#space elf

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Pain flared in his side. Burning. Deep. Familiar.

Right where her hand had been in the dream.

He muttered a curse—low, broken, not meant for anyone. His gauntlet pressed instinctively against his ribs. The armor was slick with warmth. Either sweat or blood. Maybe both.

The shard didn’t glow. Didn't move.

But he felt it. Still. Like a second spine.

Watching.

Remembering.

---

Across from him, Eithra was awake.

Had been. He could tell by the set of her spine, the slight lift of her chin, the way her eyes didn’t blink when he moved.

She’d been watching him.

Studying him.

Like a scholar dissecting a rare moment of silence.

He didn’t speak at first.

Didn’t trust the way his body remembered hers.

Didn’t trust the way the air still smelled like her skin.

---

“How long?” he asked. Voice dry. Half-broken. It tore out of him dry, iron-tasting.

She didn’t answer right away.

Then:

“Long enough.”

He grunted and dragged a palm down his face. The edges of his gauntlet caught against dried blood and the salt crust of dream-sweat. His armor hissed in protest—plating shifting over grit, over pulverized bone fragments that clung to the floor like relics of someone else’s war.

He didn’t look at her yet.

Didn’t trust himself to.

The dream hadn’t faded. He could still feel her breath in his. Still felt the phantom of her weight against his chest. Heat where there shouldn’t be heat.

Where nothing had lived for a long time.

---

“You fell asleep,” she said eventually.

He nodded, slowly. Let the weight of it settle on his shoulders.

“Didn’t plan to.”

“Your body made the choice.”

“Without permission.”

Her head tilted faintly. She didn’t smile.

“Sometimes survival does that.”

He glanced at her then. Sideways. Caught the edge of her cheekbone in the dying light. Razor-sharp.

“So,” he said. The words dragged like glass in his throat. “Do you always watch people sleep?”

“No.”

Beat.

“But I wanted to see if you'd stop clenching your jaw when no one was looking.”

He barked a laugh. Harsh. Short.

“I didn’t, did I.”

“No,” she said. “You just started grinding your teeth.”

---

That broke the tension—slightly.

Enough to let breath flow again.

Malrion leaned back against the wraithbone pillar. It was cold through the ragged seams of his armor. Grounding. He took stock of his damage of his armor. Not out of any real necessity, just to have something to do. Duty before distraction.

Without his helm, he couldn't exactly be sure of the extent of damage. But based on the last readout, combined with the sheer amount of environmental sensation he was feeling, he guessed suit integrity couldn't have been more than 40%.

When he ran out of mental tasks, he finally turned his head toward her.

“You’re different than I thought.”

Eithra didn’t blink.

“Say what you mean.”

He exhaled through his nose.

“You have more edges than I expected.”

“You mean I’m not kind.”

“No,” he said. “You are.”

That made her still.

More than still.

Careful.

“I didn’t think you believed in kindness.”

“I don’t.”

A pause.

Then he added, quieter:

“But that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize it.”

---

The silence that followed was deeper.

More aware.

Eithra drew her legs in slightly, folding one beneath her. The move made her shoulder brush the bottom of his pauldron again. Accidental.

He didn’t pull away.

“Did it scare you?” she asked, suddenly.

His brow furrowed.

“The dream.”

He didn’t answer for a long time.

When he did, his voice had dropped an octave.

“No.”

Then, after a breath:

“But I wanted it to.”

---

Eithra looked at him then.

Really looked.

But she didn’t ask why.

Didn’t have to.

He was already shaking his head—like he wanted to scrub the feeling off his skin, but it was already under it.

“I haven’t touched anyone in decades,” he said. Quiet. Flat. “Not without a weapon in my hand.”

She said nothing.

Just let the words settle between them like dust.

Malrion ground his palm against his forehead.

“You?”

Eithra exhaled slowly through her nose.

"A century, maybe more," she said. "I've stopped counting.

She tilted her head down. Gaze softening.

Malrion sat quietly in the dark, one gauntlet resting lightly on the floor beside the shard. He hadn’t meant to speak, but the words came out like something pried loose:

"What is this thing, really?"

