Chapter 1: Chapter 1 - Zso Sahaal
Chapter Text
He could still see the glimmer of the Corona through the smoke, the fireglow reflecting off metal and stone alike as his brothers set the hive alight.
So close - the jump pack whined as he accelerated downwards, and somewhere by his ear the witch was screaming, sound lost to anyone else in the gale of their dive.
He’d have to let go of her, Sahaal realized. He only had one useful arm, and he was using it to hold onto the little witch, pressing her close as her blood slicked his armour. He could grasp her or the Corona, and there was a tiny flicker of regret in his mind as they dove through another wall of acrid smoke - her scream turning into a cough - and he prepared to let her go. She’d helped him. Acerbus would have the crown now, if she hadn’t. But the choice he had was really no choice at all. His grasp on her loosened, but instead of clinging tighter to prolong her life, she twisted in his arm, her entire body stretching towards the still-tumbling crown, her remaining hand spread wide, straining forward-
She caught it, and he felt the near-exhaustive burst of kine force that dragged the Corona the last precious finger widths out of the air and into her hand.
The moment the metal touched skin her fingers closed and she rolled entirely into his chest, the crown safely trapped between their bodies as he broke out of the faster-than-freefall dive they’d been in.
The forces of breaking such speed hurt him, and a soft whimper near his collarbone told him the witch was faring no better.
They needed a break, a place to hide, in a hive that was nothing but fire and screams now, as what remained of his brothers made sport of its inhabitants. Nausea curled low in his stomach again at how far they had fallen, but there was no time for that now. First he had to survive, then he could plan how to rebuild from these ashes.
Sahaal landed on the next flat surface, some mid-hive building, roof shadowed by the towering supports of the hive’s spires and riddled by stacks of machinery he didn’t care to guess at.
Mita stumbled when he set her down, face paper white and blood still pouring freely from her empty shoulder joint. She wasn’t going to live. Not unless the bleeding stopped, and for a fragile baseline like her, it wouldn’t on its own.
“Hold still.”
He didn’t give her time to do more than make a confused noise at the order before he crowded her against one of those machinery blocks and unsheathed his fighting claws again, electricity sizzling down the sharp lengths.
She just stared uncomprehending until he pressed the flats of the claws into the wound, and then she howled as long as she had air for it, body rigid in agony. He didn’t draw it out, only seared into the wound until the bleeding stopped.
Strips of charred flesh clung to his claws still, but now she wasn’t bleeding anymore. Even the blood from her eyes had cleared into regular human tears.
For a moment, she stood there, leaned against the wall he’d put her against, then she slowly sank down, her legs just folding under her. She sat there, for a moment, shaking as he watched her, the Corona still clutched in her hand like she could let go of it no more than he could have.
They couldn’t stay here. They couldn’t stay on this planet, but they especially couldn’t stay here. No doubt Acerbus would try and hunt her down, and her blood painted the side of the spire in a fine mist, and Sahaal’s own armour in a solid sheet. They’d be easy to find if they stayed here.
He bent down and just scooped her back up, ignoring the yelp of protest and the bitten-off noise of pain she made. The crown was still in her hand and after a moment of confusion she settled back so that the Corona was once more safely tucked between their bodies.
“We have to hide.” The witch’s voice was rough from screaming and wet with phlegm but the words were sensible enough. Good. She hadn’t broken her mind against the daemon.
“We do. I know where.” The Glacier Rats would be useful for once.
—----
Herniatown was a charred ruin, its edges pockmarked with impact craters and piled debris, a maze in every possible dimension, and quiet amidst the screaming, collapsing background noise of Equixus’ death.
Picking his way through the slaughter had been almost embarrassingly easy. The present Night Lords - and oh how he hated to name them that when they’d so clearly abandoned all their father had intended for them - had been too distracted chasing down panicked humans or toying with the feeble resistance they encountered, the smell of blood and viscera so thick on the air that one gore-covered body more or less made no difference anymore.
If any of them saw him, all they saw was a shadow in midnight clad, a pale human clutched close. No doubt they had assumed him one of their ilk, finding himself a more secluded spot for a toy he didn’t feel like sharing.
Sahaal took them down into a crevasse between two leaning walls, on the brink where Herniatown was but a meter of plasteel and rockcrete away from sinking even deeper into the underhive. He had to jump, the impact rattling his own injuries, his useless arm just dead weight that he’d have to deal with sooner rather than later.
But first he needed a moment to rest. They both did. Mita slid from his grasp, wobbled where she stood for a moment, exhaustion, terror and blood loss finally catching up and sinking their claws into her. She trembled, then collapsed, and beside her Sahaal did the same, just more graceful, coming to his knees in his battered armour.
He was suddenly tired, all the way down to his bones, exhausted beyond the demands of combat or hunting. His mind felt raw but there was none of that sibilant whispering that had haunted him earlier. This was just pain, fresh and bright like a peeled nerve.
His eyes fell back onto the Corona, still in Mita’s hand where she sat against the wall. The red gem shone at him, a temptation in clarity. It would all be better if- No. His mind shied away from the thought of wearing the crown now, and the hand he’d extended to it drew back sharply as well.
No, not now. He didn’t deserve to wear it, not while they were still trapped on his planet, hiding from the brothers he should have been leading. The crown was his by right, by his father’s own words and will, but he would earn it, too. He would not desecrate it by wearing it while fleeing from his own brothers. He would be worthy of the duty he’d been given.
Sahaal’s eyes rose from the gem to the witch’s eyes. She was watching him through a mask of dried blood and ash and all he could see was exhaustion that matched his, and a mind as stripped raw as his own. She held his gaze for a moment and then dropped her head back against the rockcrete she was leaning on, baring the line of her throat over her rags.
Without looking, she lifted the Corona in his direction, hand shaking as if she was carrying some great weight.
“It’s yours.”
He reached over and folded her arm back over her chest with a rumble of disagreement that seemed to scare her, eyes flying open and darting back to him.
“Not now.”
Not here, not when he’d so very nearly failed the task he’d been set to so completely. Not when he was too weak to do justice to the legacy he’d be wearing.
She frowned at him, but put the Corona back on her lap, then pulled a stained rag off her shoulder to clumsily wrap around the metal. She struggled with it until Sahaal reached over to help, holding one corner of the threadbare fabric as gently as he knew how while she swaddled the crown in the rest.
They worked together in silence, wrapping and turning and wrapping again until eventually all the metal was hidden. Somehow, it seemed to hide the sheer presence of it, too. Some weight in the air lessened and with it, tension left the little witch’s shoulders in a way that went beyond the final exhale of strength. It was more some oppressive force letting up, letting her straighten her back against the ruined wall.
For a moment more, Sahaal ran the tip of his finger along the covered outline of the Corona where it rested on her legs, then he withdrew.
He would have liked to withdraw further, suddenly aware of her proximity in a way that itched in the back of his mind with conflicting responses. The witch had helped him, yes, had secured the Corona for him. But she had worked against him too, hunted him down in his little kingdom of rags and shadows. She’d fought him and won and that still rankled but she’s also freed him from the xenos sorcery. She had been an imperial agent and thus his sworn enemy… and he’d felt the breaking of her faith in the depths of his own mind, by his own words. He didn’t know what to do with her now and so he postponed the decision for a time when his mind was not reeling so.
She was a baseline human. He could still kill her later, if she posed a problem. But for now- Now she was useful to him, and so he settled near her, close enough that the residual heat of his body and armour would keep her from freezing to death in the cooling underhive.
Chapter 2: Chapter 2 -Mita Ashyn
Notes:
okay maybe I lied maybe updates will be twice weekly because I am a generous (impatient) soul and don't wanna make y'all wait that long.
Chapter Text
Mita woke with a start of surprise - of having fallen asleep and equally of waking again from that sleep, and then that twitch of surprise turned into a gasp of pain when the motion pulled on her raw, open shoulder.
A shadow next to her shifted with a mechanical hiss and the grinding noise of metal fitting ill together and for a split second, fear closed over her head like the ocean. She jerked back only for a huge gauntlet to manifest out of the shadows and arrest her motion and somehow that penetrated through her fear and confusion.
Yesterday - was it yesterday? How long had she been asleep? - came back to her with a rush of nauseous revelation, flashes of memories at once hazy and etched into her mind with the finest razor edge. The Night Lords, the Corona, the reveal of the inquisitor’s duplicity, the blinding pain of her arm tearing clean out of her socket, the plunge through the smoke when her visions became her reality, both overlaying into inevitable solidity.
She looked down at her lap, at the rag wrapped bundle that contained the Corona Nox. She could feel it still, like a third presence in this little hideout, but it seemed less… active now and part of her couldn’t help but think of a hooded raptor, satisfied from the kill and thus willing to let itself be blinded and carried to some new hunting ground. She swallowed dry and hoped that the flicker of amusement at the edge of her perception was a result of her own exhaustion turning on her mind, and not some indicator of the crown being aware - worse, understanding - of her own thoughts.
Her eyes drifted from there naturally to her erstwhile company. He was kneeling…neatly, she supposed, armour damaged and chipped even in the cloak of shadows that seemed to come so naturally to him. And he radiated… not calm, not truly, but his thoughts, or at least what of them slid against her mind like unseen fish in a creek, were smooth, focused, a neat line of actions laid out in his mind without a shred of insecurity.
Oh his thoughts still tasted bitter, and now there was a salt taste underneath them like tears, but all of that was just… underneath, locked away.
All of that took her but a moment to piece together, and by the time she’d drawn breath again, his gauntlet had fallen away from her uninjured shoulder and settled back on his thigh.
