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choccy-zefirka · 2 months ago

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So Commorragh was a trip

@leadflowers you were so right :')

When my Rogue Trader, Astra the imaginary Abelard-kisser, asked Tervantias to heal Abelard, he sure removed *something* from her inventory; some randomly looted scrap of flesh that I did not even miss. So I decided to up the stakes.

TW limb loss. Or I guess, methodical limb removal. The first part is from Tervantias' POV and I had so much fun writing his detached, academic perspective on mon-keigh suffering. Thank you @massgrav for being a twisted torture inspiration :3

The specimen has learned the lesson by now. The great Archmachinator's time is infinitely precious, and every last second of it must be earned. Duly paid for. It is good to have finally broken the little thing into obedience... Most satisfactory.

But then, the specimen shows some temper again. It barks out that it accepts the terms before Tervantias fully finishes outlining them. That is rude. Insolent. It cannot speak unless it is spoken to — and certainly not during. He half-considers ending and restarting its life functions as punishment. But at least it sounded sufficiently anguished, so for this additional sustenance, he shall be lenient.

So begins the exchange. A reversal of the Chtonos energy drain in exchange for new, freshly harvested materials befitting his future creations.

The specimen is most eager to provide. It lays down its arm on the work table all of its own accord, and meets Tervantias' gaze with nary a blink when the shackles lock in place, securing the source of the sample above the elbow.

The specimen looks almost impatient. Again, insolent. It presumes it has the right to rush the master.

He has already prepared the tools, however — so might as well put them to use. Without the distraction of temporarily killing the specimen.

The skin needs to be detached first. With his usual flawless grace, Tervantias carves through the fleshy peel and spreads it out, pulling it taut with an array of little hooks. Like a canvas, with one side loose and one still attached to the specimen. It cries out several times, at acceptable volume, but does not try to flinch away. It would have been unable to escape regardless, not without parting with its shackled arm — but any clumsy, erratic mon-keigh flailing might have knocked the table sideways and disrupted the meticulous order in which Tervantias has laid out his saws and scalpels. His temper is not to be tested. Luckily for the specimen, it has remained well-behaved thus far.

With his back appendage, Tervantias passes himself his favorite pair of scissors. Finely sharpened, capable of fully removing a mon-keigh's face in a single circular snip. His well-practiced eye allows him to cut into the skin canvas at exactly equal intervals, without any need for a measuring tape. This creates several rectangular flaps of dermis, which Tervantias meticulously tests for durability, by drizzling a pipetteful of different, neatly color-coded acids over each.

His observations are... disappointing. The specimen's skin is pallid and thin, like that of most mon-keigh born off-world; hardly suitable for grafting into any of his beautiful sculptures of metal and flesh. He does keep a sliver of it, just in case, and turns to the wet, raw coils that have been unveiled underneath.

The muscles and tendons will prove much more useful. The specimen has yielded an abundance living clay for him to work with. And there is such a powerful pulse coursing through it at every prod and slice of his many ever-moving, ever-whirring implements.

Regrettably, the specimen's vocalizations have, by now, lost some of their melodic clarity, devolving into a bestial rasp... But even crude nourishment is nourishment still.

Tervantias burrows deep into the skinned flesh, untangling every squelching strand of tissue, scraping ligaments from bone. Everything needs to be sorted and stored away in its own gurgling jar of fluid. Everything will find its place in his masterpieces.

The specimen, which really should have developed better tolerance after so much time in the Chasm, has the audacity to slip out of consciousness. Curling the preserved side of his mouth in an irritated sneer, Tervantias motions one of his spinal attachments impatiently at an Opera attendant, who scurries along in instant obedience, driving a heavy-duty syringe of viscous yellow liquid into the nape of the specimen's neck. A shuddering bolt of adrenaline, a wheeze for air — the specimen is back to full awareness. For maximum effect when Tervantias proceeds to disassembling its bones.

Ah. A mildly curious development.

The proportions are... not quite what Tervantias has come to expect from mon-keigh. The specimen's bones are longer than the norm for its kind; dare he say, more elegant.

If one squinted, one could almost imagine that the creature was related to one of Tervantias' own people. In their most basic form, of course; unimproved-upon, not like his majestic, transcendent self is. A laughable notion, either way. Not even minds like his, which have abolished all boundaries of impossible and impermissible, would ever entertain the mere notion — the mere thought experiment — of creating half-mon-keigh spawn. This must be one of the crude genetic mutations that plague this primitive species.