Eithra didn’t answer right away. Her head turned slightly—just enough for the light to catch the side of her face. Her expression didn’t shift. Didn’t reveal thought. But he could feel the temperature change between them.

Nothing hostile. Just memory kept behind teeth.

Finally, she said:

"They told us it was a tether."

“To what?”

“To each other.”

He glanced down at the shard. It sat between them like a wet tooth, glimmering faintly in pulses. More pressure than light. Like psychic breath, dragging from one consciousness to the other.

“It’s not Aeldari,” he muttered.

“No. But it was found on one of our dead moons. Deep beneath what used to be a temple-vault. Before the fall.”

He watched her. “So not a weapon.”

She hesitated.

“Not originally.”

---

Her fingers drifted toward it—not to touch, but to trace the air above it, like it was giving off a heat only she could read.

“The Farseers said it was once part of a larger construct. Something called the God-Skein—a Mnemonith Core.”

Malrion frowned. “That’s not in any Imperial lexicon.”

She tilted her head. “It wouldn’t be. The core predates most things. Maybe even us. The theory is—it wasn’t made to kill. It was made to make two souls…”

A pause. Then, with a faint breath:

“…understand each other.”

“Empathy,” he said, the word tasting strange on his tongue.

“As contagion,” she said. “Not feeling for. Feeling with. It doesn’t speak—it reveals.”

---

He looked at it now. Properly.

The shard wasn’t perfect. It was jagged along one edge, like it had been broken from something larger. Its surface wasn’t smooth—layered, ridged, almost fibrous in places, like fossilized muscle or memory calcified into crystal. The light inside it wasn’t light at all, but psychic pressure, refracting in the hollows. Sometimes it hummed—not audibly. Internally. Like it was echoing his heartbeat, or hers, or both.

“Like it’s trying to finish a sentence,” he muttered.

She blinked. Surprised by the accuracy.

“Yes,” she said. “But the rest of the sentence is missing.”

---

“Why give this to warriors?” he asked.

Eithra’s voice cooled.

“They didn’t. Not at first. It was ritual. High communion. Soul-bonding for seers, lovers, emissaries. You only used a Mnemonith if you wanted to be… known.”

“And now?”

“Now,” she said, eyes dark, “our kind have learned that knowing someone is the easiest way to destroy them.”

---

They both fell quiet.

But it wasn’t the old silence.

It was... active. The shard didn’t glow, but it pressed between them—thicker now. More felt than seen. Like it had inhaled everything they’d just said and was waiting to exhale.

Malrion’s jaw flexed once. Then again. He didn’t reach for the weapon at his side. He wasn’t even aware of the fact that he hadn’t.

Eithra swallowed. Slowly.

And didn’t look away.

“You hide it well.”

“What?”

“The ache.”

He didn’t answer.

So she shifted again—this time to face him more directly. Their knees brushed. She let hers stay there.

“You live in your body like it’s a prison,” she said.

His brow furrowed. He looked down. Then up.

“Isn’t it?”

She didn’t smile. But her voice eased, like she was stepping carefully across ice.

“It could be something else.”

---

Then—

Silence again.

But different now. Warmer.

And that was when she leaned back slightly.

Just enough to see him clearer.

Her gaze moved over his face—slower this time.

Seeing.

Letting herself see.

With intention.

He had the face of someone built to be revered or obeyed, not touched. Harsh, immovable lines. A jaw that clenched as if his teeth were the only thing keeping him from screaming. Mouth firm, colorless, slightly cracked at the corners—like it had forgotten softness. His cheekbones carried the faint dust of dried blood, dark along the edges where sweat had never quite reached.

The cut along his brow was shallow but precise. Clean through the flesh. He hadn’t noticed it. Or hadn’t cared.

His nose had been broken and healed crooked, not enough to mar—just enough to suggest a history of violence without shame.

But his eyes.

Dark. Deep-set. The kind that could’ve been flat—deadened by war, by doctrine—but weren’t. There was something there. Like a blade unsheathed but not yet raised.

Permission.

Not given easily. But given now.

She saw it and didn’t look away.

She saw the echo of him on his knees, in the dream—the part of him that didn’t know whether to bow or break.

She reached out.

Not far. Just a finger’s width.

