boneapplet

[boneapplet]

A Love Born in Blood pt.22

Relationship: Angron x oc/afab!reader

Warnings: minor allusions to genocide, blood mentioned

Word Count: 1004

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22

The projection fizzles to nothing. Guilliman’s voice vanishes, leaving behind a silence almost more unbearable than his words. Angron stands motionless. The glow of data-slates flickers across the scarred ceramite of his warplate. Servo-skulls hover, waiting for orders. Legion serfs breath as quietly as possible. Only Khârn dare speak.

“He’s wrong.”

Angron doesn’t look at him.

Khârn shifts his weight, arms crosses over his chestplate. “Guilliman’s afraid. Of what you’ll do. Of what we’ll find.”

Still silence. Angron’s fists are clenched so tightly the servos in his gauntlets whined.

“Troops burned a shrine-world yesterday,” says Lotara Sarrin from behind the hololithic display. Her voice is dry, measured. “Three billion. No resistance. Just a rumor.”

Angron’s head snaps toward her.

“And? Would you coddle them too, captain?”

“I’m telling you, lord, there are no leads left on that vector. They’re dead, and they told us nothing. Not because they lied, because they knew nothing.”

His nostrils flare, The Butcher’s Nails sing in his skull. “Then I need to dig deeper.”

Khârn steps forward now, lowering his voice. “We’ve broken too much, Angron. There’s no one left to question. And if Guilliman’s sniffing around the Grey Vow, others will follow.”

“Let them.” Angron turns, his voice a growl. “Let them come. Let them try to leash me with strategy and restraint. I will not ask for what is mine.”

Khârn hesitates. “And what is yours, Angron? The child? Or the war they drag in its wake?”

For a second, Khârn thinks he’s pushed too far. But Angron only looks past him, toward the void-strewn viewport where stars bled by like distant wounds.

“They are mine,” Angron says at last. “Not because they bear my blood. Because they took them.”

The Nails pulse again, slower, steadier. His tone cools but never softens.

“Ready the drop legions. Three more systems in this arc. One of them knows. Or will.”

Khârn says nothing. Neither did Lotara.

As Angron turns and strides from the strategium, his final words echo like iron in their wake, “Guilliman can count his stars. I will burn them until one speaks.”

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

Outside the tower, the wind howls faintly against the thick paned windows, but within, all is silent. Macragge’s high strategium chamber is a cathedral of reason, vaulted, cold, and vast, lined with columns carved with the histories of compliance. Every surface is cut from precision-polished stone, veined with glacial blue. Light streams down in rigid bands from lumen-haloes above, striking the marble floor in squares so perfect they seem drafted by compasses.

At the center, a vast hololith table flickers with segmented projections of the greater Imperium Secundus. Dozens of stars pulse with slow life; others, entire swathes in the Tempestus border, glow a muted red, systems marked by recent silence, or destruction. Guilliman doesn’t move as his officers murmur around the table. He stands still, hands clasped behind his back, gaze fixes on a single dim cluster, too close to Ultramar for comfort, too recently loyal to be cast into ruin.

“Angron has razed four compliant worlds,” a commander says grimly.

Guilliman’s voice cuts across the strategium like a scalpel. “Five. We received confirmation from Teleos just hours ago.”

A tense quiet follows.

One of the senior logisticians exhales. “The speed with which he moves is, unprecedented.”

“He doesn’t move,” another officer says bitterly. “He crashes through the stars. A bloody comet.”

Guilliman finally turns, his gaze sweeping over them. “And in doing so, destroys not only enemies but evidence. Records. Witnesses. Opportunities.”

He gestures toward the hololith. Stars rotate and magnify until a quadrant of scorched systems hang in the air like cauterized wounds. “We are left with ruins and echoes.”

A junior tactician frowns. “If we may speak openly, my lord, he does not act with cause. He does not seek the child. He seeks violence.”

“No,” Guilliman says. “Angron is the storm, not the hunt.”

The officers look to one another.

“We should intercept him,” someone says cautiously. “Redirect. Appeal to the Emperor’s will—”

“To no effect,” Guilliman replies. “He will not listen. His path is fixed, and I will not throw my Legion into open confrontation with the XII. Not yet.”

“The child,” the tactician tries. “What of them?”

Guilliman’s gaze flicks toward the flickering star labeled Dacartha Minor, a planet now marked silent.

“They may already be dead,” Guilliman says flatly. “Or they may live still, hidden, hunted, passed through a dozen hands. But if they lives, they must not be found by Angron. Nor by Lorgar.”

At his gesture, the chamber shifts. A portion of the floor near the dais receds with a smooth hiss. From within steps a tall figure cloaked in deep indigo and silver, hooded, masked, and utterly silent. The emblem of Espandor gleams on the figure’s pauldron, a stylized eye half-shuttered in judgment.

“Legate-Calidus Kalthar,” Guilliman intoned. “You are now charged with Operation Mimir.”

The figure bows, voice like smoke. “Objective, my lord?”

“Trace the Word Bearers’ movements. Follow the threads Angron severs. Find the survivors of Dacartha’s collapse, if any still breathe.”

“Covert?” the Legate asks.

Guilliman nods. “Minimal presence. Maximum discretion. You will move where the Eaters of Worlds have passed, among wreckage and silence. There, the truth may still whisper.”

The Legate’s mask tilts slightly. “Should we recover the child—”

“If he is found, secure him.” Guilliman’s tone is unflinching. “If he cannot be secured… remove him from play. I will not allow him to become a pawn.”

Kalthar bows deeper, the robes whispering like knives on stone.

“Preserve what can be salvaged,” Guilliman says, more softly now. “Silence what must be silenced.”

The Legate turns and descends into the shadows once more, vanishing through the same hidden aperture. Guilliman remains standing, alone now at the center of the chamber, the stars still flickering before him. He reaches out slowly and touches the glowing emblem of Calth on the map, his eyes narrow.

“My brothers make war with axes and fire,” he murmurs. “I will make mine with silence and patience.”

[boneapplet]

Veil of Sand pt 8

Relationship: Sanguinius x blind!afab!reader

Warnings: minor reference to injuries and hunting

Word Count: 1489

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8

Working side by side near the sun-warmed rocks behind the shelter, the skinned carcass laid out between them on a broad scrap of flattened metal. Flies gather despite the wind, but she’d scattered a handful of pungent herbs nearby, and they seem to hesitate before landing.

Sanguinius has rolled up the sleeves of his patched robe, the movements of his hands slower than she knows he is used to, pain dulled by her tincture, but not gone. He follows her lead in silence, mirroring the motions she’d demonstrated earlier: one hand firm to anchor the ribs, the other drawing the blade in long, steady strokes. Not hacking. Respectful. Efficient.

“You’ve done this before,” she says, without lifting her head.

“Not exactly like this,” he replies. “But close enough.”

“Not many know how to clean meat without wasting half of it.” She pauses, feeling for the muscle lines beneath the fur with practiced fingers. “They cut angry. Fast. Like they’re punishing the thing.”

He makes a low sound in his throat, almost agreement. “Maybe they are.”

She tilts her head toward him. “You?”

“I’ve punished a lot of things,” he says, and the quiet that follows feels heavier than the wind.

She doesn’t push. Just slices clean through the last length of sinew and sets the blade aside. They work a while longer without speaking. The air smells of iron and bruised sageweed. Far off, the sound of a wind tower finally giving up its last blade makes a metallic shriek, then silence.