“We cannot stay here.”
His voice sounded nothing like he had in his mind, through the speakers of the vox; stripped down to a harsh growl but something like impatience carried through anyways. She wondered why he hadn’t grabbed the corona off her and left, like he clearly wanted to.
“We do.”
She took the crown, pushed herself up- tried to push herself up, with a hand she no longer had even though she could still feel it, and for the second time in less than a minute, the Night Lord reached out and steadied her, gauntlet closing on her shoulder like a vice, hard enough that she could feel it bruise her already sore body.
“And I need some sort of medicae.” Her head was swimming, with hunger, yes, but also with blood loss. She could see the gore coating his armour like paint, and feel the way fabric was sticking to her own skin, itchy and flaking, even if the scent of iron had clearly long since faded from her conscious awareness.
She could stand, but barely, and only with the wall at her side.
Some spike of displeasure struck her mental skin from his direction, annoyance at her weakness, no doubt.
Mita could see plenty of skin through the torn surface of his armour, but all of it looked… not hale, but scared. Closed. The design of the Emperor had rendered his Angels not impervious to harm, but much more resilient to it, even those among them who had turned from him.
But then, she had too, hadn’t she? The thought filled her mouth with bile but also lit some fire in her chest, enough to take a step back from the wall and try to stand on her own.
She did not need his protection. She’d never had it, her strength was her own and she would not- her legs tried to buckle under her and Sahaal swept her up and against his chest without a single care for the squawk of protest it elicited from her.
“Put me down!”
“No. You’re too slow.”
So of course he didn’t put her down and something that wasn’t her psychic gift told her that if she tried to escape, she was going to end up thrown over his shoulder or tucked under his arm like a sack of supplies, instead of cradled against his chest like a person.
There were things her pride could take, and things it could not. Being carried like surplus supplies was the latter.
So she settled in best she could, her arm wrapped over the Corona, and let him take her to- where were they even? When they had arrived she had only been partially aware of their surroundings beyond the things right next to her - armour and rockrete and blood, so much blood, the crown clutched tight enough to cut fingers - and now it took all the way to the smouldering outskirts until she recognized Herniatown for what it was. Familiar territory for Sahaal, no doubt, and a good place to hide at least for a little while, though not ideal for the supplies they needed.
Food, medical supplies, weapons, a ship. Definitely a ship. They had to get off this planet, and as fast as they could, too. But first they would need to tend to their wounds. Even with his resilient physique, she could tell that he wasn’t moving smoothly. She’d seen him in the gallery, the way he’d all but danced even hampered as he’d been, every movement precise and purposeful.
He was still silent, even with the additional burden of her weight sitting in his arm, and she tried her best to make it easier for him, wedging the crown between their bodies to free her arm enough to cling to a pauldron or neckguard, which freed his hand up in turn to let them climb back out of their hiding spot, and then high into the shadows that clung to the underside of midhive.
It made her dizzy, knowing that there was nothing between her and a very, very long drop down, aside from the arm of a traitor marine, and her own waning strength. Then again, he hadn’t dropped her before, not even on his dive down the spire, when she’d realized that he would do it to grasp the Corona, and had caught it for him instead, even if the effort had exploded her sight with stars.
But she’d managed, and she’d lived, and now she was here, clinging to him again as he took them up towards the levels that would have what they needed. He only sat her down once they’d climbed about three levels, and shushed her with a sharp gesture of his hand when she made to ask why they’d stopped.
After a moment, she felt it. Or felt him hear it, she wasn’t sure anymore. Her mind was still raw, and the way they’d been pulled together into his mind before had left something… not a link, but a sensitivity, like a vox receiver tuned to a particular signal. She could feel the tensing of muscles in his shoulders and back, the wash of pain from it smothered into the furthest corner of his mind. She could tell what had left him so cautious: somewhere further along, just above them, another Night Lord walked.
This one was oozing Chaos like a foul perfume, enough to make her wrinkle her nose - and let her know that Sahaal was doing the same. She wondered if they could just sit here, wait for the other Astartes to pass by and slip past him, but then she felt the approach of this twisted psyche slow down, further and further as it approached their hiding spot.
Sahaal was clearly in no state to fight, one arm useless by his side, the other thoroughly occupied with her. It left their options slim: retreat, or hide.
That thought drew a low noise of derision from him, as if he could see as much of her mind as she of his. So of course he chose neither option. His head tipped down, vox dialed so low she felt the words more than she truly heard them. “Stay where I put you, and be quiet.”
The first moves were lateral, still underneath the other Night Lord, but away from him, until they’d reached some access hatch that had been blown up. He all but threw her through it before pulling himself through, and then bundled her into the corner of a burnt out building. Not in hiding, but out of immediate reach, in a place where some baseline human might have thought themselves safe.
Mita knew she was not. But when he put her down and told her again to stay put in that same nearly subsonic rumble, he’d left the Corona with her, and freed of the burden of her climbed up into the shadows with an agility she wouldn’t have believed on someone with all limbs functional, much less someone so injured, even though she knew what he was and had seen his skill before.
Silence settled over her again, or what passed for silence in the hive now. In the distance she could hear the occasional boom of explosions, or a terrified wail echoing down to her, but the bustling, near-frantic activity of the hive that she’d seen before? That was gone, utterly destroyed.
For a time, she could still feel the presence of Sahaal against her mind, but then that faded, too. Had he gone to face off against the other Night Lord? Anxiety settled low in her stomach. He clearly believed he’d come back, but belief and reality were such different things.
The anxiety burrowed deeper with every step the corrupted Astartes approached. She could feel him, like a great shade stretching towards her, and when she could finally distinguish his shape among the darkness and wreckage of the street he was swaggering down with complete confidence, she hid behind the half-torn, soot-stained wall Sahaal had left her by. It was too late, she knew that, but what other options did she have? She had no weapons, not even her mind, still scraped raw and bleeding from the daemon and the xenos sorcery. All she could do was hide, and hope, and trust that Sahaal had not abandoned her to her fate.
The anxiety turned to fear when she heard claws dig into crumbling stonework below her, the corrupted Astartes clearly climbing up to her, and a soft whimper escaped her throat.
He’d heard her, clearly, going by the pause and amused chuckle that answered her from just a few meters below her hiding spot.
“Yes, be afraid. You might live longer that way.” His voice seemed to ooze up to her against gravity, sticking to her skin worse than the dried and congealed blood of her injuries. She knew exactly what kind of ‘living’ was in store for her if he reached her.
Mita inched her way back from the torn-open wall, trying to gain more space, even though she didn’t know what for. Something. Anything.
A midnight-blue, sharp-clawed gauntlet reached over the edge of the wall, pulled out a loose brick, cursed and then pulled his owner into the building, and with him a wave of fear and sickness that made her teeth ache in their sockets. Even if she’d not known him for what he was, nobody would have mistaken him for a loyal servant of the Throne. Spines rose from every joint of his armour, carrying impaled limbs and empty skins, and the space between them was painted in blood, truly painted, different shades picking out symbols that made her eyes water to even look at.
She retched and pushed herself back further, until her hand hit empty air behind her, some staircase that hadn’t survive the fire that gutted the building trapping her, and the Corona was still on her lap, wrapped and eager now, sharp against her mind, paying attention in a way it had not when she’d woken with it earlier.
Her mouth filled with bile and copper.
The Night Lord laughed and walked closer in the same confident swagger, so sure he’d gotten himself some nice toy, some plaything he could offer to his filthy gods- and then Sahaal swung down from above, hidden in the shadows of the charred ceiling. One moment there was nothing and the next, lightning claws sprang to life a split second before they plunged in the back of the other marine’s head with a crackle of charge that was muffled in flesh almost as soon as Mita heard it.
Some part of her, long trained by the inquisition and inured to violence even further by recent events couldn’t help but catalogue what she was seeing from a technical point of view:
Sahaal had his knees hooked over some blackened rafter, and used that as a hinge to swing down, plunge his blades into- that had to be the softer seal between helmet and neck guard on the other’s power armour. Those blades were sharp enough to go through bones, even ceramite infused ones, so that’s what they’d done, entering through the nape and exiting out through the eye lenses and then Sahaal dropped, turned like a feline in his fall, and the blades turned with him, churning whatever brainmeat the harsh electricity of his claws hadn’t charred into useless slush. He yanked his hand free again with a foot braced against the falling marine’s back before he’d even fully gone to his knees.
She had seen the most skilled artists of several planets perform for the nobles of their society. Not a single one could have hoped to match what he could do while maimed.
His prey dropped, twitched, hands scrambling on the empty floor with nothing more than the last misfire of nerves fed charge that wasn’t their own and then lay still.
All of it had been so fast that Mita knew that she’d have missed it if she’d blinked at the wrong moment.
The dead marine earned himself a hard kick to the side from Sahaal, which predictably didn’t elicit any reaction. He nodded once, almost to himself, before his head lifted to look at her.
“I told you to stay put.” If there was annoyance in his tone, she couldn’t read it. “Now make yourself useful. He’ll have some supplies on him.”
Chapter Text
They’d ended up with less supplies than he’d hoped for. Some clips of ammunition, another bolter, a few more such things, but that was about it. With chaos hanging so thick around the corpse, he was no more comfortable taking anything more substantial than the witch had been. She cringed at touching the corpse, and he could hardly blame her for that. He didn’t feel much better about it.
But at least that meant that their looting went quickly, and some weapons were better than none. It still left them the problem of food and medical care, and food was easier. Most of the buildings were abandoned, and even though the reek of a dying city, Sahaal was able to track down a pantry for them. Maneuvering them through a broken window yielded a few more cuts on Mita, and even though she didn’t complain about them beyond a wince, they worried him some. She couldn’t have that much blood left inside her, it’d be better to keep what remained where it belonged.