And touched one of the dried lines of blood along his jaw. A streak left from the fight, now crusted to flake beneath her touch.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t speak.

The touch lingered.

Her fingertip had left a faint smear in the dried blood along his jaw. It wasn’t the warmth that unsettled him—it was the fact that he’d let her. No instinct to swat, no flinch, no warning.

Just… stillness.

He hadn't been still in years.

Malrion breathed through his nose, steady, slow. His hand hovered near his thigh, close to the bolter he hadn’t touched since waking. He didn’t need it. Not right now. But the absence of movement made him restless. Too aware of her proximity.

Her shoulder was still near his. Not quite touching. But the heat was there. Like shared gravity. Like a magnet waiting to click.

He glanced—briefly—out of the corner of his eye.

Eithra had gone quiet. Still again. She leaned back against the stone with the same strange grace she fought with—like her bones were made of something lighter than muscle and logic.

She wasn’t looking at him anymore.

But he could feel her awareness. She was giving him space.

Or testing him.

Either way, it worked.

---

He shouldn’t have looked.

Not really.

But the eye wandered. That was human. And despite what they’d carved into him, bled into him, buried into his spine—

Malrion was still human.

He catalogued without thinking.

Her boots: worn smooth at the sole, not decorative. Meant to move.

Her thigh: streaked with soot, blood—not hers. Her cloak was half pushed back, and the curve of her calf told him more about how she moved than her fighting ever had.

Her fingers: calloused, yes. But more along the edges, like she’d been training with instruments that required more precision than weight.

And her face—

No. He stopped there.

The memory of it from the dream had already done enough damage.

And still, he couldn’t stop hearing her voice.

Not from moments ago. Not the one that had whispered his name like prayer.

The real one.

“You live in your body like it’s a prison,” she’d said.

And that had struck deeper than daemon claws.

Because it was true. And he hated that she saw it.

---

“I meant what I said,” she murmured suddenly.

Her voice wasn’t loud. Just close.

His eyes flicked down toward her. “Which part?”

“That your body isn’t just a weapon.”

He bristled. Only slightly. But enough.

“And what would you call it, then?”

“A language,” she said, looking ahead. Not at him. “Even if you’ve only ever used it to scream.”

---

That—

That landed.

He wasn’t sure why. But it did.

He sat back further, eyes narrowing, trying to deflect the ache crawling up his spine.

“You speak like someone who’s been watching me for longer than a single battle.”

“Not watching,” she said. “Reading.”

A pause. Then, softer:

“You fight like someone who’s afraid of silence.”

---

That silence arrived right on cue.

Thick. Felt.

He should have said something. Laughed it off. Snapped. Moved away.

Instead, Malrion turned fully toward her for the first time.

And looked.

---

Her hair, the color of pale starlight—nearly translucent at the ends—was still damp with sweat. It curled near her ears in loose, uneven strands, some clinging to her neck where the collar of her tunic had torn. Her held the tension of restraint. Her lips were parted just slightly, like she'd been holding her breath too long.

Her eyes—

Black.

But there was color in them when the light hit right. Depth. Like she’d been hollowed out once and had chosen what to refill herself with.

She burned with nothing.

Carried no thirst for retribution.

What moved beneath her calm was colder—an ice that chose not to cut.

---

He didn’t realize he’d leaned closer until he felt her pulse again—faint, through the shard.

She looked at him.

Met his eyes without flinching.

Then:

“Are you afraid of me?”

The question was quiet. Not teasing. Not pointed.

Just... real.

He answered before he could think.

“No.”

And again, slower:

“No. But I think I should be.”

---

They sat in that truth.

Longer than comfort allowed.

Her voice, when it came next, was quieter.

“So what’s more frightening to you?”

He didn’t know what she meant.

She clarified.

“The dream? Or that you wanted it?”

---

He flinched at that.

Not visibly.

Just something in his chest. A flicker.

“I didn’t want to see it,” he muttered.

“But you stayed,” she said. “You let me touch you.”

“You touched me first.”

Her mouth twitched. The shape of a smile, missing its center.

“So you do remember.”

His jaw locked as he turned, heat creeping under the bone—no fury, just fire he hadn’t named yet.

