[SPEAKER_00]: There are those who, upon first hearing the name, there are seconders, will search their memory and find nothing there.
[SPEAKER_00]: No legend attached to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No great deed recorded in its honor.
[SPEAKER_00]: No reason why a world so plainly made for the extraction of mediocre or should trouble the attention of anyone beyond the administrators, who's duty it was to log its quarterly yields.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the kind of world that galaxy contains in greater abundance and has always contained, quiet, gray and unremarked upon.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sort of place where ordinary people live, ordinary lives in the shadow of large machinery and long shifts of manual labor.
[SPEAKER_00]: and yet it was here, on a morning when the sky hung low and permanent, over a plateau of grey rock and sprawling green moss.
[SPEAKER_00]: The demands stood very still at the mouth of a descending mine shaft, and completed in the silence of his own mind, a calculation that had taken 43 years to reach its final steps.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not to look at a remarkable figure.
[SPEAKER_00]: His robes were dark and travel worn at the hem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The garments of someone who had spent a great deal of time, moving through the world, without wishing to be noticed in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they had done their work well enough across the years that he had learned to trust them.
[SPEAKER_00]: At his hip, he carried a single blade, plain and ornamented, the kind of thing that draws no particular attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though any eye-trained in the matter might have paused at the sharpness of its edge and the quality of the metal, and found reason to look a little longer than was comfortable.
[SPEAKER_00]: His left eye caught the grey light, and held it differently than his right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dull silver of an automatic, the one concession he had permitted himself, when he had set aside all the other things that had once been his, and taken up instead the black robes in the long road.
[SPEAKER_00]: From below, through the vents where the deep earth breathed slow and ancient warmth
[SPEAKER_00]: came the smell of Prometheum residue and stone so old that the naming of it fell somewhat short of the thing itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: somewhere out on the plateau, one of the great drilling rigs shifted in the wind, with the low and hollow groan of machinery that has been left to its own company for longer than was intended.
[SPEAKER_00]: A sound that had something solitary about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no voices, there were no footsteps on the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The workers of Verath's Acondus had stopped coming to this part of the plateau some weeks ago, and the silence they had left behind,
[SPEAKER_00]: had settled into the place and made itself at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way silences do when they are not expected to leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had known for some weeks now what waited below.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent his time on the surface confirming it carefully and without haste because haste is the companion of uncertainty and he had not felt uncertain about this in a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had watched and mapped and understood, and when all of that was done, he had given the remaining days to the slow and necessary work of making peace with the process he would follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not with the outcome which had never been in question, but with the shape of what 43 years of a single unspoken purpose looks like when it finally arrives at the place where it must be resolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took the first step down into the shaft, and the darkness closed around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind him, the grey green world continued in its quiet indifference, the low sky, the still rigs, the slow, warm breath of the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if any of it marked his passing, it gave no sign.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a peculiar thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: the way that knowledge sometimes arrives.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are moments in a long life, and Oritha's vile had lived long enough to have collected a great many such moments.
[SPEAKER_00]: When a piece of information comes to rest in the mind with acquired, almost domestic finality, it was not a blow, not a revelation, simply a thing becoming known, and the world rearranging itself, very slightly and very permanently,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was on a forge world, gray and industrial and smelling of hot metal, that the archivist found him, or rather that word reached him, through the careful network of acquaintances.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent the better part of two decades cultivating in the quieter corners of the Imperium, to help support him in his work, protecting the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_00]: The man was a mechanicist archivist of some seniority.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was also dying, which meant that his communication held a clarity and a directness, that he might not have managed in better health.
[SPEAKER_00]: The information he passed along was just a fragment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the residue of a document that had once been more complete, before someone with considerable access had gone through the shadow-keepers pre-heracy prisoner documentation, and removed
[SPEAKER_00]: What was left on the record was a prisoner custody number, a cell designation in the deep sub-levels of the Imperial Palace, where the shadow keepers had kept their most significant prisoners, and a single notation, added at some point in the long and chaotic wake of the siege of terror.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Notations said, Prisoner transferred, Unconfirmed, two words and a caveat.
[SPEAKER_00]: the kind of entry that in the normal run of archival work would be noted and passed over and eventually forgotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: Filed in the great institutional memory of the Imperium, alongside the 10,000 other loose ends that the heresy had left untied.
[SPEAKER_00]: Orrethas read it, and then he read it again, and then he sat with it for a moment, reminding himself that the first response to information is rarely the most useful one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed reference the custody number against his own memory, which was by any standard that might reasonably be applied to such things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Considerably more reliable than most archival systems and rather less easily corrupted.