That was also why the rations bars they found went to her first. They were dry and nearly flavourless and the water they had them with looked suspicious enough for a baseline to make the witch visibly steel herself before drinking.
But it helped. Her mind seemed to clear - he could feel her across the surface of his mind, not like she wanted to pry, but more like her state was too weakened to contain herself properly and now that she was fed, the feeling of her presence lessened. He’d have to keep her fed, then.
It also made her alert enough to drag some cables out of a cabinet and use it to tie the Corona to her, leaving her hand free. A sensible idea, even when it took both of them working together to secure the knots that held the bundle of rags in place. It made it less suspicious too, once she’d wrapped another torn up blanket over herself and her lack of arm while he ate. He could have gone without food entirely for longer, but who knew how easily they would next come across any, so he made her pack the remaining bars, another bundle of supplies tied to her hip.
That left one more pressing issue: a medicae of some kind.
The witch wasn’t going to die immediately, not anymore, but she was clearly weak and thus a hindrance. Worse, he could all but smell the infection taking root in her flesh slowly but surely.
Sahaal had some idea where to get her the supplies they needed, counterseptics and bandages, but getting someone’s help? That would be harder. Of course he could intimidate someone into helping her, but that would necessitate letting that someone near her with a scalpel, and limit what damage he might do in the process of making clear how serious his demands were to be taken.
He needn’t have worried in the end. Climbing half a dozen more levels, just past Cuspseal, took them to some minor clinic. Their ascent went faster now, with the Corona secured and both of them somewhat restored.
“Can you let me down near that walkway?” The witch’s voice sounded better too, no longer so roughened from the smoke and screaming she’d done. “I will have to get close to someone.”
“You have a plan, then?”
She did. It was charmingly easy: Wait until some medical staff came out for the inevitable smoke break, grab their mind, and force them to help. The idea of trusting her witchcraft to pave the way for them sat ill with him, but it was a better idea than his own - and if it didn’t work, forcing compliance his way was still very much possible.
But this would be quieter and attract less attention. If it worked.
He set her down on the narrow walkway behind the clinic, slipped into the shadow, and waited. They didn’t have to wait long, and he had to admit, it was… fascinating, to see her flex her own claws.
There was a start when the man who’d come for his smoke saw her, the inhale where he’d meant to say something, when instead he went rigid, eyes rolling in their sockets before stilling. The flush of fear that her initial intrusion in his mind caused faded so easily, and a few seconds later, Mita followed their unwilling helper into the clinic, Sahaal on her heels, a creeping shadow slipping into the rearmost treatment room with them.
He watched the witch puppet the doctor through the doors, the man’s motions stiff and unwilling, but that mattered little.
What mattered was that Mita had forced his compliance with a flex of her mind. She wouldn’t have had to bargain with Pahvulti, no. She could have cracked his flesh-mind open like a crustacean and picked out the delicacies she wanted.
The thought was at once poison-bitter and candy-sweet. Bitter because it recalled his own failure to get results painfully clearly, forced him to acknowledge that some mutant-witch had bested him, however indirectly; sweet for the knowledge that that he had her cooperation now, and any mind she could bend to her plans, she could bend to his just as easily. She would be as useful an ally as she’d been aggravating as an opponent.
So he kept a close eye on her, half in caution - for she might still change her allegiance - and half in concern - should her grip on the doctor’s mind fail while he was near her with a scalpel while tending to her shoulder.
It was certainly the most inconvenient of her injuries. Opening the knot that held the Corona to her body had required the both of them again. The doctor might have sufficed, but a foreboding rumble in the back of his throat had stopped that idea in its tracks, the puppet twitching back at Mita’s startle in odd synchronicity. He wasn’t going to let some mind-trapped tool touch something so precious.
So Sahaal had undone the knots himself, and the witch had placed the crown down on the examination table she sat on, in easy reach of him, before shedding her clothes.
Her injuries looked worse than he’d expected, each layer of rags coming off to reveal more damage. Bruises, cuts, and a distinct swollen purpling over her left ribs that told him that the bone beneath was broken. He’d have to handle her more delicately in the future. Baselines were so fragile, and he was half-surprised that she had not complained about it earlier, but perhaps the loss of her arm had blotted out all else.
Now the scrapes and cuts on her arm and hand were cleaned, a broken fingerbone splinted. The three ribs were indeed broken, but there was little a place this far down the hive could do for that. Same with the contusion that consumed her back, a near-black stain that reached from the ridges of her shoulder blades to the small of her back.
He had expected all of that.
He had even expected the half-raw, half-charred gaping hole in her other shoulder joint, torn muscle and sinew desiccating in the cavity even while the flesh around them was inflamed red and weeping the first beginnings of pus.
No, what surprised him was the ink she wore.
Over the soft-looking flesh of her left breast, a stylized icon of the Throne, outlined in a bright golden halo proclaimed her past faith. Words twisted around the base of it, but another bruise obscured too much of them for him to read them.
Maybe his attention had drawn hers with it, because her splinted hand covered the tattoo, rubbing over the bruise hard enough to deepen it further. For a moment, Sahaal pictured himself slipping the knife under her skin and cutting the image of the Corpse Emperor from her supple flesh. Not to hurt, not to punish, but to free her from those last, false chains carved into her. He knew how to do it, even how to keep the damage minimal. She’d scar, of course she would, but better a clean scar to remind her of the truths she’d found than this.
The shoulder wound needed the most lengthy treatment of all her injuries. The charred flesh was abraded away first. That, the witch bore without complaint, the only sign of her pain the sweat running down the length of her neck. Even when the doctor later pulled loose fragments of skin over the wound and stitched it closed, only faint whimpers escaped her. Frankly, she suffered her healing with more composure than any number of trained soldiers Sahaal had had under his blades.
At the end she was still pale, chest heaving with the quick breaths of someone struggling not to cry out, but finally the last counterseptics were in the wound and in her bloodstream, and they could fasten the rags back over her form.
The puppet-doctor was standing forgotten to the side, eyes unseeing and blood slowly trickling down from his nose.
“Will he remember?” Sahaal nodded at the motionless man. He barely seemed to breathe.
“Not even his own name.” There was something bitter in the witch’s voice, harsh enough for him to pick up on. Did she feel sorry for the man they’d used? What a soft-hearted little creature.
But she didn’t elaborate, and in this, Sahaal trusted her expertise. Slitting the puppet’s throat would have made sure of their secret, but it would also have raised more alarms than some spontaneous brain bleed in the middle of a hive drowning in Chaos.
They slipped out unseen, Mita quiet until he had to pick her up again to scale another support column. This time her tone was acidic and rolled against his mind like sulphur rain.
“Did you have to stare like that?”
“Stare.” When had he- how would she even know? He was fully armoured. Of course she might have spied on his mind, but if she had, she’d have known that he’d been watching her treatment for signs of treachery.
“Yes, stare.” Her voice grew arch, like she was explaining something to a particularly slow child, and in a moment of pique, his fingers curled a fraction tighter than necessary against her bruised back. It didn’t stop her from continuing. “At my chest. Surely these were not the first tits you have seen in your life.”
That was not- That didn’t matter. That was not what he’d been looking at, why would she even think- that didn’t matter either.
“They’re not. You have a tattoo.”
“And…you’ve seen those before, too.”
“Yes. I did not expect you to have one.” She had no augmentations, not even the sort of modifications one usually made for vanity’s sake. So he hadn’t thought she’d have anything else, especially not something as pious as this.
“Well, I do.” She harrumphed and that seemed to be the end of it. She settled back down and the prickly feeling against his mind subsided slowly, her either seeing how silly her reaction had been, or withdrawing further into her own mind, he cared not either way. They had gotten what they had needed, aside from the most crucial thing for their mid-term survival: a ship.
Not that it would help them in the short term, and by the time they reached the port they’d agreed on - not the one he’d raided twice now, that was too broken to be much use anymore - he figured that maybe she hadn’t figured that out yet, considering the way she was eyeing the shuttles from their hidden corner in the wall.
“We can’t go yet.”
“What?!” She twisted around in his arm like he’d said that just to offend her personally.
“We can’t leave. Not while the fleet is in orbit.” Perhaps not even while they were whatever counted as ‘nearby’ in the Warp. But he had no way to ascertain that. “They would just shoot us down, or capture us.” Both, obviously, bad options.
“So, we do what? Wait?”
“Yes. They’ll lose interest, or an Imperial fleet arrives and chases them off. They won’t put up a fight with them.” Oh, he had no doubt that Acerbus would be howling for blood somewhere, but for all he cared, he could keep doing that until all the suns burnt out. All the demonic howling of the warp wouldn’t be enough to force whatever remains of the legon this corrupted fool had tied to himself into a fight like that.
Notes:
Sometimes you gotta give a character a little tattoo. For spice.
Chapter 4: Chapter 4 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
Word of warning: there's extra gore in here! We're getting into some detail on what happened with Sahaal's arm.
Chapter Text
So they waited.
It was, somehow, even worse than dodging the general disintegration of the hive, or corrupted traitor marines - a distinction Mita had found herself making rather consciously now. Sahaal was a traitor, she was a traitor, but neither of them bore the taint of Chaos, and these creatures? They did.
She’d seen those they called ‘raptors’, and the way their mere presence would leave Sahaal fuming with rage, until finally, what had to be nearly a week into hiding in the hangar bay, in a cramped little space barely big enough for them both, hungry, bored, filthy, bored, aching all over her body as her shoulder healed, and bored, she asked him about it.