Finally, she says, “You favor your left side when you breathe.”

He glances at her, amused. “You can hear that?”

“I can hear the ache in your shoulder when you lie. And the way your ribs lift shallow on one side when you’re concentrating.”

He huffs, but not unkindly. “I suppose I’ll have to unlearn that.”

“Not necessarily.” She sits back on her heels, wiping her hands on a rag. “Just means you’re still healing.”

He looks down at the blood-streaked fur between them. The wind lifting his hair slightly where it has dried into pale strands. “And you? You breathe easily. Like someone who’s not expecting the next blow.”

She goes still, then smiles faintly. “Not true. I just learned not to tense for it.”

That silence again, longer this time. Not empty. The kind that grows roots between two people who’ve both known too much and say too little. When the meat is wrapped and the bones picked mostly clean, she stands and stretches. Her back pops loudly in the dry air.

He moves to help, but she raises a hand, already hefting the heavier bundle with ease. “I’ve carried worse.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he says softly.

They start back toward the shelter as the wind picks up again, catching at the loose cloth around her shoulders. She walks ahead, navigating by memory and sound. He follows without speaking, but watches her carefully, how she places her feet on the shale, how she tilts her head slightly when the wind changes, how the bundle sways evenly with each step.

Just before reaching the hatch, she speaks again. “There’s another storm coming. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it’s there.”

He looks up at the sky, now streaked with ochre and ash-red. “You can feel it?”

“I can smell it. Like the earth’s remembering something it doesn’t want to tell.”

They step inside; the door closes behind them with a soft hiss of pressure locking. She begins setting the meat to dry. He watches her hands work, still smeared faintly with blood, still sure. Something in his chest, still raw and hollowed out by too much silence and too many years, settles just slightly. It isn’t peace. Not yet, but it is real.

Upon finishing hanging up the pieces of meat to dry, she tilts her head toward the ridge behind her shelter.

“Water catchments need clearing,” she says. “Sand gums the filters. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a full tank to boil.”

He follows her without question. The climb isn’t long, but it leaves his breathing tight and his wing aching. She doesn’t comment, only slows her pace when she hears the shift in his steps. The catchment is a battered structure half-buried in the slope, disguised with dry grass and fragments of scrap metal. Rain is rare, but when it comes, it comes hard. The system she’s built is old but clever, angled panels, sand traps, bone-char filters, a line of stone markers sunk into the earth like teeth to guide runoff.

They work side by side again, the sun beating down onto them. She unscrews the first panel, feeling along its edge for warping. He crouches to lift the grating with his good arm, mindful of the strain across his chest. When he tips the basin, dark water sloshes out and drags dust and debris downhill.

“Did you build all of this?” he asks after a while, voice low.

“Most of it,” she answers. “Parts came from a ruin west of here. Some traded.”

He pauses, leaning his weight on his knee, wing half-folded like a great wounded bird.

“It’s a good system.”

She smiles faintly at the tone. Not praise exactly, but something more careful. Recognition. They clear the next tank, then the next. It takes time. As they move, she speaks about little things, what birds mean bad weather, how to tell if a pipe has cracked beneath the slope. Her words are soft, almost absent-minded, as though the act of speaking them is for the land’s sake more than his.

He listens, not just to the words, but to the rhythm of them. To the way her fingers linger on old bolts as if she’s tightened them a hundred times and expects to again. As they finish, she presses a hand to one of the sun-warmed plates. He watches her, and something quiet stirs in his chest. He doesn’t know the shape of it yet, but he doesn’t move away from it.

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

By the time they return, the sky has slipped toward bronze. Wind coils lazily around the rocks, stirring ash-colored leaves and rattling dry fronds. The scent of cleaned meat and boiling water clings to the shelter like a second skin. He helps carry what they’d salvaged, coils of grit-caked tubing, a jar of murky catchment water, a scavenged panel she claims still had some use in it.

She works at the hearth without speaking, listening to the shape of his movements. He takes a seat nearby, quiet but not distant, watching her hands as they move through practiced motions: slicing, folding, stirring. She cooks simply, herbs crack in her palms, a grind of mineral salt, meat seared dry and fast over flat stone.

When she hands him his portion, he reaches out, brushing his fingers against hers, deliberate, brief. A silent thanks. She gives a small incline of her head in return, lips quirking faintly as she resumes eating.

They eat in the hush of early nightfall. Lantern light flickers against the walls, casting long, soft shadows. He chews slowly, not from pain now, but from a kind of deliberate focus, as if taste itself has returned to him only recently. As if he is remembering how to enjoy something other than survival.

“You’ve lived here long?” he asks quietly, not looking up.

A small shrug. “Long enough.”

She sips from her tin. “Before this I lived deeper in the desert. Longer walks. Fewer voices. More stars.”

He lets the silence stretch, then says, “You mentioned a ruin. West of here.”

“I did.”

“What kind?”

“Old,” she says at last. “Older than the shelters. Older than the bones we burn for heat. Half of its gone, sunk beneath black sand and scavenger pits. But the stone still hums, sometimes. Like it remembers things.” She smiles, faintly. “You’d like it.”

He hesitates.

“Would you take me there?”

She tilts her face toward him.

“You’re not healed.”

“No,” he agrees. “But I’m not broken either.”

His voice is low, even. Not defiant, not pushing. Simply a truth.

She is quiet, weighing something unseen. Then she nods, just once.

“Not tomorrow,” she says. “But soon. We’ll pack for three days.”

He bows his head in silent assent and resumes eating. Though they say little else that night, something subtle had shifted. Not in their words, but in the way they share space. In the ease of breath, the quiet clink of tin cups, the way she doesn’t flinch when he stands to bank the fire for her.

A stillness lingers between them after the food is gone. She sits cross-legged, resting her hand against the floor, fingers gently drumming, another old rhythm, like the pulse of the desert beneath them. He sits a little closer than before, not touching, but near enough to feel the warmth of her nearness. No questions about what he remembers. Just this. The now.

[boneapplet]

From Rust and Bone pt.23

Chronicles of the Lost Primarch

Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader

Warnings: reference to past background characters death

Word Count: 1095

Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22 | pt 23

               The hold is quieter than it has any right to be. Not silent—never that, not in a place where machinery groans like distant beasts in slumber and the wind whispers through cracked bulkheads like a voice half-remembered. It is the hush of tension dispersed. Of aftermath. Of something vast just beginning to settle.

Dorn moves with slow purpose through the corridor; long strides reduced to a more measured pace. He walks as a commander would, with presence, but not yet command. His eyes take in everything: the structure, the wear, the adaptation. A soldier’s scrutiny, yes, but deeper too. The way one might study a scar.

Beside him, Kessa keeps to his left, silent. Watching not just the hold itself, but the way the air bends around him. The way every shape responds to his passing, the faint shifting of shoulders, the snap of postures straightening even among those who think themselves too tired for ceremony. She doesn’t need to understand what a primarch truly is to feel the current Dorn leaves in his wake. It isn’t reverence, not exactly. It is gravity.

Passing beneath a high gantry where cabling hangs like jungle vines, swaying faintly with filtered wind. Ahead, a converted corridor opened into a wide space, part forge, part armory. The walls are pitted with old plasma scarring, sanded down but still visible beneath the matte-gray coats of paint. Racks of weapons stand arranged with ritual precision, some clearly relics, others hammered into shape by hand. At one table, a neophyte kneels polishing the grip of a bolt pistol, lips moving in silent catechism. Another adjusted a power pack beneath the guidance of an older brother, Alcaeus, Kessa thinks to herself, from earlier. The one who watches everything with a veteran’s caution.