[SPEAKER_00]: He found the match almost at once, the name that surfaced from those deep and well-ordered mental records, one that he had not thought about in a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas, a world eater, taken alive during a void boarding action in the approach to the Prospero system, in the years before the heresy had declared itself openly, and the galaxy had begun its long process of tearing itself apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been captured alive, which, for a warrior of his kind, was remarkable enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he had been somewhere, had seen something, that imperial intelligence had decided was worth extracting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether they had ever succeeded in extracting it, the records did not say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether records had ever told them anything at all, the records did not say.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the records said in the end was only that he had been there.
[SPEAKER_00]: in that cell, in those sub-levels, and that at some point in the chaos, and the darkness, and the desperate grinding enormity of the siege of terror, the notation unconfirmed had been added, and no further entry had ever followed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Reethers set the information down, and then he sat with it for three days.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, too, was something he had learned across the long years, that the mind requires time to do its best work, and that the instinct toward immediate action, however understandable, is rarely an instinct worth obeying, without first allowing the slower, more considered parts of once thinking, to have their say.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he sat, and he thought, and he let the memory
[SPEAKER_00]: But simply allowing it to unfold with the quiet fidelity of a mind reviewing what it had recorded.
[SPEAKER_00]: In much the same way that a tailor or craftsman might unroll a length of cloth in good light to examine its weave and pattern.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been a blade champion of the shadow keepers in those days.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the finest, though he would not have described himself in those terms, he just did what was asked of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the traitor tied had breached the outer walls of the palace and begun its terrible press toward the inner sanctums and the dungeon levels beneath them,
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been part of the force assigned to hold the undercroft passages, low-sealing corridors of ancient stone, where the advantages of reach and formation, counted for considerably less than the advantages of speed and precision.
[SPEAKER_00]: He remembers the sounds of that time more clearly than the shapes, which is perhaps to be expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone of the undercroft had a quality that conducted vibration, so that the impacts in the cries and the pitch of a world eaters war cry were present as something felt in the chest.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had fought in the passages where the light was porous, and he had done what he had been made and shaped and refined across centuries to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not known in those hours, which cells had been breached, he had been fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the one true thing that can be said about the siege of terror, in the end, that it was everywhere at once, pressing in from every direction, demanding everything of everyone in its simultaneously.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that the person who was fighting in one corridor could know nothing of what was happening 30 meters away, except that it was, in all likelihood, equally desperate and equally immediate.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows now, reconstructing it from what the archivist fragment contains, working backward through the timeline.
[SPEAKER_00]: That the seals, on Vrakis' cell, had failed during a period when he himself had been engaged in the corridor that ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: By his calculation, approximately 30 meters from the relevant sub-level.
[SPEAKER_00]: He calculates the probability that he had walked past that corridor, past the open cell, past whatever had escaped from it, in the course of the fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The probability is uncomfortably high.
[SPEAKER_00]: He examines his response to this, he notes with honesty that he has always tried to bring to such moments that he does not feel guilt.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does not believe that guilt is the correct response.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was fulfilling his duty in the manner and the place that his duty required of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cell failed.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are two events, connected in time but separate in responsibility, and to treat them as a single thing with a single cause would be to reason sloppily about a matter that deserves to be reasoned about clearly.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he had decided his course of action, there was no ceremony.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does not stand and declare himself or make any formal commitment to the path that is now assembling itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He simply understands that this world eater is his next target and it will be attended to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has the blade, he has the silver eye, which perceives the world with a thoroughness that goes considerably beyond what ordinary sight can manage, and which had seemed, when he first permitted its fitting, like a reasonable exchange for what he had given up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has the network of quiet and careful acquaintances that he has spent years gathering in the shadows of the Imperium's vast bureaucratic life.
[SPEAKER_00]: people who move information through channels that the louder institutions are not always watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are tools enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a particular freedom he has found in being no longer what he once was.
[SPEAKER_00]: A freedom that he had not anticipated when he had laid down his or a might plate and his pricidium spear in the hall of armaments and accepted the black robes in their place.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent 3,000 years as one of the 10,000, which is to say as one of the most singular and immediately recognizable kinds of being in the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_00]: A creature whose mere passage through a public corridor was enough to draw every eye, and empty every easy conversation in the vicinity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not from dislike, but from the simple overwhelming fact of what he represented.
[SPEAKER_00]: There had been a weight to that over the long years, not an unpleasant weight, but a weight nonetheless.
[SPEAKER_00]: The accumulated gravity of being perpetually and unmistakably seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now he is a rogue figure of indeterminate age on a forge world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most people around him look past him with the comfortable intention that people extend to those who appear to have nothing particular, to offer or to threaten.