---

The shard pulsed once. Gentle. Like breath against a fevered neck.

Neither of them moved.

Then—

Far off, a sound.

Not part of their stillness.

A dry drag. A click. A faint whine, like air pulled through broken vox.

Malrion’s hand was already at his bolter. The moment dissolved—not fully, but enough.

He rose slowly, armor groaning.

Eithra didn’t move yet. Her hand hovered near her belt, fingers brushing the handle of her bone-etched blade.

Their eyes met.

Again, nothing said.

But between them: understanding.

---

They weren’t done.

But something else had come looking.

So they moved.

---

They didn’t speak again for some time.

There was nothing left to say—and too much.

Malrion moved ahead now, bolter in low ready. The passage sloped downward into older bones of the Craftworld, ribbed with crumbling wraithbone supports and half-eaten conduits that hissed faintly as they passed. Eithra followed a step behind, her blade drawn, eyes never still.

It was a quiet kind of violence. The kind you carry in your lungs.

---

The dead lay thick here.

Not recent casualties—ancient ones. Shrines collapsed around fossilized soulstones, their psychic light long bled away. Carvings melted into slag by heat that didn’t come from flame. One corridor looked like it had been hollowed out by screaming.

Eithra’s pace slowed at times, her breath catching as they passed something sacred that had been split open—an altar of bone-hung runes still weeping psychic residue. She didn’t pray. But her fingers twitched like she wanted to.

Malrion didn’t ask.

He could feel the air changing.

Heaviness. Wet pressure. Like breath from a mouth too large to see.

---

They crossed a broken plaza—once a sanctum, now a crater punched through the psychic skin of the Craftworld. Gaps in the floor revealed twisted piping and strange half-organic cables, pulsating faintly.

Malrion crouched. Rubbed two fingers over a smear in the dust.

Blood.

Not human.

He stood again, slower.

“We’re not the only ones still alive.”

Eithra was already looking at the far wall.

Carved into the stone with something dull: a crude symbol. Imperial. Bastardized.

✠

The mark of the Deathwatch.

Beneath it, smears.

Footprints.

Power armor.

Multiple.

---

“They were here,” she murmured, voice flat, untouched by surprise.

Malrion’s expression didn’t change.

“Then they’re hunting.”

“Us?”

“The shard.” His hand brushed against it at his belt. “But they won’t hesitate.”

“No,” she said. “They won’t.”

---

They kept moving.

Faster now. Quieter.

Time blurred into corridors. Into lifts that didn’t function, stairs that had to be scaled with fingers bloodied by glass and splintered bone. At one point, Malrion boosted her through a crawlshaft barely wide enough to fit her slender form—his hands firm at her thighs, her fingers dragging over broken wraithbone.

Neither of them spoke about the heat that passed between them as she twisted away into the dark.

He followed after. Slower. Scraping his armor.

Breathing harder.

---

At a junction three levels deeper, they found something worse.

A corpse. Too soft for an Astartes. Too ruined for Aeldari.

Human, maybe.

If it still counted.

Half-cooked. Skin open like wet petals, mouth stretched in a silent howl. Sigils scorched into the flesh around the eyes. Warp-tainted.

Eithra crouched near the corpse with the precise tilt of a surgeon's eye.

“Cultist,” she muttered. “But…”

Her fingers brushed the jaw.

“…this was done by something else.”

Malrion stayed standing. His hand hovered near his sidearm.

“Warp predator?”

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she tilted her head slightly. Listening.

A pulse. The shard.

It beat once.

Harder than before.

Malrion hissed as it buzzed in his blood.

Eithra winced.

They both looked up.

And felt it.

Something was following them.

Not close. Not yet. But not guessing either. Hunting by feel.

---

They moved again.

Cover was a lie now. Only distance mattered. Wraithbone shrieked underfoot. Eithra’s cloak snagged on a shattered pipe. Malrion turned to help—but she was already past him, not speaking, eyes burning ahead.

There was a path opening. A tunnel choked with thorny cables and vines that shouldn’t be growing here. They slipped through it, brushing past old mycelium growths and petrified silk-rot. Malrion’s pauldron cracked a vine that bled steam.

Still, they pushed.

The light thinned.