Because what else was she supposed to do when his anger became a roiling cloud over them both, and she could count how often any of the ‘flock’ had gone by on the dents his fingers had left in the steel walls of their hiding spot?
So the next time the noises downstairs grew insufferable, she leaned across against his shoulder, and whispered her question.
“Why do they upset you so? The raptors, specifically.”
Because she did know that all of them upset him, though really ‘upset’ was too small a word, and yet the only one she knew that could hope to encompass the tarry mixture of grief, rage, disappointment and blame even remotely when she tried to fold it over the feelings. ‘Distressed’ implied a vulnerability to it that just wasn’t there. All this turmoil wanted to come to the outside, find a target and annihilate it.
He just had no target. And hopefully she had not just gone and made herself one.
His head swiveled to her, close enough that she could see the reflection of her own tangled hair and drawn face in his eye lenses. Something that wasn’t exactly fear rippled through her. He would not kill her, he would not, he needed her.
“They do not ‘upset’ me.”
She could all but see the distaste on his face, as if something as pedestrian as ‘upset’ couldn’t happen to him. Only grand rages for him, no doubt.
“Anger you, then.” Perhaps that was a more acceptable word.
There was a moment of silence, but he was still looking at her, though the weight of his attention diffused slightly, in a way that on a human she’d have known to mean they were remembering something.
“They were mine, once.” It sounded almost like an admission of…not shame, but guilt. Like a failure of his. The mud pit of his emotions stirred, throwing up bubbles of regret. “I was Talonmaster, I formed them into the unit they were, honed their discipline and skills. They were magnificent-”
The word stuck in his mouth like a thorn, the way he spat it out, like it hurt him, and part of her couldn’t help but feel sorry. No doubt what he considered magnificent would have been terrifying to her, but even so… she’d seen him kill. That was terrifying. It was also beautiful, like some destructive force of nature whirling past before your eyes in a way you couldn’t help but admire.
There was nothing admirable on the Raptors anymore, not to her. Clearly not to him either.
“And then you became lost to them.” She finished in his place, voice soft. She could…understand that. They’d been his responsibility, and he’d vanished, and now they were so far removed from humans most of them could have been mistaken for some death world’s predator beast. Claws and wings and beaks and fangs, armour fused into their bodies, if not worse mutations.
“Yes.”
And that was all he would say to her for the remainder of the day.
–
They had to hide themselves for another three days, before suddenly the chaos below them took on a whole other magnitude. Night Lords covered in fresh skins and skulls, hauling crates of supplies, hurried back and forth, herded human captives into shuttles that bore the same heraldry as Sahaal, or at least had borne it, once, before being defaced the with the usual insignia of Chaos. Mita knew them on sight, but tried not to look at them. She was feeling miserable enough as it was.
Sahaal was certainly keeping an eye on things anyways. He had gotten to leave their little bolthole ever so often, finding them more food - Mita did not ask where or how and ignored the stains - and keeping track of the movements of his former brothers. He’d left the Corona with her, and, faithfully, she’d kept it close. Still, his mood had soured worse than hers, and she had started to wonder why, and how to fix it. For all he’d not lashed out at her, Mita kept wondering if there was a ‘yet’ attached to the end of that sentence.
Now however his mood did lighten. She could feel his attention sharpened at the going-ons below, hunting instincts starting to boil up inside him.
“Soon.”
They’d talked about this. There would be a narrow window of opportunity, between the traitor legion leaving and the arrival of some imperial force investigating the emergency beacons that had no doubt been set off.
Once the strike cruisers and such in orbit had left, they would have to take whatever spaceworthy shuttle they could grab and make for the nearest inhabited world. Her inquisitorial codes would give them access in a more subtle way than his blades, for all that they evoked the very same fear.
She scooted back from the edge of their hideout to gather what resources they had managed to collect. Some more weapons and ammunition, food, a small stack of medical supplies. At her request, Sahaal had even acquired clean clothes that should be close enough to her size. When the time came for her to play the loyal inquisitor, she would have to present the right image. And so, for an entire day she’d been alone while he had gone to prepare. He’d come back with a carefully wrapped bundle of fine silks and a matching pair of shoes, attention to detail she’d not expected but certainly appreciated.
Now all of that went together into a great bundle that they could carry between them and got dragged to the front. The hangar below was emptying quickly and she hoped desperately that there would still be spaceworthy shuttles when all was said and done. Otherwise- no. No otherwise. There would be a shuttle for them, and it would function, and they would get off this frozen ruin of a planet and go- somewhere. The important part was to get away, and get to Baih’Rus, and then from there all other things could be decided.
For once they were lucky. The Night Lords cleared out, and a number of shuttlecrafts remained. Nothing fancy, but all the better to hide with. It would be enough. It would have to be. Arranging everything to Sahaals satisfaction, before he just jumped down into the hangar, took another few minutes that felt too long.
They had no idea how close any imperial fleet might be, or what shape it might take. This would be threading the needle, and they likely only had one attempt.
Their luck held. The shuttle they picked was a government craft, and reacted to Mita’s inquisitorial overrides as eagerly as she’d hoped for. It was old, and simple, but allowed them to listen into the vox channels of whatever remained of Equixus’ government. It wasn’t much, and none of it was watching the sky except to make sure that their tormentors were truly gone, but it told them that some considerable force was on the way, accompanied by an inquisitorial craft. So they would have to leave, and fast, but not as fast as they’d feared.
Some part of Mita wanted to pray to the Emperor for this lucky streak, but most of her rebelled at the very thought now. This wasn’t some blessing from distant Terra, this was blind, stupid luck, helped along by their own skills and resourcefulness.
The controls were much too small for Sahaal to handle, and she could tell that it annoyed him to be relegated to the back of the cockpit, crouched down and boots maglocked to the floor while she flew through what she remembered of the preflight checks for such crafts. It wouldn’t need much and- ah. There. A servitor wired into the side of the cockpit woke from its slumber, taking up most of the controls.
“Take us to orbit, then plot the most direct route to Baih’Rus”
The servitor garbled a short affirmative, and the engines of the shuttle started firing up. Mita dropped herself into the command throne, watching through the windows as the shuttle left the hangar and rose into the atmosphere. Below them, the hive still burnt, but even then she only paid half attention to the vox. Sahaal had been thorough when he had begun to dismantle the defenses, and his brothers had done the rest. Nobody would shoot them down. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was going to be alright. They were going to be alright.
They were perhaps not going to be alright. She hadn’t heard Sahaal leave - she often didn’t, and ever so often the idea of sticking a bell on him amused her - but she felt his pain ripple through the shuttle like a wave, sending her scrambling into the back of it. Had they made a mistake? Was there someone else?
Instead she found him alone in what was supposed to be a common area of sorts, half of his armour on the floor and bodyglove peeled back to reveal skin. She’d seen him naked in his mental landscape but this was- not that. This was flesh, and here the damages were real, and lasting. One of his arms hung limp, and while all of him was pale enough to show the veins through the skin, the arm was…grey. The unhealthy color went all the way up to his shoulder, where instead it became a mottled purple-green that she’d seen quite a lot of on her own body these days and then in the joint itself- well, there wasn’t really a joint anymore. The was scarring, gnarled and angry still, but even that wasn’t complete. There was something shiny, the color of ivory and with a start she realized that it was bone, shards of his shattered shoulder blade working their way free from his flesh before his transhuman healing had caught them.
His other wounds - cuts and bullet impacts, all scared over cleanly - didn’t even register in her mind, too busy cataloging - there was the black carapace of his kind, hard metal ports and odd mesh torn to shreds, a great pectoral muscle cratered like a moon except of course celestial bodies didn’t bleed or bruise like he did, a flap of skin hanging partially off his oddly fused ribs, another sliver of bone laid bare in the lights of the shuttle.
She must have made a sound, or maybe he was starting to feel her the same way she could feel him, a presence at the edge of her mind, except where he was a kettle of anger and pain, she couldn’t be anything but a pit of shocked cold.
He turned to her, pitch-black eyes narrowed against the glare of the lumens.
“Are you going to stare, or are you going to help?”
“Help?” She echoed dumbly. Help with what exactly here?
His mental emanations shaded darker and spiked into annoyance. “With the arm. I need it off. It’s useless.” Dead, he meant, Mita was sure of that. Living tissue didn’t look like that, and it clearly didn’t respond to his will any longer.
“You- You want me to-” She gestured helplessly at his side.
“Help me get rid of this, yes. Before it starts to rot.” Like that was all there was to it, and maybe to him it was, his body just another weapon that could be replaced if it failed him. And she couldn’t- except the thought of leaving him to deal with this on his own, when the act of just removing his armour had been enough for his pain to be felt all the way from the cockpit? Or worse, to leave the limb to rot while still attached to him? No, that was unthinkable.
Mita took a deep breath and stepped close. Something in Sahaal’s posture relaxed as he sat down on the floor, legs crossed, and somehow, somehow the motion was still graceful, making the dead-fish non-response of his arm all the more horrific in context.
“What do you need me to do?”
“Cut here-” He tapped on the worst of the scarring, and it gave oddly under his touch. “Down to here.” He drew a line that slid along the edges of his fused ribcage. “I don’t think there is anything but bone shards left in there, it shouldn’t be hard to sever, but I cannot get a good angle on it.”
She wasn’t sure how he could sound so detached about it all. “Painkillers?”
There would be a first aid kit or similar on the shuttle, or at least there should be but somehow she doubted that any of it would work on him.