[SPEAKER_00]: those that do look, look because of his unusual height.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moves through the world like water through stone, present and leaving very little trace of the passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: He finds to his mild and
[SPEAKER_00]: As Orythus came to think of it, across the years of its unfolding, was not a thing that resembled the hunts of legend, not the swift and purposeful pursuit of a known quarry across known ground, with a clear beginning and a foreseeable end.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was slower and stranger and considerably lonely than that, more akin to the work of someone attempting to read a book from which a great many pages have been torn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reconstructing the narrative, not from what is present, but from the shape of what is absent.
[SPEAKER_00]: what O'Rithus understood in the early years was this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rackas was not what he had once been.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world eaters of the great crusade had been terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Overwhelming, indiscriminate, possessed of a fury so total that it left no room for anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: what had escaped from 10,000 years of captivity and corruption and the slow transactional sustenance of a dark gods' attention was something different in character, if not in fundamental nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: The body that Orrithas was following bore, he would come to understand the accumulated damage of an almost incomprehensible span of existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Old wounds healed improperly, augmentics incorporated into the flesh and overgrown by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A physical body that had been broken and reconstituted so many times that the boundary between the original thing and
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not lead war bands, he did not see glory, or conquest, or any of the grand purposes that his legion had once pursued.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was in the simplest and most honest assessment, too old and too damaged for any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he settled.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fracca's moved through the quiet imagines of the Imperium, the agricultural stations, and mining outposts, and penal colonies, and abandoned facilities that existed in the spaces between the places that anyone important was watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where he settled, the dying began.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a while it was slow enough, and dispersed enough that no administrative system took
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave the blood god what he had to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mathematical, dedicated and hurried slaughter, offered up with the regularity of a craftsman.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Blood God, in return, kept him breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, as arrangements go, one of the older and more honest kinds.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first site or Reethers visited was an agricultural moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: A modest and unassuming place whose principal business was the cultivation of grain for the processing stations of a larger world nearby.
[SPEAKER_00]: and whose records revealed a pattern of disappearances that had been noted, queried, attributed to various mundane causes, and ultimately filed in the category of things that were not important enough to deal with.
[SPEAKER_00]: He arrived a year and a half after Vrakas had moved on, which meant that the immediate evidence was gone, and the survivors had had time to begin the long, and not always successful work, of constructing a life around what they had experienced.
[SPEAKER_00]: He interviewed them with care, in the quiet and unhurried manner that produced more useful information than any alternative approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had learned patience in this, as in most things, learned that the people who have survived something terrible need time to locate the memory of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A handful of workers had sheltered in the irrigation tunnels, during what they described as the final weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: He listened to each of them in turn, without expression, and he noted what they said,
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them, a woman who had been a shift supervisor before the thing that had happened, described seeing a shape moving through the grain fields in the darkness at a scale impossible to mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: Impossibly large, she said.
[SPEAKER_00]: That last word he noted, she used without being prompted toward it, and it was the word that stayed with him longest.
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked how long the dying had continued before anyone understood what was happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: She said nearly six months had passed before the disappearances were understood to be connected rather than incidental.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thanked her and left.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second site, a water processing station on the outer edge of a minor system, staffed by rotating crews of technicians, whose social connections to one another, were largely professional, and therefore easily severed without anyone raising an immediate alarm.
[SPEAKER_00]: This place brought him three months closer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close enough that the bodies were still present, which was useful, and that the altars had not yet been exposed to the full passage of time, which was more useful still.
[SPEAKER_00]: He examined these things and learned to read the iconography of them over that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he found was that the works had grown considerably more elaborate since what he would later identify as the first site.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a consistency developing, a recurring set of symbols and proportions and spatial relationships that was not a frenzied improvisation of pure religious mania.
[SPEAKER_00]: but of something being refined across time, something being worked toward.
[SPEAKER_00]: He recorded what he could through the silver eye and considered it for a long time on the transit between that world and the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: The third site was an abandoned naval resupply depot at the edge of a system that had seen better days, and here he came within eleven days of finding Vrakas himself, close enough that the trail was still warm.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was among the ruins of what had been a functioning community before Vrakas had found it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A survivor of a different kind than those he had spoken with before, a young man, barely conscious, who had been a dock worker in his previous life, and who had, in the weeks or months before or Ethan survived, been something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, by his own account, and by the evidence of the markings he carried, been a devoted follower, which is a thing that Arithas had learned to regard not with contempt, but careful attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the motivated follower is a more revealing kind of witness than the simple survivor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He interviewed the young man with patience and without cruelty, and he listened to what was said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man spoke of rackers in theological terms, almost as if he believed him to be a preacher or priest of some twisted belief system that promised salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called him the kept one, which was the name that those around him had settled on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he described the central article of the theology of Raqus had offered them, that the blood God preserves those who are not yet finished with their purpose, that the ones who are kept alive across the impossible span of years are kept so, because there remains something that only they can complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: Orithas listened to this, and then he asked what Vrakas's purpose was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The young man said he did not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said Vrakas had never told them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had seemed the young man said after a pause in which he searched for the right word to be working it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Orithas thanked him and killed him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the young man's willingness to answer questions, he had fallen into chaos and
[SPEAKER_00]: Orythas noted on his travels between planets and the quiet corners of forge worlds and void stations, where his network of careful informants passed their information along, that people were frightened of very particular things, specific, imaginable, proximate things, and correspondingly calm about dangers of a scale, and nature that should concern them considerably more.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no judgment to offer about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, he had concluded, simply the shape that mortal cognition takes, when it is confronted with a universe too large and too dangerous to be held in mind, all at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the response was as understandable as it was universal.