As Dorn enters, heads turn. Helmets come off, gauntlets tapped to chestplates in sharp, soundless salutes. Eyes, those strange, intense eyes so unlike any she has ever known, seek him out like iron filings to a lodestone. Some full of awe. Others caution. One or two unreadable, but no less alert. He offers no grand reply, just a nod. A single, measured acknowledgment of their gesture.

Kessa lets her gaze drift over the space. There are no banners here. No relic shrines adorned in incense smoke and votive candles. But there is memory. She sees it in the small things, names etched into wall plates, tally marks carved with ritual precision into the edge of a transport ramp, a tattered yellow scrap of cloth pinned above a weapon locker. A child’s drawing, maybe. A sun with too many rays.

“This place was never meant to hold,” Dorn says at last. His voice wis low. Roughened, not with doubt, but with something older. A recognition of failure too long buried.

“No,” Kessa replies, eyes on a dented arch overhead. “But it did anyway.”

He looks at her, and for a flicker of a heartbeat, something in his gaze softens. They move on. Down the next corridor, they pass what had once been a stasis bay, now an infirmary of necessity. Through the wide blast-hatch, Kessa glimpses a marine laid out on a reinforced slab, half his torso unarmored, bandages stained dark with old blood. Two others work around him, efficient in their silence. One is clearly more skilled; his hands moved with the precision of a battlefield apothecary, even if the tools he uses are scrap-born and uneven. There are no sanitized apothecarions here. No standard kits. Just will, and bond, and the ghost of training meant for a different kind of war. Dorn pauses in the doorway. His shadow falling across the threshold like a curtain.

“They should have had relief,” he says.

“They didn’t,” Kessa answers. “Yet they found a way anyway.”

“They shouldn’t have had to.”

“No,” she says. “But they’re still here.”

For a long moment he says nothing. The sound of the medics’ work fills the silence. A rasp of breath. A muted grunt. The hiss of a cauterizer. Dorn steps away, and they continue down the hall. They reach a place where a side ramp has been converted into a memorial. The walls bear no statues, but names, hundreds of them, carved in rows with powered blades and burning irons. Some full rank and honorifics. Some just first names. Some only symbols. Near the bottom, someone had scrawled in charcoal: There is no death in the shadow of the wall.

Dorn stands before it. Kessa, quiet at his shoulder, lets her eyes trace the same rows. The marks are uneven, some reverent, others raw. There had been no script here, but the kind made in grief and flame.

“I saw sons die on Terra,” Dorn says, at last. “Watched walls fall that were never meant to fall. Buried brothers beneath cataclysms that shattered stars.”

Kessa doesn’t speak.

“I thought that was the end. That what came after would be a slow decline. Rot in the guise of order.”

Turned from the wall then and looks toward the distant scaffolding where neophytes are rearming under dim lighting, where laughter, brief and real, echoes from a corner workbench.

“They survived,” he says. “And they built again. Not because of the Imperium… but in spite of it.”

She meets his eyes. “And what does that tell you?”

“That duty,” he says slowly, “may still live. Even when the dream has broken.”

A long silence follows.

“They’re waiting,” Kessa says.

He looks at her.

“For you. For what you’ll be to them now.”

“I was meant to die,” Dorn says. “Sacrificed to the storm. That was supposed to be the final act.”

“It wasn’t,” she says. “You’re here. So are they.”

“They don’t need who I was.”

“Maybe not,” she says. “Maybe they need what you could be now.”

He looks at her for a long time. Below them, through the grated floor, she can barely see movement. Marines assembling. The soft thump of ceramite boots on metal, the hushed gestures of brothers in communion. A gathering.

“They’re waiting,” she said again. “But not just for a commander.”

Dorn looks down at the gathering below, at Erastes standing in a ring of flickering lumen-flares, Jarn quietly speaking to two scouts near the edge. The survivors of a broken crusade, standing in the shadow of something older than them all.

“No,” he says at last. “They’re waiting for a father.”

With that, he turns from the memorial and begins down the stairs. The bell tolls once above them, raw, mechanical, and resonant. Calling them to him. Calling him to them.

[boneapplet]

Hearts of Ruin pt 8

Relationship: Dante x afab!reader

Warnings: Mentions of illness and injury, battlefield description

Word Count: 1251

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8

Morning comes soft and dim, pale light filtering through half-collapsed stone arches and broken glass. The sanctuary had held through the night. Its ruined bones still offering a kind of hush that neither of them broke for a long while.

The woman moves first. She stirs from where she’d been seated near the threshold, wrapping her shawl tighter as she rises. Her silhouette passing through dusted light. Dante, already awake, tracking her movement with quiet eyes. She doesn’t speak, not at first. She just looks back toward the fractured altar, the cold brazier, the scorched murals. The place where she had once knelt in silence before a war that never ends.

He stands slowly. There is stiffness in his body, but less than there had been days ago. Less pain. Less haze.

 The scarred remnants of his armor creak faintly as he crosses to where she stands, his voice low. “That place… the ruin you spoke of. You remembered.”

She doesn’t look at him, not quite. “It wasn’t always broken,” she says. “There were voices once. Light. I remember hymns.”

Dante follows her gaze across the shattered nave.

“You brought me here,” he says quietly. “Even now… you still guide the lost.”

That makes her pause. Her mouth tugs into something between a breath and a smile, fragile, worn. “Not all of them make it,” she says. “You weren’t the first I tried to save.”

There is weight behind that. A history unsaid. He doesn’t press it. Instead, he reaches out, not a warrior’s grasp, but a steadying one, two fingers brushing her wrist in acknowledgment. She exhales slowly.

Outside, wind brushes the dead grass. The sky is murky but calm, and the long path that leads out of the sanctuary lay open. They leave the sanctuary without ceremony.

The woman wraps her satchel in the folds of her cloak, slipping vials and cloth-wrapped tools into hidden pockets. Dante adjusts the salvaged plates along his arms and side, not yet whole, but armored enough to give pause to any who might challenge them on the road. His haloed helm remains hooked on his hip, not yet worn. Not here.

They walk side by side for a time without speaking. The land stretches in waves of ash-blown scrub and bleached stone, the air dry but cool. Here and there, hunched structures dot the horizon, ruins more recent than the one they’ve just left, scavenged shells with nothing left to give. Overhead, the sky shifts behind high, torn clouds. The sun is distant and watery.

Eventually, she breaks the silence. “There’s a settlement half a day east. Small. They trade medicine for fresh water or meat. You’ll have to wait outside its edge, at least until I speak to the watch.”

Dante nods. “They fear outsiders?”

She gives a dry smile. “They fear strangers who are as tall as giants.”

He says nothing, but his pace slows slightly.

After a while, she glances toward him, softened. “I’ve passed through before. If the same elder still runs the gates, he’ll remember me. We’ll manage.”

His gaze stays forward. “If it becomes a burden for you, I can remain behind.”

That stops her, she turns to fully face him.

“No.”

One word, flat and final. It surprises even her.

She adjusts her grip on the satchel strap. “We don’t leave the wounded behind. That was the oath.”