“The armour is out, and you won’t have anything suitable.” He shrugged his good shoulder, still clad in midnight ceramite. “I can take it.”
Maybe. Likely. He’d handled this until now, and the thought that he’d been carrying a dead limb with him all this time made her stomach climb into her throat. She swallowed it back down. There were ways to block the pain in the mind, but she’d never learnt them, at least not to use on anyone but herself that she wanted to actually keep alive.
Right. She would actually do this. Without anesthesia or numbing of any sort. Though what surgical instrument she was supposed to take to his flesh, Mita didn’t know. She opened her mouth, and Sahaal flipped a combat knife over in his functional hand and offered it to her. It might as well have been a shortsword.
She felt herself blanch, but closed her fingers around the hilt. Her gorge rose once more, and once more she fought it down. She wasn’t the one about to get an amputation. For a split second, the thought that somehow, having a daemon tear her limb off had been the kinder option threatened to make her break into hysterical giggles, but if she started now, she might not stop for a long time and Sahaal needed her help there, needed her hand to be steady.
So she shoved the horror and the fear and whatever residual worship for an angel of the Emperor some childish corner of her mind might have summoned into a box and banished it into the basement of her mind, where it could not disturb her focus in the present.
The blade was sharp enough that when she rested the edge against his skin, where he’d indicated, it drew blood immediately. Her hand shook for a moment, then she steeled herself again. It wasn’t hard. He’d shown her where to cut. It wasn’t her arm, her flesh, any phantom pain that sizzled in her own empty joint was just that, a phantom of her own imagination.
She drew the blade down into his flesh.
There was no reaction, no tensing of his remaining shoulder muscle, not even a change of his breathing, just blood, bright red and thicker than her own oozing down over his chest, clotting already. Mita looked up, worried, only to meet his gaze, fully focused on her and with the tiniest creases of tension in the corners of his eyes.
“Keep going, or you’ll get stuck.” The same faint tension carried in his voice, like he was holding himself still for both their benefits: the pain she’d felt from him earlier had gone far away or perhaps sublimated into her own body, urging her to finish the crude surgery and give him whatever relief could be gained in this barbaric way.
The knife sank deeper, blade and hilt growing slick with blood until her grip started to slide. Even with an edge of such nearly supernatural sharpness, even with the natural resilient harmony of his muscle and enhancements ruined, it was hard work cutting into him like that, and she was injured and tired and hungry and her hand slipped, nearly losing grip of the knife, except he caught her, gauntlet closing on her hand until she had a real hold again.
The blood clotted so quickly that the soaked wrappings of the hilt became tacky like glue under her fingers, reaffirming her grip almost as much as his hand did, and then he let go again, and she started cutting once more.
Mita almost wished the blood wouldn’t stop flowing so quickly. Like this, there was nothing to hide the growing gap where the dead arm’s own weight pulled it away from the destroyed joint. A dead thing, dead meat on equally dead bone. She tried to think of it like that, almost as if it was a necropsy, except the blade scraped over an unbroken rib, making Sahaal exhale long and with the faintest of shaking on it, enough so she knew that this hurt him even if all she could feel was the phantom iceburn in her own shoulder, fresh and searing, like it had never been closed, enough to make her eyes water.
But she wasn’t finished yet. Just a little more, she could hold on for a little more, she had held down worse, she’d faced down a daemon for Throne’s sake! With a rough noise of her own, the blade parted out of flesh again and his dead arm dropped to the floor beside him in a quickly-quenched spout of blood.
She dropped the knife with it, except he caught it before it had even properly left her hand. Like he’d expected her to drop it. Their eyes met again and this time he seemed to be searching her face for something, minute motions of his lids giving away that his eyes were moving after all.
“Thank you.” It sounded more like a question than anything else, like he was trying the words out for her benefit, a foreign language he’d learnt from a book and never had cause to sound out loud before.
Mita looked down at the dead limb, back up at the wound she’d caused, already clotting and healing, down at her bloody hand, and his own gauntlet with the equally bloody knife and stumbled back towards the door with a retching noise.
Now she was going to allow herself to throw up.
Chapter 5: Chapter 5 - Zso Sahaal
Notes:
Quick note! I will be on vacation until the end of June, so there will be a little gap here (also giving my much beloved betas Kas and Nina time to beta) but never fear, the rest of this story WILL be coming at you from July onwards again at the latest.
Much love! <3
Chapter Text
Sahaal watched her flee with something that might have been amusement if there hadn’t been so much of his blood on the floor.
But there was, and he wasn’t even done yet. There were still fibres of his bodyglove embedded deep in the wound, and while it wouldn’t kill him, it would be annoying to deal with later. He dropped his remaining gauntlet to the side and picked the detritus out of his flesh with delicate claws. This, too, would have been a task better suited to Mita’s small hands, but the distant sounds of retching and vomiting told him not to waste his time seeking her out for that. She’d done well enough, he supposed. The cut was cleaner than he could have managed on his own, at this angle.
The rest he could handle himself, and deal with the severed arm, too.
It didn’t take too long either way, he was finished before the miserable noises from deeper inside the shuttle petered out. Just as well, really. Standing back up had been an experience he was glad not to have anyone else witness. His balance was off, leaving him clumsy like an unblooded neophyte. It was bad enough to make him shed his remaining armour just to lessen the discrepancy, and for the first time since he’d woken up on this warp-cursed planet, he got a good look at the state it was in. It was, in one word, atrocious.
There wasn’t a single ceramite plate that wasn’t dented, chipped, or worse; midnight scored down to its shining base metal in galaxies of damage.
For a moment, despair rolled over him. The damage was so extensive, they had no suitable supplies at all, and if they did have to fight, he would have to do it. The little witch could deal damage well enough for someone like her, but a lasgun shot would kill her. Even unarmoured, it would take a very lucky shot to do more than slow him.
His mouth curled down in displeasure. It would be best to avoid combat, but he still had to be ready for it. His shoulder wasn’t bleeding anymore, granulation already spreading as he watched. It would have to be good enough.
The knife was still gummed with clotted blood, but that too would just have to be good enough.
The first steps of the drill he went for were slow, measured, as Sahaal tried to gauge how far he could push himself, and yet his body refused like he expected it too. Turns and twists that should have come as easy as breathing had him struggle to center himself again, and worse, he kept trying to use a hand he didn’t have anymore.
Sahaal was perversely glad that nobody was there to see him try and switch his knife from one hand to the other and predictably, shamefully, drop it even though he could feel the ghost of his fingers wrap around the hilt.
The blade clattered to the ground, and for a moment, he just stared, pulse pounding in his ears from sheer mortification. Nobody had seen that. He had seen that.
It wasn’t going to happen again. He snatched the knife up from the floor, ignoring the way his back protested the motion, ignoring the way his entire body protested the next three repetitions of the drill, all of it lopsided and clumsy but at least he kept hold of the knife- and then on the fourth repetition he didn’t, grip slipping a second time when a lunge sent a stab of fire up through his hip.
His throat worked, breath hitching for two heartbeats before it tore out of him a shout of rage, starting low in his chest and spiraled up into a wordless shriek that rattled the dingy recaf mugs in the shelves. He whirled around - flawless, this time - fist meeting the plasteel of the wall and denting it deep.
The rattled mugs fell, cheap metal clattering against the floor.
Pain flooded up his arm. No part of him had escaped Equixus unscathed, and the pain only stoked his rage higher, about the entire undignified mess of it, the disappointment and humiliation falling over each other in his head to converge into a single thunderstorm.
He wanted something, someone, to destroy, but there was nothing on this shuttle they could spare to lose, and the only living soul on the damned shuttlecraft was the witch and he couldn’t- she hadn’t done anything.
The next scream did turn into words, Sahaal cursing everyone from the Emperor to the filthy little underhive gangs of Equixus and the entire concepts of xenos and Chaos besides, in the filthiest gutter Nostraman he knew, not that any of it was doing the entire situation justice, none of it helped this warp-blasted feeling of- of- of helplessness coiling in his chest, harsh and thorned, enough to drive him to pace the scant few meters between the walls, round after round.
It didn’t help either, and on each pass his eyes slid back over the bloody knife on the floor, and his thoughts went to it too, how good it would feel to cut something, the near-silent, wet parting of flesh, even if it would have to be his own…
His shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat, and without a second thought his remaining hand came up to press his nails into the barely-closed wound. It hurt, but it was better than just pacing. He pressed his fingers down harder, felt the bruise form and fade and form again as he kneaded at the nearly-raw flesh.
“Sahaal?`”
His head swiveled to the door, hand falling away as if he’d been caught in some misdeed.
Mita stood there, all their shared gore and filth scrubbed from her, rags exchanged for some shapeless grey uniform. Her hands were red, as if she’d all but scalded the blood from them.
“What?”” What could she possibly want from him now?
Something in her face hardened, mouth setting into a stubborn line. “I found rations stored in the hold. I came to ask if you were hungry.”
That…was unexpected, both that they had additional food, and that she’d just come and offer it to him. It doused his anger like rain on a campfire. Of course she had to know that it would be on him to defend them, should it become necessary, and therefore that it was in her best interest to keep him fed, but it still. Still. He would have expected that from the Shadowkin, but Mita had faced him with caution and defiance in equal amounts, and absolutely none of that simpering devotion he’d almost gotten used to again. So no, he hadn’t expected her to share food, no matter how sensible it clearly was.
She was still staring at him like she wanted an answer. She probably did want an answer.
“I am not hungry. I just ate.” And he wasn’t likely to forget the taste any time soon, unfortunately.