At least, the resulting long, sharp bone shards will make for excellent hooks, and needles, and perhaps claws on one of the more refined battle beasts. And the phalanges... Oh, those are pristine, much as Tervantias loathes to keep complimenting a mon-keigh's anatomy. He might just keep them for personal use.

When he takes away the last of the bones, and loosens the metal ring to — oh so generously — treat the bleeding upper half of the specimen's arm, the creature looks at him with senseless, bleary eyes, where the sclera and the iris have turned the same shade of pink. Amusingly, about one third of the specimen's shortly cropped hair — normally the color of dried blood — has lost its pigmentation. This does happen to mon-keigh during various... exercises beyond their endurance limit, but surely, this was too mild compared to the previous entertainment the fallen Dracon's people got out of the thing?

Hm. Tervantias is too preoccupied by higher matters to care. He assumes the specimen will hear him when he announces that the deal is complete, and he will administer the counter-Chtonos measures now. If it is too mind-numbed to comprehend his words — its loss. He will not repeat himself.

***

Abelard does not know what is worse. The aching stiffness of his spine and the stabbing heat within his ribs, which turns the simplest motion into a gargantuan task, requiring several fumbling attempts — like he is a faulty servitor, blast it — and a few moments of wheezing rest afterwards. Or the tremor in his withered, crooked fingers as they grope uselessly for the trigger on a pistol he should have fired with ease. Or the muddy blots that mar his vision, now that his ocular implant has been violently ripped off his face, and his surviving eye burns incessantly, leaking tears like he'd been staring into a sun, unblinking, for decades straight.

Or the shame of it all.

His insides twist tighter than in the clutches of any xenos torture machine, whenever he has to fall back in a fight — he, who was once the vanguard, the first and strongest shield against danger! — or whenever his knees buckle and he has to reach, half-blind, for Lady Astra's shoulder to lean on.

"It's alright," she tells him each time, and even though he cannot bear to look at her, he can hear that thin, hesitant smile of hers in her voice. "I have you. You are safe."

She shouldn't be the one to say that. She is the Lord Captain — his Lord Captain! His to protect, to stand beside: stand firm and proud and whole, instead of... Of this disgrace.

Throne's mercy, it was his duty to burst into the damned torture chamber and cleave the xenos apart before they laid one finger on her... And instead, he let them mangle her body and flood her mind with hallucinations, while he — what did he do? He shuffled off into some trash heap, like just another crab grey beggar among the many that fight for scraps in the bowls of the xenos city. A sniveling, drooling hunchback with milky eyes. A maggot, writhing senselessly in the gutter while he thought he was in the arms of a woman.

Sometimes, she looked like Quatharina, his first love, the mother of his children... And sometimes, her face rippled, lost color, and morphed into Astra's — and he thought he could hear her tell him that she loves him, too, that she will help him remember how it once felt, that she is here to rebuild what he lost.

Like he deserves it.

Maybe these recent words of reassurance — "I have you. You are safe. I am here. I found you, and I am not letting go again" — are another fever dream. Injected into his mind by xenos, or cobbled together by his dying brain of its own accord, to make the agony more bearable.

Maybe his first instinct, when he woke up on that island of trash, legs numb and useless, blood trickling out of his ear — maybe it was right all along.

Back then, he thought, or screamed out loud, he cannot tell, he cannot remember,

"She is dead! Quatharina is dead! And Astra is dead too! I failed them both!"

Could that have been the truth?

Abelard blinks heavily. He lost track of his own surroundings again, his thoughts mixing with reality, spinning off into senile oblivion. He has to ground himself. He has to grasp on to what's actually there. He —

He feels different.

Not fully the way he was back on the ship, as the ever-reliable, not yet disgraced Seneschal. But somehow... Stronger. More aware.

The ache in his joints has subsided to... decently manageable, and his hand no longer shakes when he raises it to his eyes. He can breathe in with his full chest (which he instantly regrets, because it smells like he has been dragged into a sewer). And the floor and walls do not swim away from him, allowing him to actually make out the details of haphazardly scattered makeshift tents and bedrolls, of ragged silhouettes huddling beside choking fires, of crates and rickety ladders... They are back in the Pit, then. The tiny refuge of Humanity's dregs that the xenos have not yet designed to stomp out. Astra would leave him here to sleep — but now he is fully, keenly awake.

