting a sculpture like this is lost to time.”

Sculpture…lost to time…

The housekeeper regards me with the sort of look a man would give a thing he hoped to solve.

“So no harsh chemicals then.”

“No. Don’t want to disturb the patina. We’re thinking of putting it in a temperature controlled enclosure next week.”

The housekeeper chuckles as he gently traces a line down my arm, as though he was checking for dust. The touch felt revolting… so unlike the way my people had touched me… with reverence, with faith, with love.

“Saves me the trouble of cleaning then!”

The manager doesn’t answer but fixes me with another steady stare.

“Make sure you don’t break it. That thing is worth more than all our livelihoods combined.”

“Sure thing, boss!”

The manager turns away, leaving the housekeeper and me alone. His eyes flit over my form, taking in the way I stand, gently balanced on one leg while the other is slightly bent as though the sculptor had caught me in the middle of moving. The hand that the little girl had tried grabbing was flexed gently towards the ground. The other hand held a small lotus bud.

“Say what you will about the people! They sure knew how to cast a beauty!” his eyes leered at my breasts as he whistled low before turning to grab his supplies.

Where once before I stood beside my beloved in a temple, where once before I was regarded as a goddess, alive and present, where once before when men touched me, they did it with reverence and love….

I now stood in a cold hotel lobby, away from my lord who probably languishes in yet another cold room, with men regarding me with the same lust they offer the women in their lives.

Where once before I was worshipped… I now stand admired.

The hotel lobby continues to exist, and I continue to endure.

India loses approximately 1200 temple idols every year. Most of these idols are then sold in the black market to international collectors and museums the world over.

These are not just statues for us. They are our gods and goddesses. They are our divine fathers and mothers. They are our history and the legacies of our ancestors.

This is a small attempt from my side to shine light on this issue. And I understand if this is not your cup of tea. But I hope, the next time you see some artwork or piece of history from some distant land, you stop and think a while on it got there. And if possible, you ask questions.