[SPEAKER_00]: on a transit vessel moving between the second and third sites, a mid-range passenger carrier of no particular distinction, carrying the usual mixture of functionaries and traders and families relocating themselves across the indifferent distances of the imperium.
[SPEAKER_00]: A child of perhaps seven or eight years found her way to the cargo section where he had taken a corner seat and sat in stillness that had become for him simply his natural state.
[SPEAKER_00]: She looked at him for a moment with a direct and undefended curiosity of a child and then she asked him if he was a monk.
[SPEAKER_00]: He considered the question and said something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: she asked what he prayed for.
[SPEAKER_00]: He told her honestly that he did not pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: She accepted this without any apparent difficulty, in the childlike way many young people accept what is said by adults.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a moment, she went back to whatever she had been doing before, leaving him alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought about the exchange for longer than he expected to, longer certainly than the interaction seemed to warrant, and he could not, in the end, determine precisely why it stayed
[SPEAKER_00]: The intelligence that finally led him to verith seconders came from a former administrative clerk, who had over a long career of modest official employment, developed a secondary vocation in the rooting of information through channels that the louder and more formally constituted intelligence organs of the Imperium preferred not to acknowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was thorough and reliable, and when her reporter arrived through their secret channels
[SPEAKER_00]: or Reeth has read it twice and understood that the long hunt was nearing its end.
[SPEAKER_00]: unusual fatalities at a mining facility on a green gray world of no particular significance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Access to the deep shaft levels restricted by an authority that the facility's own records could not account for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maintenance drones returning from the lower levels with residue on their chassis that the facility's technicians had locked, correctly but without full understanding,
[SPEAKER_00]: He booked passage on a bulk or carrier, the kind of vessel that moves through the quiet as shipping lanes of the Imperium, at a pace that prioritizes economy over speed, which suited him well enough, as he had never been in the kind of hurry that required a fast to ship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he spent the 19 days of the crossing in the cargo hold in the dark, reviewing everything he knew about world eaters, which was a considerable amount drawn from sources both official and otherwise, and supplemented by the irreplaceable knowledge of a man who had fought them in the undercroft of the imperial palace, when the fate of everything hung in the balance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He arrived on various secunders, three weeks before the morning, on which he now stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: 100 meters below the surface, descending into the dark with the past, still moving through his memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent those three weeks doing what he always did on these hands, watching and confirming and mapping, building the picture to the point of completeness before taking the step that closed the distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Raka's yet concluded had been on this world long enough to settle properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: to establish the routines and patterns of behavior that met the arrangement with his guard.
[SPEAKER_00]: The slow and patient rhythm of what he offered and what he received in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would not flee.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, as far as or ethos could determine, no remaining instinct for flight, if he had ever possessed one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reflection had brought him this far, and now 100 metres down, with the stone close on either side, and the darkness thickening steadily below, it paused.
[SPEAKER_00]: He continued downward.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first 200 meters of the descent were, in their way, the strangest part of all, not because they contained anything terrible, but because they contained nothing terrible at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the absence threatened to loll him into a force sense of security.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was simply a mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tools rested where they had been set down by hands that had intended to pick them up again.
[SPEAKER_00]: a wrench laid across the teeth of a dormant drill mechanism, a safety harness hanging from its bracket like someone had every intention of coming back soon to collect it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The drilling apparatus was cold and still, it's enormous machinery settled in place.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wars were lined with the practical, unpretty architecture of industrial necessity, and the light fittings, where they had not failed, offered a thin and yellowish illumination that was better than nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in all its particulars, simply the place that ordinary people had come to do ordinary work.
[SPEAKER_00]: He read the dust as he walked.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a great deal that dust will tell a patient reader where feet have been and in what number and with what purpose, where they have not been and for how long what has moved through a space and what has not.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dust of the upper shaft had been undisturbed for some weeks across most of its surface, settling in after the air stopped moving, and people stopped walking through to displace it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But running through it, down the centre of the corridor, with the evenly spaced footprints of something very large.