He meets her eyes then, and something in him stills. A distant shape emerges over the next rise: spiked fencing, watchtowers, the broken ribs of old vehicles turned to wall. Smoke from cookfires twists faintly into the air. The settlement.

Shifting her footing and glances at him. “If anyone asks, you’re my charge. A penitent. Took the vow of silence after the Red Plague.”

Dante tilts his head slightly.

“They’ll whisper. They’ll avert their eyes. No one wants to catch madness, even secondhand.” She shrugs. “It won’t hold up to a customs scan, but it’ll do for roadside talk.”

He nods once.

“You shouldn’t speak,” she says again, glancing up at him. “Not until I say.”

He makes a low sound of agreement. Then, after a moment, adds “Understood.”

She raises a brow but lets it pass. The wind carries grit and faint voices on the edge of hearing. The scent of smoke. Behind them, somewhere deep beneath the ruin, the sealed silence of what they had left behind.

The settlement has no name she cares to speak aloud. None that survives on signs, either, only a string of shattered tiles across the main gate, and those too faded to read. It is the kind of place that clings to the edge of use, neither fully dead nor truly alive. Trade comes through twice a month, and the locals scrape by on salvage, fungus-gut wine, and whatever water could be skimmed from cracked filtration tanks deep beneath the street.

Pulling her wrap tighter and slows her pace as they reach the outer edge. Eyes following them. Dante’s shadow stretches long behind him, unnatural in its symmetry. Despite the dust-laden coat she’d wrapped him in, he still walks like something built to conquer. He says nothing. She feels the weight of his silence behind her, an anchor and a warning both. A child runs past them barefoot, trailing ribbons of solar-fused plastic. Then a whistle from an open window, three sharp and short notes. A signal, not a greeting. They are expected now.

She turns to him slightly and murmurs, “Stay two steps behind. Don’t look at anyone too long.”

He obeys. Not out of deference, she thinks, but because he understands the cost of being noticed. The inner market is a shallow bowl ringed by once-white stone. Half the stalls are boarded up. The others lean into one another like drunkards huddling for warmth. Faded canvas, rusted steel, and the wet stink of boiled root and oil. A cluster of merchants fall quiet as they pass.

“Penitent,” she says, bowing her head slightly toward a hunched woman with eyes like burned glass. “Plague vow. I have tinctures if you need them.”

The old woman spits sideways and makes a warding sign. But she doesn’t shout, doesn’t stop them. That is enough. Moving deeper into the bowl, toward the old train terminal at its heart, now a clinic, a trade-hub, and a gossip sink all in one.

A voice calls out from above, “You’ve brought something with weight behind it, Flame.”

She stops but doesn’t turn. “You always know when I’m near.”

A figure leans from the upper gantry, a man this time, bare-armed and bald, with circuitry along the side of his jaw like vines choking brick. “Hard not to, with the way the dust curls around your steps. Come for trade or trouble?”

“Information. Then I’ll be gone.”

The man’s eyes flick to Dante, narrowing, then dismissing him with a grunt. “Keep that one leashed. I’ve seen plague-walkers tear a man’s throat out over dried fruit.”

The healer says nothing, simply continues walking on. Inside, the terminal is cooler. Lights flicker from high above, solar-fed, barely alive. The walls still bear the scars of old lettering: BAAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY.

Stopping near a rusty ticket counter. Dante comes to stand behind her, a statue in shadow. She turns, finally, to face him. Quiet. Careful.

“They’ll ask questions. I’ll answer most. But if I fall, or if I give a signal…” she hesitates, then adds, “...don’t let them take you.”

His eyes met hers, steady and unreadable. “They won’t.”

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Yautja

oc!Yautja brothers trio x scientist!afab!oc

Bloodline Unknown

pt 1 - The Fall and the Hunt

pt 2 - The Edge of Trust

pt 3 - The Threshold of The Hunt

pt 4 - Scars in the Snow

pt 5 - The Lure and the Fall

pt 6 - Below the Ice

pt 7 - Restless Watchers

pt 8 - Uncertainty in the Dark

pt 9 - The Trap and the Watcher

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Blood Angels

Dante x afab!reader

Hearts of Ruin

pt 1 - A Healer Among the Ruins

pt 2 - Between Ruin and Refuge

pt 3 - Lurking in the Past

pt 4 - The Weight We Carry

pt 5 - What Follows the Quiet

pt 6 - Two Souls in the Deep

pt 7 - Names Never Spoken

pt 8 - A Penitent’s Path

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Blood Angels

OC!Blood Angel Librarian x machine!afab!reader

Servo Sanctum

pt 1 - Awakening Beneath the Ash

pt 2 - She Who Waited, He Who Fell

pt 3 - The City Watches

pt 4 - Ash Beneath Their Feet

pt 5 - Nothing Stays Buried

pt 6 - The Voices Beneath

pt 7 - The Machines of a Lost Age

pt 8 - Pulses Beneath Stone

pt 9 - What Sleeps Below

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Salamanders

OC!Salamander x OC!Salamander

Beneath the Ash, the Flame

pt 1 - Fire Finds Iron

pt 2 - Ash Upon the Wind

pt 3 - Remembrance

pt 4 - Words of Fire and Shadow

pt 5 - Unspoken Oaths

pt 6 - Stonewalls and Whispers

pt 7 - Old Scars, New Sparks

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Magnus the Red

Magnus the Red x assassin!afab!reader

Shrouded in Silence

pt 1 - The Dimming

pt 2 - The Unspoken Game

pt 3 - Tether

pt 4 - Fault Lines

pt 5 - Echoes of the Unseen

pt 6 - Unseen by the Eye

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Jaghatai Khan

Jaghatai Khan x fem!reader

Untamed Wind

pt 1 - The Storm That Walks

pt 2 - Footsteps Through the Grass

pt 3 - The Storm's Arrival

pt 4 - Behind the Bows, Beyond the Blades

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Sanguinius

Sanguinius x blind!afab!reader

Veil of Sand

pt 1 - Under Crimson Skies

pt 2 - Echoes in Dust

pt 3 - The Stranger and the Talisman

pt 4 - Names in the Sand

pt 5 - First Steps

pt 6 - Where Silence Finds its Shape

pt 7 - Quiet Marks the Living

pt 8 - Something Like Peace

[boneapplet]

Masterlist: Angron

Angron x afab!OC

A Love Born in Blood

pt 1 - The Champion’s Prize

pt 2 - Visits in the Dark

pt 3 - Silent Defiance

pt 4 - The First Spark

pt 5 - Silent Kindling

pt 6 - Vows in Shadow(slight NSFW)

pt 7 - The Choice of Blood

pt 8 - Bound by Blood

pt 9 - Unwavering

pt 10 - The Weight of Brothers

pt 11 - Forged in Fury

pt 12 - The Red Concubine

pt 13 - Not Yours to Break

pt 14 - The Weight of a Name Unspoken

pt 15 - The Red Angel’s Resolve

pt 16 - Two Ships in the Night

pt 17 - A Mere Planet Away

pt 18 - Echoes of the Broken

pt 19 - Shadows of the Red Dawn

pt 20 - The Hunt, Unending

pt 21 - Blood and Prophecy

pt 22 - Proof Through Ruin

[boneapplet]