“What.” Now it was her turn to stare dumbly, eyes roaming from him - halfway out of his body glove and bloody - to the pile of armour in the corner of the room - also bloody - to the empty stain on the floor where his arm had fallen after she’d cut it. She blinked, looked back at him, eyes progressively growing wider and mouth falling open and closing again as if the words were escaping her.
“You- you ate it?” Her voice pitched high, as if the air wasn’t coming right, and he had the fleeting thought that it might be very inconvenient if she fainted now- but also that she’d seen so much worse, why would this be the limit of her tolerance?
“I wasn’t going to waste the meat.” And he’d certainly not feed it to her. “What would you have me do with it instead, enshrine it in some reliquary?”
They apparently did that now, worshiping saints and martyrs and parading their mummified, crumbling remains around like dying for something took more skill than staying alive for it.
That deflated her alright, some of that greenish cast to her face giving way to her usual color. “I- no, of course not, I just-” She exhaled a slow sigh, shoulders settling down. “Never mind. The food is in the main hold if you want it later. I’m going to sit with the vox in case anything important comes through.”
She turned, the empty sleeve of her uniform flapping against her back, drawing his attention to what she wasn’t wearing.
“Where is the Corona?” What had she done- not that she could go very far, this was a shuttle craft, past the atmosphere of a burning trash heap of a planet, there wasn’t any rational way for her to hide the crown from him for long.
This question she seemed to have expected. “In the hold as well. There was an explosives cabinet in the back, the one with a red warning sign. I thought it would be more secure storage.” She paused, shifting in place. “It’s- can you not feel it?”
“Of course I can. It is enlightening” How could it not be? The Corona still carried the presence of his father, not from the time when he’d died, going under the assassin’s knife like a sacrifice, not the screaming fits of prophecy or the disoriented, pained rages that followed. Not the untethered from time and reality specter he’d been.
But the Night Haunter at his finest, all clarity and confidence and righteous anger, the knife that would carve the shape of justice onto the galaxy even if he had to cleave himself in two to do it. How could he not feel that? How could he not bask in it, for all that he wasn’t worthy of it right now?
But the way Mita looked, shifting on the spot like guilt was eating at her- he had to wonder if for her it wasn’t this glorious thing. If for her, wrapping it into rags and not touching its metal was born less from the respect such a symbol deserved, and more sheer fear.
Then again, when had his father not commanded both from the mortals living under his rule?
“That’s one way to put it.” She ran a hand over her face, hiding her expression, like he couldn’t smell the stress hormones on her, not quite fear and not quite anger. It was a scent he’d gotten well used to from her while they’d been cooped up in the hangar together. It was a minor miracle he hadn’t grown entirely numb to it yet.
“For me it’s overwhelming, like someone standing right behind me, breathing down my neck. It was...unpleasant, the first two times. It is calmer now, but still, I prefer not to feel watched while taking my showers. So I left it somewhere safe”
She wasn’t lying, he could tell that, but just as surely he could tell that this wasn’t the whole truth of it. Oh, she had stored it safely, to the best of her belief, that was just true. But her description of carrying the Corona…no, something was missing there and couldn’t help but probe. He’d trusted her with his most precious, most vital possession and she’d not failed him yet but she might. She still might.
“That isn’t all of it.” He took a step towards her, pleased that the motion was smooth, his body finally adjusting to the missing limb, and even more pleased with the half step she took back before she straightened up to meet his eyes in open challenge.
“You want the whole truth of it?” Her shoulders set hard, bracing for his reaction.
He nodded. How was he supposed to trust her if she lied to him?
“Fine. Fine! It feels awful.” She glared up at him like she was waiting for disagreement. She wasn’t going to get any. Not yet. He wanted the truth, after all, all of it, not the bait she would throw to him as distraction. “It’s alive, it’s like you, except more. Like some huge predator that will eat me if I make one wrong move, sitting right on my chest the entire time.”
She couldn’t have known what a compliment she had just paid him, she just couldn’t, but from the way she blinked, surprise rippling over her face, she could feel the ripple of pleasure that echoed in his mind at being compared so.
It did a lot to soften his mood. “So you stored it somewhere fit to contain explosives.” Like the lead band he’d used to blind the astropaths, though he doubted that some explosives cabinet was anywhere as efficient. Still, her squeamishness might even benefit them in the long run, if it made the Corona less detectable in the warp.
“Yes.” Again, that ripple of surprise. She’d expected something else from him. Anger? Violence? Probably. And still she stood there, as tall as her slender, wounded frame allowed, ready to hiss her displeasure at him. He could respect that.
“Show me where you put it, then.” He would rather know where exactly it was either way. “Then you can go back to the cockpit and listen to the vox.”
She made a face at him that he couldn’t read beyond the snake-quick flicker of annoyance that he’d seen on her often enough recently whenever her own injuries hampered her. He didn’t care if he annoyed her, as long as she stayed true.
And she did. The Corona was exactly where she had said it would be, cushioned in her old rags. It could stay where it was for now, and he said as much to Mita’s already retreating back, heading straight for the cockpit.
It suited him fine. She’d already been so ridiculous about the meat of his arm, no doubt she’d be worse about the bones, and what he’d planned for them. But ceramite infused bone was a useful material for any number of uses. He wasn’t going to waste that because of her delicate human sensibilities.
Chapter 6: Chapter 6 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
Bonjour! I am back from my vacation, and the lovely Nina Madou has been relentlessly chugging ahead on the betaing front, so here we go!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They had somehow gotten out before the Inquisiton had shown up. Fantastic. The chatter from Equixus was slow and more static than words, but she had heard enough to know that somewhere behind them, the smouldering remains of Equixus were being gone over with a very fine toothed comb. She was almost grateful for the utter devastation the Night Lords had left in their wake, even if she couldn’t fully silence the pity for all those innocent victims either.
But it had certainly helped them get away, and would hide their trail well, perhaps even destroy it utterly. Luck needed only be on their side for a little longer. She had a plan on how to get out of the system, and by the time anyone came to look for them, if they did so at all, they’d be long gone.
She’d told Sahaal about it earlier, over a shared dinner of the proper rations she’d found.
It had been an odd meal, most of the lumens in the ship turned off, or down as far as they would go. It was easier on his eyes, and she found she didn’t actually mind. Perhaps it was just because that way she couldn’t look too clearly at the ‘goop with starch and protein chunks’ they were eating.
Regardless, it was almost…nice to sit together and eat. Normal, in a way her life hadn’t been normal ever since his ship had crashed on Equixus. So she ate goop with starch and protein chunks in it, and drank tea - actual real tea! From plants! - and told Sahaal about her idea: that once they had reached Baih’Rus, she would use her inquisitorial codes to secure them passage on something warp-capable - a longhaul trader would be ideal - and she would play at being the dutiful inquisitor…and he could either play along or hide.
Both options had their uses, and disguising him as a Raven Guard or similar would be easy enough. He had the looks for it, just not the armour. They could scour the heraldry off, not that a lot of it remained anyways after the beating he’d taken, paint it black, and pretend.
He’d refused, venomously - and loudly. He’d also refused the idea of crawling through some voidship’s vents for what could be weeks or months but he also hadn’t had a better idea on how to get out of the system fast enough, with the limited resources they had, and more importantly: without leaving a trail so bright it could be seen from Terra.
In the end, the idea of defacing his own armour had proven less palpable to him than the vents. So they’d agreed that she would still take the armour in, instead of hiding it. A victory trophy - and oh, how he’d bristled at that, too, hissing something under his breath that she had known to be a curse even if she didn’t understand a word - she would like to see refurbished. He clearly hated the idea. He just as clearly also hated the current state of his armour more, and this way, she could get at least some repairs done.
Not the delicate internals, probably, but even just having the plates themselves mended would be a huge boon already.
So that was the plan.
It went…it went okay. Baih’Rus was a small colony, and usually she would have been more wary to approach it, but all the security it had was a single clipper in stationary orbit over it, shielding the largest settlement below it.
They had no idea what had happened in Equixus, aside from ‘something terrible’, and her codes and rosette bought them the deference they wanted without any of the questions that she had worried about.
Of course the captain of the clipper had to try and be nosey. She felt the sweep, some astropath thinking they could be sneaky and find out how many people were on the ship, and with a growl of anger she lashed back at them.
In the warp, the sweep looked like a wave of sound, a radar ping. She dove right past, letting it slide off what passed as her skin in this not-place, and plunged her fingers into the wave’s source, blades of lightning shredding the offender. She would not be read, she would not be seen by some backwater astropath. She would get out of here and live and they would not stop her.
She yanked herself free from the convulsing mind of the astropath like coming up from a great dive, with dark satisfaction curling in her chest like a grand feline, and that feline started purring when the vox pinged again. It was the captain of the clipper, his voice gone even more simpering than he had already been when she first presented her codes.
“Lady Inquisitor,” and oh, she liked hearing that, and felt herself sit up straighter in the command throne, legs crossed in a pose she’d seen often on Inquisitor Levoix, back when she was serving under her. It was meant to make her look confident, in control. The only one who could see her was Sahaal, granted, and he knew the truth, but that pretense of confidence would still carry in her voice, and that was all that mattered. “I must offer my apologies, I didn’t meant to cause any offense to you, the sweep-”
“Is routine, I am aware.” She waved it off, another gesture that only served getting her into the role she had chosen for herself, here and in the immediate future. She could not be caught in the lie of it under any circumstances. “But impermissible regardless. I’m sure you understand why the nature and number of my company must stay a secret?”
“Of course, of course. Is there perhaps some way to assist you on your mission?” ‘To get you out of my hair before you kill any more of my staff’, she translated for herself.