[SPEAKER_00]: At 300 meters, he found the first body, a man who had by the laminated identification card still clipped to the breast of his jacket, been a shift-forman, and who had died quickly and violently.
[SPEAKER_00]: Orythas examined this for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rackers had been maintaining something here in the upper levels, managing the boundary between the place that was his and the planet above.
[SPEAKER_00]: He continued down.
[SPEAKER_00]: At 400 meters, the corridor widened slightly at a junction where two secondary passages met the main shaft, and it was here the three figures were waiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The waiting is perhaps too active a word for what they were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: These men were standing as if they had been told to hold the position.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been minors once, which was evident in the quality of their hands, and in the practical heavy duty clothing they still wore.
[SPEAKER_00]: though the clothing was marked now with symbols that had not been put there by any mining company.
[SPEAKER_00]: The symbols had been scored into the fabric and he noted into the skin beneath it in places, with something sharp and without any apparent concern for the discomfort of the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not expecting him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were as far as orreethers could determine, not expecting anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved the moment they noticed him, a clean movement that combined both footwork and the drawing of his blade, and then they were on the ground, and he cleaned the weapon on the nearest jacket, and sheathed it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of it had taken a brief moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood for a moment and listened before moving on.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the three had been young, 17 perhaps, or close to it, and had the hands of someone who had spent a meaningful portion of his short life doing physical work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The calluses across the palm, and the weathering of the knuckles that mine work produces in those who do it long enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: On his collarbone, visible above the collar of his jacket, was a scar that had not yet finished healing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still pink at the edges still recent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of mark that someone makes deliberately on another person to indicate a change in status or allegiance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had found this boy, or the boy had found something, and the mark had been put on him
[SPEAKER_00]: The authors began below 500 meters, and they told a story that he read with the slow and genuine interest in an attempt to understand in more detail what he was dealing with.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first ones were improvised, rough arrangements of stone and salvage material that had the feel of early experiments, of a practice, not yet certain of its own form.
[SPEAKER_00]: Further still, and there was something that he found himself reluctant to call anything other than architectural.
[SPEAKER_00]: Structures that had required planning and effort, and the kind of sustained attention that is, whatever else one wishes to say about it, a form of devotion.
[SPEAKER_00]: He examined them as he passed, not hurrying, giving each a consideration.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was looking at a theology, a coherent set of beliefs and practices, and visual languages that had been built, layer by layer, in a place where no one but its builder would ever see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which was, he found himself thinking, the detail that lodged most firmly and most uncomfortably in the mind, as he walked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who was this far?
[SPEAKER_00]: The question was not rhetorical, and he did not treat it as one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned it over in his mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The authors were here, in the deep dark of a mind shaft on a world of no note, in a place where no congregation would ever gather, and no observer would ever pass through to be impressed or moved or converted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas had built them, it seemed for himself, or for corn, which might be the same thing, or might be meaningfully different, and he was not certain which, or simply for the act of building, for the having of a practice, in a life that had, in all other respects, the come a thing of function.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second group of people were seven in total, and they had arranged themselves with more care than the first.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been sitting around in a side passage, where the junction created a natural concealment, lounging and socializing, in a spot that had clearly been chosen as a place to guard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether they had heard him coming, or had simply been placed there against the general possibility of intrusion, he could not tell, and it did not greatly matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: The corridor here was narrow in the way of secondary mine passages everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did enough for two people to pass, but no more?
[SPEAKER_00]: And this meant that the work required sequencing, rather than the raw application of force, the blade moving through the small, practiced arcs of confined spaces.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took a little longer than the first encounter.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is not to say that it took very long.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them toward the end managed the beginning of a prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first syllable of something that his lips had begun to form before the opportunity for its completion was removed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not find this pityable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He found it as he found most things informative.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had known what he was, or had known enough about what he represented, and they had prayed anyway, had reached in the final instant, for the comfort of the practice they had built their recent lives around.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood among the dead, looking at them, and seeing the same markings, and the same Haggard look.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were undoubtedly the servants of chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had found Rackers, or Rackers had found them, and they had followed something into the deep dark of a mine shaft, and they had stayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent 40 years reconstructing the wake of devastation that Rackers left behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking of it as damage, as something done to people who had not chosen it, and could not have anticipated it, and this was true as far as it went.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it did not account for this, the willing few who chose to turn from the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_00]: He filed the thought and moved on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Deeper still, the corridor narrowed further as the shaft approached the geological void that the drilling had eventually opened below.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was here, at what the facility's own schematics had identified as the final transition point before the lower chamber.