Masterlist Section: Rogal Dorn

Rogal Dorn x afab!OC

From Rust and Bone: Chronicles of the Lost Primarch

pt 1 - The Fallen Son

pt 2 - The Weight of Rust

pt 3 - Cracks in Steel

pt 4 -The Shape of Patience

pt 5 - The Quiet Before

pt 6 - Stormbound

pt 7 - Old Stories, New Roads

pt 8 - Echoes in the Ruins

pt 9 - Shifting Winds

pt 10 - Silent Anchors

pt 11 - Dead Man’s Mask

pt 12 - The Long Road’s End

pt 13 - A Kind of Warmth

pt 14 - Beneath a Quiet Sky

pt 15 - What We Mend

pt 16 - The Weight of Waiting

pt 17 - Days of Ash and Pressure

pt 18 - Ash and Memory

pt 19 - What Lies in the Basin

pt 20 - The Weight of Silence

pt 21 - Faith Beneath the Ash

pt 22 - Those Who Remain

pt 23 - Within Death, Life

[boneapplet]

The Midnight Madness

Characters: oc!Dark Angels, minor background mention of Lamenters

Word Count: 1237

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

Slicing through the cold void of space, the Judgment's Embrace’s massive frame cast in the light of distant stars, a sentinel of the Imperium. Its hull, scarred from countless battles and soaked in the blood of long forgotten enemies, still gleaming with the authority of the Dark Angels. Yet in the eerie silence of deep space, even the most battle-hardened warriors find themselves restless.

Captain Damarion of the 10th Company stands alone in the ship’s refectorium. He has removed his armor for the moment, something that is rare for an astartes away from their homeworld but tonight is different. His polished black boots tap lightly against the cold metal floor as he leans over the comparatively small stove, preparing something wholly unfit for a warrior of his stature. The smell of boiling water and processed cheese powder wafts through the air, an aroma that seems almost absurd amid the warship's oppressive silence.

The pot in front of him bubbles softly, its contents slowly coming together, mac and cheese, the simplest, most mundane of meals. His usually focused expression softening for a rare moment of calm as he mixes the concoction. His thoughts are far from the impending battle that looms on the horizon. For tonight, at least, there is no talk of war or strategy. There is only the trivial satisfaction of comfort food.

The door to the refectorium slides open with a soft hiss, and a familiar figure appears in the doorway. Sergeant Kallus, towering over the dimly lit room, his massive frame encased in the shining ceramite of his power armor, enters with his usual solemn demeanor. His helmet is still affixed to his head, the reflective visor hiding any hint of emotion.

“Captain?” Kallus’s voice, low and gravelly, echoes across the refectorium. “What are you doing up at—what time is it? Uh… three-thirty in the morning, making mac and cheese?”

Damarion doesn’t even glance up from his task, though a smirk tugs at the corner of his lips. “Look, Kallus, I don’t ask for much in life. But just this once, could you not question my madness for like ten minutes?”

Kallus freezes at the absurdity of the situation. He has seen his commander lead them through impossible odds, outwit entire battalions of enemies, and survive against all manners of threats. Yet here he is, standing in the refectorium of a warship, preparing something that has no place in the life of an astartes, a simple, processed food that is completely beneath their station.

Damarion stirs the pot, draining the water before adding another packet of powdered cheese, milk paste, a stick of butter, and then, with exaggerated care, gives the concoction a final stir.

“Look, we’re not fighting yet,” he mutters, more to himself than to Kallus. “The Lamenters are still on the surface holding off the xenos, but we’re not going anywhere until tomorrow. I need something to keep me from going mad before the battle.”

Kallus tilts his head slightly, he glances at the pot, a small frown creeping over his usually impassive face. “I understand the need for rest, Captain. But… food? At this hour?”

Damarion gives a sharp laugh, turning slightly to face Kallus. “We’re warriors, not machines. We all need something. Some just find it in prayer or meditation, and others, like me, find it in macaroni and cheese.” He gestures toward the stove with a mocking flourish, as if inviting Kallus to partake in the madness.

Kallus’s face remains stony, but there is a flicker of something, perhaps it is curiosity, or even understanding, in his eyes.

“If it helps you focus for tomorrow, Captain,” he says, his voice betraying the slightest hint of hesitation. “Then I suppose I’ll let it be.”

Just as Damarion is about to continue his work, the door hisses open again. This time, it is Brother Oris, his imposing figure filling the doorway. Oris is a silent one, a warrior whose presence speaks volumes without words, and whose grim demeanor makes even the bravest question their own resolve. His helmet, a custom piece of ancient design, is still affixed to his head as always, giving him an air of unreadable intensity.

“Captain,” Oris says, his voice steady as ever but with a note of disbelief. “Sergeant Kallus… you are still here? Preparing food when the Lamenters are being slaughtered on the surface? This is not the time for such indulgences.”

Damarion pauses in his stirring, his eyes narrowing as he glances over his shoulder at Oris. The silence between them stretches for a moment before he finally responds.

"You want some?" Damarion asks, holding up the pot slightly, offering the meal in what could only be called an absurd gesture.

Oris blinks, his helmet tilting slightly to one side, but it is hard to read anything through the polished lenses. “This is… not a worthy meal for an Astartes.”

Damarion’s smile widens at the sight of Oris’s disdain, a small chuckle escaping him. “Maybe not. But it’s a meal, Oris. And sometimes, a meal is all you need.”

Oris remains still, his towering figure blocking most of the light in the refectorium. His eyes flicker between Kallus and Damarion, his mind processing the absurdity of the situation. For a moment, he seems almost… human. The mask of the warrior, the relentless soldier, cracked, if only slightly.

Finally, Oris unclips his helmet, setting it down on a nearby counter. The face beneath is as stoic as ever, but there is a weariness to his eyes, a fatigue that couldn’t be masked by the hardened exterior of a Space Marine.

“Fine,” he says, his voice carrying the weight of someone who has given up trying to understand. “I’ll indulge. But know this, Captain: If I die tomorrow, the last thing I will remember is this.”

Damarion hands him a bowl of the steaming, yellowish substance, the noodles soft but not quite dignified. “At least if you die it will be with a full stomach, Oris. Better than dying hungry.”

Kallus, who has already begun eating, adds in his usual, gruff manner, “It’s not terrible. For whatever this is.”

Damarion raises his bowl slightly, the motion subtle but deliberate. “To the Judgment’s Embrace,” he says quietly, his eyes glinting with something far more serious than mockery. “And to the madness of our duty.”

Kallus and Oris exchange a brief glance. It isn’t a cheer. It is an acknowledgment of the unspoken weight they carry as sons of the Dark Angels, of the horrors they have witnessed and the ones yet to come.

“To the madness,” Kallus rumbles softly, his voice steady, lacking the enthusiasm of a man reveling in absurdity but full of the grim acceptance that they are who they are.

Oris doesn’t speak, but he nods. His expression, as always, is unreadable, but the slightest twitch of his lips suggests that perhaps, just perhaps, he understands.

In that silence, as the Judgment's Embrace drifts through the stars, the battle rages but only a moon away, but here, within the quiet confines of the refectorium, there is only the fleeting, fragile moment of respite. They aren’t celebrating madness. They are acknowledging it, a brief escape from the relentless war that defines their existence.

Tomorrow, they will fight again. Tomorrow, they will face the darkness that threatens the Imperium. But tonight, there is only this: a small, human moment amid a universe at war.