The pressure rose.

---

Finally—

A door.

Twisted shut by collapse, but not sealed.

Eithra knelt, brushing her palm over the edge. Whispered something in a tongue that sounded like glass weeping.

The shard glowed.

The door opened.

---

Inside: silence.

Peace? No.

Safety? Less.

Only the echo of something long-dead, long-emptied.

The room had once been a memory-vault. Now it was half-collapsed. Soulstones embedded in the walls pulsed faintly with the remnants of stored lives. The air was dry. Faintly metallic.

Malrion stepped in first.

Eithra followed.

They didn’t speak.

But when the door closed behind them—sealing them in with ghosts and flickering light—they both exhaled.

A reflex, nothing more.

Survival marking itself, breath by breath.

---

Malrion moved first.

The chamber was quiet, too quiet. It had the weight of old breath in the walls—thousands of soulstones slumbering like eyes that no longer watched.

He scanned the edges for structural weakness. None. Just a long, cracked wall of psychic crystal and collapsed sigil-tapestries that twitched faintly when he passed. Behind him, Eithra trailed her fingers along one of the embedded stones. Her eyes were far away.

“They were archivists,” she said, barely audible. “Librarians of souls. They recorded every death. Every severing.”

He didn’t answer.

He was listening.

To something else.

---

There.

Beyond the vault’s door.

The softest tap. Like steel fingers brushing bone.

He turned his head slightly. Bolter already angled.

Eithra felt it too. She stilled mid-step, hand dropping from the soulstone.

One breath passed. Then another.

Then a sound.

Tap.

Tap.

Whirr.

Malrion’s blood went cold.

Grav-boots.

No civilian uses grav-boots.

And no loyalist wears them like that—staggered, slow, measured.

He turned to Eithra, voice low. “We’re not alone.”

Her blade was already in her hand.

“I heard.”

---

They moved quickly.

The vault had no second exit. But it had height.

A spiraling wall of memory-steps led upward into the half-collapsed dome. Above—fragments of broken stained crystal, barely holding against gravity.

They climbed.

Silent. Swift.

At the top, Malrion crouched behind a ruptured console. Through the cracked vault archway below, he caught the first flicker of movement.

Not Chaos.

Not Aeldari.

Astartes.

Black armor. Steel pauldron. The sigil of the Inquisition burned into the plating like a brand.

Deathwatch.

Two entered first.

One bore a heavy flamer—its muzzle already lit, dripping promethium with bored malice. The other carried a storm bolter the size of a child.

Behind them, slower:

A Librarian.

Malrion’s breath caught.

---

The psyker moved differently. Head tilted, gauntlet raised, fingers twitching like they were plucking vibrations from the walls.

He was reading something.

Following something.

No—sensing.

Malrion felt the shard at his hip pulse violently, reacting like a struck nerve. Eithra hissed, one hand pressed to her temple.

The Librarian turned his head.

Past them.

Toward the soulstones, like they’d whispered his name.

He reached out.

The vault groaned.

And one of the stones shattered.

A soul—someone's entire life—screamed into the warp like a flare.

The scream cracked through the chamber, but the sound wasn’t what hit him.

Something rushed into Malrion’s skull—raw, bright, terrible. A sensation like someone else’s memories tearing free inside his own nerves. He staggered a half-step, gauntlet tightening against the stone.

Flashes—too many, too fast.

A corridor lit in gold. A hand brushing a child’s hair. Panic, sudden and icy. A heartbeat’s worth of love that snapped off mid-thought.

Gone.

Eithra sucked in a breath beside him, sharp enough to cut. Her fingers dug into her ribs as if bracing against a blow. The soulstone dust drifted across her knees; she stared at it with an expression he’d never seen on her—hollow, stripped.

Malrion felt the shard react. A twitch against his hip, like a muscle contracting. A pull. A drag. And something faint—almost a taste—bleeding across the inside of his mouth: copper, ash, grief that wasn’t his.

Eithra whispered something under her breath. A name, maybe. Or the end of one.

He didn’t ask.

The moment passed, but slowly—like breath thawing in winter air, leaving a sting behind.

The shard hummed once, low and tired, as if it had swallowed the memory whole.