[SPEAKER_00]: That he found the third group and understood it once that someone among them had known what they were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 12 of them, tactically positioned across the narrowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mining equipment they carried had been adapted with the kind of ingenuity that military necessity tends to produce in people who have the aptitude for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Autogun.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was one positioned at the rear with a clear line through the bottleneck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was the piece that concerned him most, not because he was unable to address it, but because its placement demonstrated that whoever had arranged this had understood the problem they were solving.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not Vrakas's work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas, as far as Arithas had been able to determine, had long since moved beyond the management of tactical details.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the work of someone who had, before whatever had brought them here, had taken home, possessed a genuinely capable mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not take the bottleneck.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a maintenance hallway running parallel to the main passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had noted it on the schematics, had measured it against his own size, and had concluded that it was sufficient.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved through it carefully, making sure not to make any noise that would give himself away.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came through the cross-base above and behind the arranged position.
[SPEAKER_00]: The autogun never fired.
[SPEAKER_00]: He dropped behind the autogunner, and, in one smooth movement, drew his blade in a broad arc that cut through the bone and sinew of the neck.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next 30 seconds were a wash of flowing movement, the flickering of robes and the desperate swinging of mining equipment as the remaining force made an attempt to fight back as this rath flowed through them dressed in black.
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had arranged the bottleneck was the last, and when orethers reached him, there was a moment in which he looked at the man's face and saw behind the devotion that had brought him here, and the corruption that had shaped him since, something that had not entirely gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something that was still in there, looking out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, it was not enough, and the man fell to join the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in the cleared space for a time, in the warm orange light that was coming up from the fire below, and painting the rock warms in colours that would have been beautiful in any other circumstance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by his calculation, 50 meters from the cavern entrance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could hear, or perhaps feel, through the stone, the quality of an enclosed space of enormous size.
[SPEAKER_00]: the way vast chambers have an acoustic weight to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A resonance that differs from smaller spaces, the way a cathedral differs from a room.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been thinking of Raka's, across all of the 40 years, as the thing that needed ending, as the source, as the pointed which the damage originated, and from which it flowed outward into the communities it found, and the people it consumed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was true, as far as it went.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the damage required materials and the materials, the boy, the dock worker who had called frackers the kept one, the materials had come forward willingly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sheathed the blade and went on.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shaft opened and the world below it opened with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: An enormous geological void, 300 metres across, and deep enough that the drilling had stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: The workers apparently judging that there was nothing more worth pursuing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had left the space to the dark, and the silence, and now to the fire that burned at its centre, that seemed to be fueled by some subterranean gases or oil.
[SPEAKER_00]: The altar complex that surrounded it was the most elaborate he had yet seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: clearly marked and created for the blood God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood at the threshold and felt, or registered, or noted the quality of the silence below him change.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the silence of something aware of him, something that had known, before he had taken the final step that brought him to the edge, that he was coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: He drew the blade.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had carried one question through 40 years of this hunt, and standing here at the threshold of what would end them, he found that he still did not know the answer to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does a thing like this want after 10,000 years?
[SPEAKER_00]: What after all of that does it still need to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire burned below, and offered no reply.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he went down to find one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was seated at the centre of the cabin, and he had been waiting for some time.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the first thing or breath of saw, descending the final slope into the vast geological dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that Vrakas was present, which he had known before he crossed the threshold, but that Vrakas had known he was coming, and had chosen with deliberation to remain exactly where he was.
[SPEAKER_00]: To sit in the middle of everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those long descending altars had been building toward, and to wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: The floor of the cabin was one of the most extraordinary things or ethers had ever seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The geometry of it was vast and intricate and entirely coherent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks of labour he estimated, inscribed in the blood of the people who had worked this mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every line and symbol placed with long, considered care.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the finished work of everything the earlier authors had been working toward.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final expression of an offering to gods that humanity had been at war with for thousands of years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at its center, Raka's.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not what the history is remembered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Legion Warrior of the Great Crusade, Lean, Purposeful, a terrible thing engineered for killing, had become something else, something vast, layered over with the physical record of an existence that had endured far beyond any reasonable span.
[SPEAKER_00]: Old wounds had healed in odd ways, producing a silhouette that was less the shape of a warrior, and more the shape of a landscape that had been changed many times.
[SPEAKER_00]: Organetics that had been grafted on at some point in the long centuries had been incorporated in overgrown.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boundary between machine and flesh, having long since dissolved into something that was neither.