[boneapplet]

Servo Sanctum pt 9

Relationship: oc!Blood Angel x machine/afab!reader

Warnings: Minor talk of human augmentation

Word Count: 1320

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9

               At the heart of the sanctum, the sealed cradle unfurls with a hiss of air and the deep, grinding whir of ancient servos. Golden light spills from the breach, glinting off Dace’s armor and casting long shadows across the dust-streaked floor. Something moves within the cradle.

The construct stands, slowly, surely, rising with deliberate weight. It is massive, armored in segmented plates of pallid alloy, draped in remnants of a once-ceremonial cape now faded to gray. Not a war machine, precisely, there are no weapons drawn, no visible signs of rage or corruption. But it is built for endurance, for protection. Its eyes, if they can be called that, flare with a dull, internal glow. It takes a step forward. Gaius lifts his power sword in silent readiness. Halix moves to flank.

Dace raises a gauntlet to still them. “Wait.”

The construct halts, scanning them. It proceeds to turn slightly, its attention locking on the synthetic woman. She doesn’t flinch under its gaze. Her bear arms are streaked with oil and ash, her borrowed clothing torn and travel worn. A silent exchange passes between them, no words, only a beat of motion. Recognition, perhaps. Or correlation. The construct tilts its head. Not in deference. In confirmation. A faint tone hums from its core. A diagnostic ping. The woman exhales, not quite relief, something heavier, wearier.

“It knows I’m not the threat,” she says quietly.

Dace narrows his eyes, stepping closer. “But it knows what is.”

The construct’s head shifts again; a faint click in its inner gears. It steps past her slowly, ignoring the others entirely now. Toward the sealed corridor beyond, where deeper levels wait. The sanctum breathes around them. Somewhere, far off, a deeper mechanism rouses.

Gaius whispers, “How many more of these are there?”

The woman doesn’t answer. Only watches the path ahead, where the old construct walks into darkness, toward whatever still sleeps beneath. Hollow lights shimmer to life along the archways. Walls flex and shifted in places, revealing mechanical seams that haven’t seen motion in millennia.

Dace lifts his hand. “We split.”

Halix turns toward him. “Sir?”

“Signal’s gone,” Dace says. “And we’re blind in an active structure that’s waking up. We can’t afford to lose the surface or the children.”

He turns, issuing orders with calm precision.

“Verno. Gaius. You’ll fall back toward the vault. Try to reestablish vox, any internal relay, uplink, anything. If that fails, find the children. They should still be just above. Escort them up if it’s safe. If it’s not, keep them moving. If we’re sealed in, we’ll need an exit path marked.”

Verno's expression tightens, already adjusting the charge settings on his auspex. “Acknowledged. If we don’t get a signal?”

“Mark relay points. Drop coded beacons if you have to. We’ll leave a trail to follow.”

Dace looks to Halix next. “You’re with me.”

Halix nods without hesitation, powering up his helm sensors. “Tracking that construct?”

“If this place has a core or archive, it’ll lead us there,” Dace replies. “I want to know what this place was before it turns into what it might become.”

The woman has remained silent through the exchange, but now she steps forward slightly, gaze distant, expression unreadable. Her eyes remain fixed on the corridor where the construct had gone.

“I don’t think it was reacting to you,” she says quietly. “Or to anything we did.”

Dace doesn’t look at her. “No, but it responded to something.”

Gaius reaches out, briefly clasping Dace’s forearm. “We’ll get that signal.”

Dace returns the gesture. “See you on the other side.”

The squad split with practiced efficiency, Gaius and Verno vanishing back toward the vault, weapons ready, auspexes scanning. Halix moves beside Dace as they turn toward the newly revealed passage. The woman follows without a word. Behind them, the lights of the sanctum continues to flare awake, marking a path that hasn’t been walked in ages.

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

The corridor slopes upward, subtly at first, then more sharply as ancient stone gives way to smoother alloyed walls. Verno sweeps his auspex across junctions, watching for trace signals or buried relay nodes. Nothing. Just the faint, pulsing hum of the structure itself, as though the Sanctum were breathing.

“No uplink yet,” he mutters. “This place is built to deflect vox. Either that, or it’s thinking about it.”

Gaius grunts beside him, blade drawn but lowered. “Just find us a node. I don’t like losing contact with the Captain.”

“I don’t like that construct.”

“You don’t like anything without a pulse.”

They rounded a corner and stop. Just ahead, a cross-hall looms open. Broken stairs descending on one side, rising again toward the vault access above. In the center of the space stands the three children. Mar turns first, wide-eyed, a scrap of metal clutched protectively in her hands. Elric holds Pip’s shoulder, guiding the smallest behind his side.

“We told you to stay above,” Gaius says, voice even but not unkind.

“We did,” Mar replies, chin lifted. “But then the walls shook. We thought something had gone wrong.”

Verno checks the area quickly, then steps forward, lowering his weapon. “You’re not hurt?”

“No,” Elric says. “Just… the air’s different. Thicker.”

Gaius scans the ceiling. A faint glimmer traces a panel high above, thin, almost imperceptible. He raises a finger and activated his helm’s augurs.

“There,” he says. “A hardlink uplink relay. Dormant, but intact.”

Verno follows his line of sight. “Can you patch it?”

“Give me three minutes and some prayers.”

He begins the climb, scaling the edge toward the exposed panel. Verno turns toward the children.

“You three stay behind me,” he says. “This corridor’s defensible. If something comes through that vault, we hold it.”

“What about the others?” Mar asks.

Verno’s eyes don’t leave the shadows ahead. “If anyone can walk out of what’s down there, it’s Dace.”

Above, sparks crackle as Gaius forces the panel open. Plugging in, signal lights flicker, and for the first time in over ten thousand years, the relay reawakens. A low burst of static hisses from Gaius’s helm. For a heartbeat, nothing more, just garbled echoes, half-drowned in machine-warped noise. Then a voice, broken and layered with distortion, cracks through.

“--Alpha designates compromised. Repeat: breach below threshold layer. Auxiliaries unresponsive. Defensive automata offline or dormant. Emergency protocol TERTIUS-NULL active. Awaiting authorized override—”

The signal dies for a moment, then resume, no longer a warning, but a loop recording in binary-cant, so dense and fast only a machine-spirit could fully parse it. Gaius reroutes it to his suit’s systems.

“Saints...” he mutters. “This wasn’t just a sanctum. It was a lock.”

Verno’s eyes narrows. “You mean containment.”

“Or something meant to keep out the wrong hands.” Gaius drops back to the floor. “That construct didn’t just wake itself. Something tripped the sequence. Our entry, maybe. Or…”

He doesn’t finish. They both turn slightly as the stone beneath their feet gives a low, groaning shudder. A second voice enters the channel—clear, this time. Astartes vox-code. Raphen’s.

“Status update. Intermittent seismic activity traced to subterranean levels. Heat signature spike below the city core. Dace, respond. This is Captain Raphen. Are you receiving?”

Gaius patches through. “Raphen, this is Gaius. We’ve reestablished contact through an uplink near the vault’s upper shell. Dace is below, pursuing a construct, non-hostile so far. Something ancient.”

“You’re not to engage alone. Reinforcements are en route. Sitrep the children?”

“Alive and accounted for. Holding position near the relay.”

There is a pause, Raphen likely parsing that new complication.

“Acknowledged. Maintain watch and stabilize the uplink. Keep transmitting. Dace’s signal is fading again.”

Verno turns to the children. “Looks like you’re sticking with us.”