Malrion’s lips curled back in a silent snarl. Rage hadn’t arrived. It didn’t need to.

His body already knew what this was.

Desecration.

---

The shard at his belt vibrated harder.

Eithra pressed in behind him, her lips near his ear. “They’re tracking it.”

“I know.”

“They’ll breach the vault next.”

“Then we don’t give them time.”

---

He turned.

There was one exit. Barely.

Above, behind the dome, a breach in the upper structure had collapsed into a long ventilation shaft—jagged, wet with condensation, just wide enough to crawl.

They made for it.

He climbed first this time, dragging himself through blood-slick metal.

Behind him, Eithra followed.

---

Halfway up, the vault exploded.

The first sensation wasn’t heat or sound—it was a pressure inside his skull, like something screaming to be let out.

It tore through thought and memory in the same breath.

A soul detonation.

The Librarian had triggered it.

Malrion’s vision blurred. For a second, the shard screamed in his body like a second spine tearing loose.

Then Eithra’s hand closed on his ankle.

Anchoring him.

Light bled faintly from her eyes, but it wasn’t power radiating outward.

It was pressure.

A force curling inward, threatening collapse.

“Go,” she hissed. “Move.”

---

They climbed blind.

The shaft turned vertical, then angled, then dropped. At one point they had to jump—four meters down into a pile of bones and wet rags that used to be a sanctum. Malrion landed heavy. Eithra followed in a crouch.

Above—the footsteps came again.

Boots on the wall.

Climbing after them.

---

“We have to split,” Malrion said, turning toward her, voice low.

She shook her head.

“You’ll never make it alone.”

“I’m not alone.” His hand touched the shard. “They’re following this.”

Her jaw clenched.

“Then we destroy it.”

A beat.

Then—his hand closed over hers.

Not gently.

But real.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

---

Somewhere above, the ceiling caved in.

A Drop Beacon crashed through the floor.

Deathwatch had called reinforcements.

Eithra’s eyes widened. The psychic aftershock singed her senses.

Malrion looked at her. At the direction of the breach.

Then back down the corridor ahead.

“Run,” he said.

And this time—she didn’t argue.

---

The memory-vault collapsed behind them with a scream that didn’t come from stone.

It came from the souls—stripped, screaming, detonated in unison like a psychic minefield. The explosion cracked through Malrion’s skull like a hammer. His eardrums burst. His vision split.

He didn’t stop running.

Eithra’s hand gripped his pauldron. She dragged him left when the corridor forked, through a tunnel warped with melted wraithbone and fungal lace. Her boots skidded on blood-glass. Her breath was ragged.

Behind them—boots.

Whirring.

Floating.

Grav-walkers.

And now—they were tracking by memory.

The shard pulsed at his hip like a beacon, screaming his position to every bastard with a soul. And the Librarian following them had too many.

---

“Here—!” Eithra hissed, slamming her blade into a panel that barely held the wall closed. It cracked open. A service tunnel behind.

They slipped through.

The walls pressed tight.

Malrion’s armor scraped sparks. Eithra moved like shadow, but she was slowing. The warp in the air made her bleed from her nose—light, thin, but constant.

They climbed hand over hand through darkness that pulsed like a throat.

Somewhere behind them, the Librarian whispered a litany.

And every soulstone on the wall they passed shattered.

---

They dropped.

A vertical shaft gave way beneath Eithra’s boots. She fell first. Malrion followed without thought. The landing was ugly—wraithbone spikes caught on his greave, twisted metal ripping through part of his shoulder plating. Blood splashed the floor.

He grunted.

Didn’t cry out.

Eithra was already up. Already dragging him again.

---

The next passage was… wrong.

Light flickered, not from lumen-strips, but from memory. Flash-stills from the Craftworld’s dying archive: children laughing, warriors screaming, a single Aeldari face repeating again and again, lips moving soundlessly.

Eithra faltered.

Malrion caught her arm.

“Keep moving.”

She didn’t speak. Her eyes were blown.

---

Behind them, sound caught up.

Not footsteps.

Chanting.

The Librarian wasn’t just tracking them now.

He was sanctifying the ruin.