[SPEAKER_00]: The armor he wore was now a second skeleton, fused and inseparable from the body beneath it, as though the distinction between the thing that protects and the thing being protected had over sufficient time, simply ceased to bake.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had become Orytha's thought, like an old tree that grows and nars around objects close to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the sight of a thing that had lived for a long time in this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas looked at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: As O'Rethas looked back, he could have sworn he saw recognition in the things eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: A genuine recognition of the kind that requires memory, the kind that says, I have seen this face before, in a particular place, at a particular time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have not forgotten it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The silver eye, O'Rethas understood, was what he knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the detail that had survived the passage of the centuries in vraccuses awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: The single point of reference that connected the robed figure now descending into his cavern, to whatever the shadow keepers had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the deep corridors of the Imperial Palace, in the last days before the Emperor fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of them spoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire burned its red in sourseless burning, and the cavern held its immense and resonance silence, and the two of them remained across the distance of the ruined floor from one another for a span of time that was not, as all Reethers felt, the silence of two enemies preparing for war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt more like a silence of two beings who had spent a very long time alone, who had, each in their own different way and for their own different reasons, arrived at a condition of fundamental solitude and who recognised that quality in each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was unexpected, a kind of kinship they had no framework for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Raka's spoke first, eventually, in a voice that sounded like it had not been used for ordinary conversation in a great many years and has not missed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You came alone, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a question.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an observation, stated flatly.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pause followed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So did I.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas was not speaking of a choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was speaking of a condition.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come alone because there was nothing left that could come with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: No legion, no brotherhood, no name that anyone living spoke with anything other than fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was alone the way a ruin is alone, not having deliberately looked for solitude, but having persisted long enough that everything else was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Arithas standing in his black robes with his plain blade, heard those words and the subtext within them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vrakas was telling him, without meaning to, that they had arrived at the same place by different roads.
[SPEAKER_00]: The difference, and he reached for it, because he needed it to be there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that Vrakas' solitude was the product of destruction, of the long and terrible process of everything being taken or broken or worn away.
[SPEAKER_00]: While his own was the product of purpose of choice, of service freely given, this was a real difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not certain in this moment that it was as large a difference as he had always assumed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be a lie to call this a Jewel.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Jewel implies a contest between two combatants, a meeting of forces whose outcome is uncertain, and none of these things were accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Rethus was faster than Vrakas, and more precise, and had refined the art of violence across thousands of years of active practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: into something that barely resembled a person fighting, and more resembled a natural process occurring.
[SPEAKER_00]: The movement of water, finding the path of least resistance through stone, fluid, and without waste, every motion the minimum necessary, and not one fraction more.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Vrakas was sustained by something that did not respond to injury in the ordinary ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this meant that a strike that would have ended, most things within the first several seconds of the engagement, did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or Rethas drew first blood within seconds of closing the distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rackers fought in a very different way.
[SPEAKER_00]: The creature fought without technique, without form, without any of the legion doctrine that had presumably once organized his violence into something with edges and intentions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now he moved with mass and aggression, and the belief that whatever pain arrived in him would not cause him to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved fast for something so warped and large, moving with our ethers across the floor of the cavern, through the elaborate pattern of the authors.
[SPEAKER_00]: The altar complex was being destroyed in the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: The careful weeks of work, the finished inscriptions in the blood of the dead, the expression of a practice built across decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was being unmade by the simple fact of too large and purposeful beings, moving through it in opposition to each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: He observed this, and noted that Rako's gave no sign of caring about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the fight was of the forefront of his mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Time and time again, or Ritha struck at the creature, and time and time again, the damage that continued to build did not seem to be enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: His blades swung in smooth, flowing arcs as he continued to find gaps in the guard of the monster, and the weak points between armour plating.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another weakness that the old custodian had noticed when they two first began their fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: A clear pattern in the movement of the chaos warped warrior in front of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Deep in the hip, where an old wound had healed with no access to proper care.
[SPEAKER_00]: A constraint on the pivot, small but consistent, a restriction that appeared in the same moment, every time the same movement was attempted.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been patient with it across the whole of the engagement, giving himself time to confirm the pattern, waiting for the moment when it would become a deciding thing rather than an interesting detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moment arrived as he side stepped quickly around his enemy, causing it to rotate on the spot, and exposing the hesitation caused by the old wound.
[SPEAKER_00]: He used the floor, and Vrakas fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the momentary opening, Ulrichus fainted a low strike, and came up high under the chin of the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was something which could have been parried or avoided if Vrakas was healthier, but he was not, and he fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fire in the chamber went out, it did not gutter or fade, it simply ceased, between one moment and the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: As though whatever agreement had maintained it had been concluded, one way or another.