Elric nods silently. Pip tugs at Mar’s sleeve.

“What’s a Tertius-Null protocol?” Mar asks, after a moment.

Gaius’s voice is quiet. “It means something woke up that shouldn’t have. And whatever it was, this place was never meant to let it out.”

[boneapplet]

Beneath the Ash, the Flame pt 7

Relationship: OC!Salamander x OC!Salamander

Warnings: minor description of rough neophyte training

Word Count: 1176

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7

The training halls have long since emptied, their echoes dulled by the stone-blooded silence of Nocturne's fortress-monastery. From a high alcove cut into the basalt wall, two figures stand watching the glow of cooling sparring pits far below — like embers banked for the night. Kadai leans against the rail, helmet cradled beneath one arm, gaze fixed downward. Arakh’Tor stands beside him, motionless, save for the slow rise and fall of his chest. His skin bearing the marks of a long life at war. A Salamander not merely of rank, but of time.

“Maraek,” Kadai says. “He reminds me of myself. When I was too proud to raise my guard.”

Arakh’Tor’s reply comes slowly. “You were smaller.” A pause. Then, “But just as proud.”

Kadai chuckles, the sound dry and low. “You broke three of my ribs.”

“You let your anger show your flank,” Arakh’Tor replies, still watching the floor below. “I taught you better.”

“You taught me a great many things,” Kadai says, quieter now.

The silence that follows is familiar. Not awkward, not uncertain, simply space allowed for thought, the way it has always been between them. Once student and instructor, then brothers-in-arms, now… something more enduring.

“Do you miss the time before?” Kadai asks, his voice thoughtful. “When it was only war. When we were only blades.”

Arakh’Tor is silent for a moment.

“No. I miss nothing. But I carry everything.”

The older warrior finally turns to look at him. His expression, as always, is unreadable beneath the discipline of decades. But the look lingers.

“You were never ‘only’ a blade.”

That stops Kadai, just for a moment. Below, one of the neophytes called something to another, a joke, maybe, and the sound echoed thinly up the stone.

“They speak of us,” Arakh’Tor says.

Kadai smiles faintly.

“They wonder which one of us is worse.”

“They’ll learn.”

“Are you proud of them?” Kadai asks.

“They endure. They listen. They burn.” A long pause. “Yes.”

“Will you ever tell them that?”

“No.”

Kadai laughs again, a quiet, rough sound.

“Good. I’d hate to think they had it easier than I did.”

Arakh’Tor says nothing, but the corner of his mouth ticked. Almost a smile.

They stand there for a while longer, brothers beneath the mountain, watching the forge-born rise in their place.

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

Within the reliquary chamber it is still, lit only by the ember-glow of hanging forge-lanterns. Arakh’Tor stands alone, the heavy doors seal behind him, shadows drawn long by the flickering light. Before him, resting on a plinth of obsidian, lay a relic blade, simple in shape, but marked with inlays of heat-tempered bronze. The hilt bears the old glyph of Firedrake Company, faded with time. His hand rests just above it, not yet touching.

"It’s been years, old drake," he murmurs. "But I remember."

The chamber doesn’t echo. The air is too dense, soaked in old oils and incense smoke. It holds memory the way fire holds smoke, clinging. He closes his eyes. In his mind, the room bleeds away. The forge becomes the battlefield. Obsidian sands, red sky. The smell of promethium smoke and blood. And Mhazan.

Sharp of voice, with eyes always turned toward the stars even when the ground burned beneath them. He had been a battle brother, then a friend, then more. Not with words, they had never needed words. But in the way he stood back-to-back in a last stand, in the way he passed his blade to Arakh’Tor when his own was shattered. In the way, on his last day, with lungs half-collapsed and blood in his vox, he had said:

"You burn too cold. You always have. But not forever. One day, let someone else stoke the fire in you. Promise me that."

He had said it with a dying smile and Arakh’Tor had promised. He opens his eyes. The reliquary blade catches the low forge light, its metal scarred, but beautiful. His hand finally settles upon the hilt.

“He stokes it,” he says quietly, almost to himself. “In ways you would’ve laughed at. But you’d approve.”

His thumb runs along the old edge of the grip, where the ridges have worn down beneath Mhazan’s fingers.

“I gave it to him. He doesn’t know what it meant.” A pause. “But maybe… he will.”

Behind him, the lanterns sway faintly with the forge-winds. The chamber remains still, but Arakh’Tor can almost feel Mhazan’s presence in the warmth, not a ghost, not a haunting. Just memory, kept alive by fire and vow. He bows his head briefly. Then turns, the blade still resting behind him on the stone. It no longer needs to be his.

Outside, the training yards are quiet. In another hall, Kadai will be waiting, not asking questions, not demanding the past, but walking beside him all the same. For the first time in a long while, Arakh’Tor doesn’t feel alone in the flame.

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

The forge corridors are dim and hushed, the hour too late for drills, too early for rest. Kadai stands near the open archway of the cooling alcove, half-shrouded in the glow of dormant embers. He’d come seeking solitude after the long day, his armor marked with ash and sealant, the edges of his thoughts worn like whetstone-scraped metal. He hears the soft grind of armored footsteps before he sees him.

Arakh’Tor steps into view, emerging from the reliquary vault with that same steady gait, the one Kadai has come to recognize in war and silence alike. Though there is something different tonight. Not in movement, but in… pressure. In presence. Kadai tilts his head slightly, quiet.

Arakh’Tor slows as he draws near. His armor still carries the scent of sanctified oils and forge-smoke, but his shoulders, always squared, always braced, have eased. Not slackened, never that. But eased.

The silence between them holds for several long breaths. Then Kadai speaks, low and careful, as if not to disturb whatever unseen thing has passed through the old drake's heart.

“You’ve been with the flame,” he says, not as a question.

Arakh’Tor’s eyes, steady beneath his helm’s cowl, flickers toward him. He doesn’t nod, nor does he need to.

“And it burned less bitterly, this time,” Kadai says after a pause.

That brings the faintest shift to Arakh’Tor’s face, the barest crease at the edge of his scarred brow. Not a smile, but a ghost of something softer.

“The forge takes,” he says at last, voice low and gravel rich. “But it also returns.”

He doesn’t explain further. Kadai doesn’t ask. He only steps forward, not to press, not to prod, but to walk beside him as they leave the vault corridor behind. Though no words are shared after that, the quiet between them has changed. As if some old ember, long banked and smothered, has been stirred and coaxed back to life.

Kadai feels it, not in sound or sight, but in the way the air moves when Arakh’Tor exhales. As though the burden the old drake carries has grown just a little lighter. In that warmth, Kadai walks a little closer.

[boneapplet]

Shrouded in Silence pt 6

Relationship: Magnus the Red x assassin!afab!reader

Word Count: 1427

Warning: Minor allusions to chaos caused death, background character deaths

Requested Tags for All Works: @beckyninja @runin64 @ilovewolvezz

Masterlist

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6

               Within the Librarius vault, the flicker is faint. A single candle guttering in a sealed room, impossible. Ahriman’s gaze snaps upward, not toward the source, but into the pattern of runes etched into the vaulted ceiling. He doesn’t speak. His eyes move like a scholar scanning a forbidden page, lips parting just slightly. Around them, the air hums off-pitch for a breath. Then— A shudder. Low. Bone-deep. It doesn’t feel like the deck-plates shifting. It feels like something underneath them exhaling.