---

Another turn. Another crawlspace. They passed through a cistern that once carried soul-currents. Now it bubbled with psychic fluid that hissed against ceramite. Malrion's gauntlet corroded where it touched.

He shook it off.

“Direction,” he said. “We can’t keep running blind.”

“I know where we are,” Eithra murmured. “Or where this used to be.”

He looked at her. Her mouth was bleeding.

“How close?”

“If we get through the reactor cradle—there’s a grav-chamber beyond. No warp pull. No echo.”

He nodded once.

Then paused.

Something was… buzzing.

A hum in the walls.

She heard it too.

Then—

A flash.

A bolt of psychic fire screamed past them and exploded the corridor ahead. Wraithbone shattered. Debris rained. Eithra dove. Malrion covered her with his body.

The ceiling collapsed.

---

Blackout.

Then—

Light.

No HUD. Just fire. Rupture. Pain behind his eyes like someone had split his skull open to the air.

Malrion’s breath hitched sharp in his throat as consciousness slammed back into him. His leg was pinned—crushed. Armor twisted. Bone—maybe worse.

He coughed. Dust. Bone fragments.

Eithra was beneath him. Breathing.

He rolled off with a low, broken sound—half gasp, half snarl. The air tore at his lungs. Something cracked in his side as he moved.

She sat up. Her cloak was gone. Her right hand was burned to the bone—but she didn’t scream.

She looked at him.

“We go.”

He nodded.

They pulled each other upright.

---

They ran.

Now limping. Now smeared in ash. Malrion's wound reopened. Eithra’s blade was cracked. The shard glowed brighter than ever, pulsing with rhythm that didn’t match their hearts.

Ahead—a hatch.

Open.

The cradle.

---

They entered.

And hell followed.

---

The reactor cradle was never meant to be accessed in war. It was a sacred core—where energy met soul. Now it was… spitting ghosts.

Malrion stopped.

The floor was covered in faces.

Not real—psychic impressions. Half-lost. Screaming. Crawling up the walls like insects.

“Don’t listen,” Eithra hissed. “They’re not yours.”

He moved.

The faces whispered anyway.

“You left us.”

“Traitor.”

“The God-Emperor never knew your name.”

“You think she loves you?”

He gritted his teeth.

They pressed on.

---

Halfway across, the vault door at the far end sealed shut.

A moment later, it blew open.

The Deathwatch entered.

Four of them.

One with a plasma incinerator.

One with lightning claws wet with black ichor.

One—the Librarian—hovered without walking, haloed in screaming runes.

Malrion turned.

Eithra was behind him. She looked too small beside him now. But her eyes were wild with psyniscience.

“They’ll take us alive,” she whispered. “For dissection. For study.”

Malrion said nothing.

His bolter clicked empty.

Then he pulled a frag-charge from his belt.

No words.

Just choice.

---

He set it on the support column.

Turned to her.

“Run.”

She didn’t argue.

They ran.

---

The cradle exploded behind them.

Half the chamber came down.

But not all of it.

Through the fire and scream of twisting metal, the Librarian emerged.

Gone was the calm.

He burned now—soul and skin and silence wreathed in warpfire.

His eyes found Malrion.

Locked on.

And then he spoke—just one word:

“Bonded.”

---

They dropped through the floor.

Literally.

The force of the blast cracked an access tunnel below. Malrion went first this time, catching Eithra mid-fall. They slammed into the depths of the Craftworld.

And kept going.

---

Now—

They were crawling through blood channels.

Warp-seep filled their boots.

Something in Malrion's thigh was broken, but he didn't stop.

Eithra’s blade was gone. She’d dropped it. But she pulled a psychic shiv from her wrist—one of her soulrunes. A desperate act.

The shard between them began to hum in two tones now. As if sensing pursuit.

As if choosing sides.

---

They reached the grav-chamber.

Barely.

Collapsed just inside the iris-sealed dome, breathing like hunted animals. Malrion slumped against the wall. Eithra crawled beside him, every part of her shaking.

For a moment—

Silence.

Just breathing.

Then—

The door behind them groaned.

Something began cutting through.

No more running.

Not now.

Not yet.

Not ever.

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

Thanks for reading!! And tysm @lucidknight for convincing me to post this

(uωu*)