[SPEAKER_00]: The darkness that replaced it was the deep, absolute dark of a place far below the reach of any natural light, and in that darkness the only sound that remained was the sound of Oritha's breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Steady and measured.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in the dark in the silence of the cavern settled around him, and the long 40 years arrived at their conclusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: He worked in the dark, but the dark was no obstacle to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although his ordinary eyesight was much greater than that of a human, his silver eye provided even greater vision down here in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: He made sure that the creature on the floor in front of him was indeed his target.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no room for error, after some time in investigation, there could be no doubt.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was thorough.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had always been thorough.
[SPEAKER_00]: The altar complex, which had represented weeks of labour, was, in the straightforward physical sense, gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The structures had been destroyed in the conflict.
[SPEAKER_00]: However the place was still recognizable as a bed of chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: and this would not do.
[SPEAKER_00]: After looking around for some time or Reethers found what seemed to be blast charges that are often used to dislodge rubble, large boulders and other obstructions.
[SPEAKER_00]: These he places around the chamber to make sure none of the symbolism would remain once he had gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he set a timer before moving on.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordust was still settling, drifting down through the dark in the slow way of things that are finding their way back to rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: From somewhere far above, so far that the sound of it was barely a quality of the air, rather than a sound in any proper sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: The geothermal vents breath their warmth downward into the cold of the deep stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: As they had been doing since long before any human being had stood in this cavern,
[SPEAKER_00]: and would continue doing long after the last trace of what had happened here was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought about the words fracas had said to him, the two of them, so did I.
[SPEAKER_00]: Connecting the two of them having come to this place alone, with no brothers, no legion, no support.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an odd thing to feel a hint of connection to the enemy in this way, especially in enemy who had so clearly fallen so far from the cradle of civilization.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultist of the naval depot had told him how Rackers had explained his own survival to those who followed him, that the blood God preserves those who are not yet finished with their purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: that the ones who are kept alive across the impossible span of years are kept so, because the purpose is not yet complete, and the God does not release what the God still requires.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fracus had served corned totally across 10,000 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been hollowed out by that service, gradually and completely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seemed like everything that was not useful in that service was worn away, until there was only the husk of a thing left.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scratching out their place in the universe on the edges of the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blood guard had kept him alive because he had a purpose, yet to fulfill.
[SPEAKER_00]: A twisted duty that had yet to be finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Reethers wondered about what that purpose could have been, and what he had stopped here today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the creature would have gone on to do terrible things in the name of the blood God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps he would have been responsible for great suffering.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or perhaps he would have continued in the same way.
[SPEAKER_00]: or Reethers didn't feel emotion about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He felt some level of satisfaction and a pleasure in completing another hunt for the emperor.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was not angry at what had been done here was not sad at the loss of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had believed for a very long time that the absence of feeling was a kind of completion, that he had simply become through the long process of service entirely what he was meant to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: with nothing left over that was not in service to his purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: No sensation wasted on anything the purpose did not require.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had found a kind of peace in this understanding, or something that functioned like peace, which he had been willing to accept in the absence of any clear alternative.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thought that would not leave was more subtle than any of that, and more difficult to dismiss.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not that he had become complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was that he could not tell if he was devoid of emotion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he was more complete, or if he was devoid of emotion because he was designed to be a tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: As he made his way back to the surface, he thought about this for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he decided that it did not matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: If he was a tool, he was simply a tool that is in service for something he believed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He emerged into the grey-green world into daylight, but the overcast sky made it impossible to tell the time of day.
[SPEAKER_00]: The light was flat and sourseless, the horizon lost behind the low cloud that had sat over the plateau.
[SPEAKER_00]: The drilling rig stood motionless, patiently accepting their fate to erode, and eventually fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: The air smelled of moss and cold stone, and the deeper smells brought up by the geothermal vents, which went on breathing their slow warmth upward into the indifference sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Standing at the lip of the mind, he transmitted information through his private channels, a brief and encoded confirmation, with just enough information for those who needed to know, and no more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one would come here after him.
[SPEAKER_00]: No official account would be written, no ceremony performed, no record added to any archive that a future archivist might one day catalogue and flag as anomalous.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world of various secunders would continue producing its mediocre awe, and these abandoned minds would stay silent while others would be set up elsewhere on the surface.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would remain an unremarkable place, but it would be a safer one after today.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at the horizon for a moment, the long flat line of it, grey against grey, ordinary but beautiful in its own way, with the speckles of green moss that seem to cover everything inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were three leads in his pending files, each of which was a thread that needed to be pulled carefully.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one might lead somewhere that required his attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any one of them might in time become his next purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had been waiting for him to finish what he had just finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: He began to walk toward the transit station, which was a modest structure, several kilometers across the plateau, and offered connections to the shipping lanes that would carry him wherever the next thread led.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not look back at the mouth of the shaft when the blast charges went off, causing a deep rumble through the nearby rock.