“There is, yes. I would like passage on a tradeship headed towards Charadon space, at least broadly.” It was a wide shot, but they might as well pick a direction and go for it. The important thing was to get away from Equixus, and proximity to Charadon would certainly more than excuse the presence of a member of the Ordo Xenos. They could always vanish once they’d found something a little less isolated than this corner of the galaxy. Or more, depending. But for all they had to hide now, she didn’t feel like doing that forever. No more cowering. In time, no more hiding either.
“Hmmm, yes you’re in luck, Mistress Inquisitor. The VoidWalker is still in hailing reach, and should be heading the right way. Would you like me to-”
“That won’t be necessary, thank you. If you could just transfer me her codes and heading, I shall hail her myself and arrange for things.” The less the clipper’s captain knew about her, the better. If he didn’t even know for sure if she’d actually left on this particular ship? That would be best.
“Of course, of course. I shall transfer them presently. Err, may the Emperor protect you on your mission.” The captain’s voice shook, relief at getting rid of her so cleanly beyond obvious.
“Thank you. May He protect you as well.” Mita pulled a face at the words that she’d said so often in all seriousness, and now they only tasted like ash. Behind her, comfortable in the shadows beyond various console lights, Sahaal radiated amusement, though she felt no need to prod and find out if it was her own distaste or the captain’s fear that had entertained him. She would let herself pretend for a moment that he was taking pleasure in the discomfort of someone who wasn’t her.
The data packages arrived only moments later. The VoidWalker was a large ship, made for long haul resource transport, venerable, and still very much within reach of their little shuttlecraft. She was, in a word, perfect for them.
Sahaal leaned over the back of the command throne, startling her. She hadn’t heard him move. Despite all this time almost living in each other’s coat pockets, he could still hide himself from her so easily, perhaps even easier now that he had had time to adapt to her psyker skills.
This time, she was sure that his amused humm was caused by her flinching. She thought a pointed reprimand at him - literally, the equivalent of jabbing him with a finger, except doing so in the flesh would have had no result at all, and likely only bruise her finger. His amusement curdled, as she’d intended it too, but he still leaned over her to read what the clipper had sent them, a pointed reply of his own.
That was alright, she could deal with that.
The VoidWalker replied to their hail as fast the distance allowed, and if whoever was manning their vox was intimidated by her identification codes, the crackle of the system hid it well. They weren’t as submissive as the clipper captain, but still showed all the manners Mita had come to expect from people suddenly faced with the Inquisiton.
“Of course we will wait for you. The Emperor’s agents are more than welcome on the Voidwalker, Mistress…”
They wanted a name, of course they did, but she’d thought of that, a little surprise that she hadn’t shared with Sahaal yet.
“Chianni. You may call me Chianni.”
Behind her, Sahaal choked on air.
–
It was another four days to the rendez-vous with the Voidwalker. She’d wait for them, near the translation point instead of doubling back. Mita hadn’t needed to push them to agree to take their little shuttlecraft on, so she felt generous. Waiting was fine. It gave her - them - time to prepare.
So she found herself some scissors and fashioned her hair into something that at least looked intentional, if a little too reminiscent of a Sororitas’ cut. She made time to go over the clothes Sahaal had scavenged her for, try them and make adjustments as she needed.
She knew they were silk or something similarly fine, and now she was pleased to find that they were a matching ensemble that very nearly fitted her too, pants and a wrapped blouses in colors that made her look a little healthier than she felt, even if the pattern was too garish for her tastes and she needed his help again to tie the blouse on properly the first time around, or pin the empty sleeve in place neatly.
It wasn’t anything she’d have chosen for herself, but it suited the image she wanted to project: confidence, control, an agent of the Throne battered but no less dedicated for it.
The wait also gave them time to fall into something of a routine with each other.
Sahaal would keep watch in the cockpit while she slept, folding his bulk down on the floor instead of trying to fit onto the command throne. It would have looked ridiculous. Even out of his bulky armour, he was so tall that she only came up to his collarbones, and she was pretty sure - not that she’d taken the time or opportunity to check - that her thighs were thinner than his lower arm. Every part of the shuttle was sized awkwardly for him, the furniture most of all.
So they had taken to sharing their meals on the floor in what she would hazard to describe as ‘companionable silence’. They ate in the cockpit after she woke, and in the common area - which she’d scrubbed clean off his blood in a fit of boredom on the second day - before she went to sleep.
In between those times he proved elusive, despite the limited size of the shuttlecraft. She’d only managed to find him once, when a nightmare had thrown her from her dreams with all the grace of an artillery shell. Sahaal had been in the hold then, going through the steps of a drill with the shortsword he called a knife, so focused on the slow, methodical repetition of steps and swipes that he hadn’t noticed her.
To Mita, it had seemed quite akin to the focus meditation brought her, his mind narrowed into a single point of being.
It gave her the opportunity to admire the display. Not that he was putting on a show for her, no. But that didn’t change the appeal of watching. She’d thought him graceful in his massive armour already, fast and lethal.
This? This was something else, and he was moving slow enough for her to truly see what he was doing, the way he’d shift weight, twist and turn, compensating his lost arm with astonishing elegance. While she still struggled with trying to put her shoes on with a hand she didn’t have anymore, Sahaal had apparently worked out how to block an attack when he didn’t have anything to block with.
And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to call him beautiful. There was something too alien to him, the way he’d bend and twist to evade unseen attackers, the efficiency of his movements, all just a little too far outside of the human scope for it to sit comfortably in her mind.
But she couldn’t stop watching either, captivated the same way she’d been captivated during her psyker training, when one of her fellow students had failed, and the warp had overcome him. It had elicited the same fear-tinged fascination then as she felt now; watching something awe-inspiring in the truest sense of the word, fear and wonder in equal parts. The warp could have done the same horrific things to her at any time as it did to the other student. Sahaal could likely do things just as horrible, if his temper failed him. And yet, here she was, working with both.
In the end, she had stood there and observed him working his way up into faster and more complicated drills until her feet had grown numb, and she’d returned to bed with the soothing knowledge that Sahaal had set himself at her side - or her at his? - and for all that he frightened her at times, she could hardly wish for a more capable warrior defending them.
Her nightmares didn’t return for the rest of the journey.
—
The VoidWalker came into view slow enough to appreciate - or criticize, apparently, if one happened to be Sahaal.
Mita thought the ship looked good, delicate gilded spires rising from her middle, huge prow painted with the likeness of a saint stretching their wings along the side of her hull. She could appreciate the artistry of it, and perhaps look forward to the luxuries of a hot bath and real food that her exterior promised.
Sahaal thought she looked too lightly armoured, and that her weapon banks could have been placed more advantageously. The decoration warranted no comment, though his face was set into disdain, so why waste words on it?
They exchanged codes with her bridge again, and then were ushered into her belly, a huge hangar that held at least five more shuttlecrafts of similar size, each decorated to fit the look of the VoidWalker herself. The entire setup wasn’t quite lavish enough to belong to a Rogue Trader dynasty, but only barely, so Mita couldn’t help but wonder if that was why the captain had agreed so quickly to help them. The favor of the Inquisition could certainly be the stepping stone towards a Warrant of Trade. She would have to keep that in mind.
For now though, she had other things to tend to first. Once more she was in her silk outfit, rosette prominently displayed on her chest, hair as tidy as she’d been able to manage - here, Sahaal had been no help at all - but without hiding her injuries. A laspistol sat on her hip, easy to draw with her remaining hand, and for this, Sahaal had not just been useful, but meticulous, insisting she practice until the motion came smooth enough to satisfy his standards. It was a necessary caution, when he and the Corona would have to remain on the shuttle, until he found the moment to sneak out and keep a closer watch on her.
Her nerves still jittered as she stepped out of the shuttle and into the hangar to greet the captain. He surprised her, though she shoved the emotion away before it could manifest on her face. She’d expected someone older in charge of a ship like this, not a man about her age, with augmentations that seemed more a sign of vanity than utility, jeweled vox beads, lenses and who knew what else working along the side of his face to give the impression of something closer to a masquerade mask than bare mechanics.
“Captain Klegg. Thank you for waiting up on me.” She offered her hand - the splinted finger and all - to him, watching him bow over it and kiss her knuckles like she was some noble. There was apprehension on his mind, but nothing concrete. Good.
“Mistress Chianni, how could I have refused a request from His Holy Inquisition? And I am glad I didn’t try to, you seem…” He paused, perhaps trying to be diplomatic, like she didn’t have a mirror. Like she hadn’t carefully cultivated her present appearance to make the most of it.
“Injured?” She offered, blunt, and the captain nodded at that. “No need to dance around it. I am injured. How much have you heard about the events at Equixus?”
How much truth could she get away with to hide the lies?
“Not much. The hive went dark, and some sort of…corrupt influence struck them. We were far away at the time.”
Yes, because otherwise you’d be dead, Mita couldn’t help but think. No ship that had been close would have survived the arrival of the Night Lords in the system.
“That is accurate enough. I cannot share the details, you understand, but the battle was fierce.” Both blunt, hard truths, “and I was injured. But there are news I have to bring back to my superiors.” Another truth, then a lie. She took a breath, and her reluctance was only half-played. The vulnerability of the next truth sat ill with her, but the VoidWalker and her captain presented an opportunity she could not, would not, miss.
“I already requested your help, but perhaps you would be willing to aid me further?” She touched her hand to her empty sleeve. “If your medicae could spare an augmentic? I will have my order reimburse you, of course.”