Vale stiffens where she stands near the ward-table, the iron-etched filigree still cooling from the last tracing. She does not look at Ahriman. Her weight shifts subtly to her back foot, a rebalancing more instinctive than conscious. The fingers of one hand slide beneath the inner fold of her coat. He doesn’t need to ask. He already knows.

“Sub-level five,” Ahriman murmurs, already moving. His voice is calm. Controlled. That in itself is alarming.

She answers without emotion. “One of the sealed vaults.”

They move. Two lines spiraling down the helix of the fortress-ship’s core, Vale disappearing into the side-path, an old maintenance stair veiled in false bulkheads. Ahriman descends the grand causeway of command, robes trailing like whispering banners. Arriving within moments of each other, Vale is already at the outer bulkhead, fingers brushing the glyph-sensor with mechanical precision. Ahriman arrives through the main hall just as the doors disengages with a reluctant shriek of pressurized locks.

               The temperature here, within vault 5, drops in a way that isn't physical. It prickles in the spine, a thrum in the blood that tells the body: wrongness dwells here. Null containment wards, copper-threaded, salt-etched, reinforced with broken blackstone, line the walls in concentric ovals. Most of the cells are dark, empty. Some are sealed with blank plates and prayers long since faded.

One is not. The containment field is open. Or worse: flickering. Shivering in place, unstable like heat mirage over glass. The fail-light, a dull red rune shaped like an inverted eye, glows above it. Inside the cell, something is still waking.

It resembles a man only by cruelty of design. Lanky limbs too long for the proportions of a human body, plated over in mismatched armor and jagged brass. Mechanisms extrude from its spine, coils and memory-chains connected to corrupted MIUs. Its head is a steel hood fused with a shattered vox-grill, whirring slowly like a predator tasting the air.

It turns. Not by sight. It feels them. More accurately, it feels her. Vale’s null-aura is a weapon here, bait and blade in one. It snarls, wires flexing as it lunges, not toward the sorcerer muttering layered chants behind her, but toward the hollow silence she emits like a toxin.

She’s already moving. Almost a blur of motion, coat snapping behind her, body low to the ground. Her presence blanks out the residual warp-resonance in the chamber, disrupting even the air’s memory of what just happened. She leaps, rebounding off a low rail to meet the construct mid-lunge.

Its claws blindly slice empty air. Her blade finds its heart. A warp-core nexus, twisted into something like flesh. The strike is clean, but not final. The thing reels backward, shrieking in static tongues, and snaps at her with an arm that reconfigures into a chained flenser blade mid-swing.

Ahriman finishes the chant. A web of sigils flares outward from his palm, each mark binding to the cell’s walls, sealing them like stitches in a wound. Copper lights flare, the room flooding with restrictive counter-fields. The creature is yanked backward, screaming in silence, its body disintegrating into ash and wire fragments within the contained zone.

               Once it’s gone, the quiet returns with unnatural swiftness. Vale lands lightly near the far wall, a shallow cut runs across her left forearm, clean, already clotting. She examines it briefly, then tucks her blade away beneath the folds of her coat, as if it had never existed. Ahriman approaches, boots slow against the black stone. His eyes flick to the still-humming containment glyphs, then to her.

“You moved before I finished reading the field failure.”

Vale meets his gaze. “You take too long to interpret the obvious.”

There’s no heat in her words, but no softness either.

“You bleed,” he observes mildly, nodding to her arm.

“It happens,” she says. “It stops.”

He studies her for a moment longer. “That construct was part daemon. They hunger for minds, and yours gives them none.”

Her expression doesn’t shift. “Then I am the perfect lure.”

“Useful,” he says again, just as before.

This time, her tone is more deliberate, “So am I.”

A breath passes. His gaze lingers, more thoughtful now than suspicious.

“We’ll review the seal logs,” Ahriman finally says. “This shouldn’t have been possible.”

“No,” she agrees, glancing once back at the still-glowing cell. “But someone made it so.”

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               The aftermath stinks of ozone and scorched copper. Warning chimes still echo dully through the corridors above, their urgency now a background drone. A minor warp incursion in the upper strata, contained, but anomalous. Whatever breached the Photep’s psychic sheath did so with surgical precision, threading the veil like a blade through parchment. It left no daemon. Only distortion trails. Two acolytes, glassy-eyed and bloodless, now entombed in stasis sarcophagi to be examined later. Vale, somehow, had been there first.

She’d arrived ahead of even the rubric marines. No premonition. No psychic broadcast. Just sudden motion, precise and silent. Her presence had pressed against the warp’s roiling edge like a blade into velvet, uncanny and absolute. The breach had folded in on itself the moment she stepped through it.

Ahriman had seen it. Felt it. No overt psychic counterforce. No warding sigils. Just... absence. The absolute negation of presence, like a vacuum in the shape of a woman. A null. Now, beneath the cyclopean gaze of Magnus himself, the silence is absolute.

The debrief chamber is hemispheric and vast. Its polished obsidian walls swallow reflections. The Eye above them, a massive, lens-studded scrying node, shifts faintly in iridescent spirals, a structure both technological and living. It sees everything. And in this moment, it sees her. Magnus does not rise from the dias. He sits cross-legged at the center, his long form draped in layered crimson and gold. He does not look at them. He doesn't need to.

"You were first to the breach," Magnus says. His voice is low thunder. Calm. Pressure, not sound.

Vale stands without stiffness, arms loose at her sides, posture exact. "Yes, my lord."

"You are not trained for counter-intrusion."

"No, my lord."

"And yet the phenomenon collapsed the moment you arrived."

She inclines her head slightly. “Residual patterning was unstable. It may have been degrading already.”

Magnus’s eyes opens. The iris is luminous gold rimmed in voidlight. "That is not what the Eye recorded."

She meets his gaze. Not with defiance. With unbroken steadiness. “Then the Eye saw more clearly than I.”

Ahriman stands to the side, silent, hands clasped at the small of his back. Watching both of them.

"You are not what you appear," Magnus says, not accusation, only certainty.

“I am what the Emperor made,” she replies evenly.

"And what did he make you for?"

She doesn’t answer. Something flickers across Magnus’s expression. Not anger. Not suspicion. A shadow of weariness. Of recognition. His eye narrows.

“When you entered the vault, the Eye’s vision ended. You did not simply quiet the breach. You blinded me.”

She neither confirms nor denies. The chamber hums with barely contained pressure.

"Continue your duties. And your reports," Magnus says at last. His gaze lingers on her for half a beat longer than necessary. “Together.”

The dismissal needs no tone. They exit in silence, walking side by side down the vault corridor until the psychic saturation begins to thin. Only then does Ahriman glance toward her.

“You did not hesitate,” he says.

“No.”

“You knew what it was.”

“Yes.”

He studies her for a moment. His voice, when it comes, is quiet. “You obscured yourself from him. That, in itself, is a kind of shield.”

Vale stops walking. “Is that your interpretation? That I protected him?”

“I make no claim of motive,” Ahriman replies. “Only observation. Whatever else you are, you chose not to let him see.”

Her mouth tilts, almost a smile, but not quite. “And that makes me dangerous.”

“To whom, I wonder,” he says.

She doesn’t respond. Just walks on. At the junction ahead, their paths diverge. She pauses briefly. Not quite turning. Just a flicker of acknowledgment. A rare and deliberate moment of shared understanding.