"He is back with us, Aett-Vater!" a thundering voice rolls underneath the Pit's grimy ceiling. "What a saga — the mighty she-wolf letting the trap's jaws snap shut around her paw, to save one of her own pack! Will the bargain pay off, I wonder?"

"I did what I had to do, Ulfar. I have no regrets."

The tight fleshy lump in Abelard's chest unfolds into a functioning heart.

"Astra!" he blurts out — and corrects himself. Like things are back to being normal.

"Lord Captain!"

"Abelard!"

She sits on some battered metal box beside him, clutching a blood-splattered cloak over her shoulders. Her eyes are so darkly bruised, her cheeks so gaunt, that she looks like a skull. A broad streak of grey slashes across her hair. His heart sinks lower and lower with each second of taking her in — his Astra, his star, his light, nigh extinguished — of realizing how harried she is by this place's horrors... But she is no hallucination. He is lucid enough now to say that in certainty. She is here. She has him — and he has her.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fit and well!" Abelard declares. To him at least, his voice sounds almost like his old self's.

"All that remains is for us to get out of his infernal place, and — "

The meaning of their new companion's words catches up to him like delayed explosion.

"What... What did the Astartes mean by... jaws of a trap?"

Astra remains silent, shifting her weight awkwardly on her metal seat... Which makes her cloak slip back. Starting, she fumbles to catch it — but the cloth eludes her fingers. It slithers off the box and pools on the ground. Fully revealing the leering emptiness beneath her other elbow.

"I am sorry!" she cries out, as if they are back in Theodora's shadow and he is about to shake his head at her, disappointed in the new heiress for not living up to Rogue Trader standards.

"I did not want to worry you! It is nothing, really! We all had our implants broken or damaged — Heinrix back there is regrowing his entire nervous system from scratch! As soon as we are back, I will requisition a new arm from Danrok! Or maybe Pasqal will have some ideas! In the meanwhile, I was going to attach a sword under my elbow, and fight like that in the Arena! It will all be — "

"Both your arms were organic," Abelard says quietly.

He should know. He had them wrapped around him on... multiple occasions.

"The Astartes said you had to save one of your own."

She draws a deep breath. Her frantic speech shatters into pained, choppy fragments.

"The... thing that drained your life force — it was made by the same xenos that tortured Idira. And Kibellah. And Heinrix. He said he knew how to reverse its effects. So I asked him to. We made a deal."

She drops her hand into her lap, her fingers twitching and her eyes slanting sideways at her stump... As if she were expecting a second set of fingers to clasp together, but found nothing there.

On impulse, Abelard nearly flings himself towards her and presses her hand between his.

"Astra... You... Sacrificed a part of yourself to that creature... For my sake!"

"Are you second-guessing your Lord Captain?" she asks, weakly imitating a threat... Even as her eyes begin to well up with tears.

There is a small metal implant at the bottom of her face — an injector box to support her weakened Voidborn immune system, though Throne knows if it's even working anymore. But Abelard imagines that underneath it, her chin is quivering.

"I would sacrifice even more to heal you. I would do anything for you. I — "

Abelard cannot let her finish. Because if there is even the slightest chance she is about to say what his hallucinations said... He is afraid he might slip into doubt again. So he does the most foolish thing a man in his station can do to a woman in hers. Out in plain sight of the Emperor's Angel, and van Calox, and Idira probably — if not in person, then most definitely spying on them through her little whispering friends.

He kisses her. Deep, uncoordinated, one scarred, wet face pressed against another.

"We are getting out of here," he repeats his past words, breathing them into her breath, each syllable hot with conviction. "We are returning to the voidship. The retinue, and whatever beggars you have decided to adopt — I know you have — and you. And me."

"Me and you," she echoes after him, burying her face in the crook of his neck and hugging him with one arm.

"Rogue Trader and Seneschal. Together."

#warhammer 40k #warhammer rogue trader #abelard werserian #abelard x rogue trader #abelard x von valancius #tervantias the archmachinator #astra von valancius #original things

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