“Oh, oh no no no, none of that. As I told you, Mistress Chianni, it’s an honor to help you. Of course my medical staff will be at your disposal.” He sounded almost genuine in his refusal, but there was something there, some hunting instinct coming into his mind. Of course, the more he did for her, the bigger a favour she would owe him down the line.
“I will show you there myself, once you have settled into- I hope having quarters prepared for you wasn’t too forward? Would you rather stay in your shuttle?”
That, too, she could answer honestly. “No, truly, whatever guest quarters you have will no doubt be a leap up from this” She tilted her head back at said shuttle. “I’ll be happy to be free of it for a while. But, since you brought it up: I must insist that nobody from your crew or otherwise approach it. I have everything well confined, but there are dangerous things brought back from Equixus that are best left undisturbed except by people who know how to handle them.” Like a certain Night Lord no doubt listening in on them right now.
“Though-” She stepped closer, and at a gesture, Captain Klegg bent his head down to her, the light sending rainbows sparkling off his augments. “I did acquire a…trophy of sorts that I can show, and in fact would like to get some refurbishment for, if possible. It would look marvelous in my office.”
There, offer him a taste of secrecy, like they were conspiring together, like she was taking him into her confidence. “If you could let me borrow a grav-cart…”
It worked like a charm, his eyes lighting up - the augmentic one doing so literally, and minutes later she had the armour laid out on said grav-cart - with Sahaal’ help, hidden away safely as he was in the shuttle. It clearly pained him to part with it, and she thought she understood why, even without delving any deeper into his mind than what he was freely displaying to her psyker senses. The armour was part of him, as much as his arm had been, and even if right now it was useless, letting it go hurt.
It hurt enough that she couldn’t help some attempt at comfort, putting a hand on his arm as he stood there, staring down at his armour with those bottomless eyes.
She wasn’t sure why she’d bothered. His eyes darted to the point of contact, confusion rippling over his mind like waves on a disturbed lake, something rolling under the surface that she had no chance of naming. She took her hand back, and he settled.
“I promise I’ll take good care of it, and get it back to you repaired.”
He nodded sharply, once, and stepped back from the cart, vanishing into the shadows of the shuttle the way he’d no doubt vanish into the VoidWalker as soon as he could.
Notes:
Credit for Captain Klegg's name goes to Nina !
Chapter 7: Chapter 7 - Zso Sahaal
Notes:
Time for a longer chapter!
I need you to know that while writing this fic, this was the point where i realized that. Oh. Oh no. I am in for a long haul on this.
Chapter Text
He had to wait hours until he could slip from the shuttle, until well after the VoidWalker had finally translated into the warp. He could feel that, the not-pressure of something that wasn’t physical reality settling over the ship. The baseline serfs outside grew quiet with it too, as if even they could feel the danger they were in.
Sahaal certainly could, skin prickling with the instinctual awareness that something was watching him even though he knew that no human would see him this deep in the shadows, black bodyglove blending seamlessly into the darkness. But the feeling only abated when his fingers ghosted over the wrapped up shape of the Corona, securely tied to his chest now. He could deal with his armour being taken elsewhere, he could deal with his arsenal being reduced down to the combat knife strapped to the small of his back or the lighter ones holstered on his thighs. He was absolutely not going to hand the crown off to anyone else except Mita, much less leave it on their shuttle without proper guard.
And for all his skills, he couldn’t be in two places at once. He’d gotten into the maintenance tunnels underneath the hangar, crawling underneath great snakes of cabling, and tried to decide if he should find her first or his armour. He settled on the armour. The little witch had proven that she could take care of herself. She’d fare well enough against some no-doubt useless noble. The thought that she might go and give him the same treatment she’d applied to the astropath certainly cheered him, even if it was unlikely.
His armour however had no such recourse. So that was what he had to find first. He followed the scent of her blood, still clotted thick onto the ceramite, through the tunnels, past pipes that funneled water and heat from one end of the ship to another. Soon, the bundles of cables were also wrapped in parchment, dripped with wax seals bearing the skull and cog symbol of Mars.
She’d seen his armour to the tech priests then, just like she’d told him she would. It settled something further in his chest. Two more bends and crossing some abyssal refuse chute later, the stink of incense finally overpowered the scent of her blood. Sahaal started to climb. Humans, baseline or augmented to the furthest extent, so very rarely looked up. They learnt young that danger came from their fellow humans, not the skies.
He’d teach at least some of them differently throughout this journey, even though hunting for sustenance felt so… base.
Sahaal’s fingers landed on the Corona again, letting a little of its clarity of purpose seep into his skin. Soon he would get to hunt properly again, to bring vengeance for his father. But even the loftiest ideals required survival to be achieved first. So he would survive, and then he would ensure that this rotten little corner of the Imperium remembered that the Inquisition wasn’t the worst thing that could be waiting for them.
Soon he was high enough up to be both safe from discovery and have a good vantage point, and settling into those great bundles of cables that fed the cogitators below, he watched. Mita had been true to her word. There was his armour, being cleaned of her blood by red-robed apprentices so covered with purity seals they seemed to have trouble moving.
The thought that they might think his armour contagious - his! When his dedication had stayed pure unlike so many of his brothers! - amused him enough to make up for the instinctual burst out outrage at them touching his armour at all. At least he would not be able to complain about carelessness, though that much incense would have been a hazard for anyone who still had organic lungs.
When he had satisfied his curiosity, he slipped back into the vents and retraced his steps. He’d caught the scent of the current Mita - alive, bathed with cheap soap and wrapped in expensively perfumed silks - earlier, diverging from the path her dead blood had taken.
It was time to ensure that she was being tended to as well as his armour.
Another techpriest was seeing to her, by the time he found what passed for an apothecarion on a trade vessel. They measured and tested her, having her move what remained of her shoulder until she grimaced with pain and then let a swarm of baseline menials descend on her for the more conventional treatments of redressing her wounds. They bowed and scraped and averted their eyes like she could destroy any one of them with a glance if she so chose - which he supposed she could have, given enough cause.
With a little start he realized that she liked it, a little twitch in the corner of her mouth as someone pulled out the stitches in her arm clumsily enough to make her flinch, and promptly all but threw themselves at the floor to ask for forgiveness.
No doubt she could sense their fear as clearly as he could smell it. Mita wielded the title of her stolen office like a familiar weapon, clearing the way for obedience through fear, exactly like he’d done so, so often in his life. He settled in to keep an eye on her, perhaps to appreciate her way of work more than just to guard her.
—
He followed her all over the ship the rest of the day, learning the layout of the vessel as he learnt its inhabitants. Here the mess hall and the kitchens, there the vox center and its mistress, the bridge this way and the realspace and warp engines in that direction. He learnt the faces of the commanding officers, anyone they might have to put extra pressure on. Anyone who could hide secrets that might hurt or help them.
It truly proved enlightening to watch her work, the way she pulled people this way or with her words. He had no idea how she figured out what would work, if she was using her witch abilities to find the chinks in their armour or if there was some obscure human interaction there he was missing. The important thing was that it worked, and that she played the role she had chosen for herself with utter confidence.
The captain invited her for dinner, and Sahaal had worried then that the wine served might loosen her tongue in the wrong ways, or worse that some other treachery might strike, poison in the food or drink, but she had stayed in control and none of that happened. The dinner had ended, and she’d retreated to the rooms that had been given to her. The suite that would have looked out into open space if they’d been in realspace, but here in the warp the windows instead were shuttered with screens that displayed a plethora of landscapes that he watched her page through like a book while she searched the rooms for surveillance, until she settled on some ocean vista at the same instance as her mind slid against his in quiet invitation, light as a feather. Clearly she was satisfied with the lack of results of her search.
He slid from the vent next to her bed and came over to her, still making sure to be quiet and as unobtrusive as possible. Her shoulders relaxed at the sight of him and she came to meet him, rising to tip toe as he bent down. She had to brace herself against his shoulder, hand inches from the Corona, but that was acceptable. They had agreed to keep things quiet, and he would not abide her in his mind quite so often. So whispering like conspirators it was, even if it required her to be so close.
“You made it.” The statement was… so inane that he didn’t dignify it with a response beyond a huff of breath. Like she had doubted his ability to outwit a shipful of baselines who didn’t even know they had a Night Lord in their midst? And never would be any wiser, if this went according to plan.
“My armour is being repaired.” He’d seen that. Which was an actual achievement, and much more important than him making his ways through the vents like he’d been trained to.
For some reason, that made her sigh, breath gusting over the side of his face. She smelled like her dinner still, wine and meat and fresh fruit.
“I told you I would arrange for it. Captain Klegg seems quite willing to follow my leads.” Something lit up in the back of her eyes, a quiver of excitement he knew he shared at times: the thrill of the hunt, when your quarry moved like you’d predicted it to for the first time. “We can use him.”
Sahaal nodded, and perhaps she could feel some of his excitement at the idea as well because her smile widened enough to show blunt little teeth, an expression he’d seen rarely on her.
They could be in control here, subvert this ship full of dumb little mortals to their goals, their needs. When he’d done that to the shadowkin, he’d felt almost sorry for having to abuse that trace of kinship with them like this. But here? In those gilded chambers, steering people who wouldn’t know justice if it bit their throats out - and it would, one day, it would - here he felt not a single pang of sympathy.
“Rest, then. I will keep watch.”
In case the hold ‘Inquisitor Chianni’ had on their host was not as firm as it should be. Just in case. They’d both seen too much betrayal lately.
“You’ll watch me sleep?” He couldn’t tell if the thought amused or annoyed her. Perhaps both. She’d certainly managed to do both at once to him when she’d picked the name of her role. Why should he not return the favour?
“Yes? I have done it before.” Many times, really. At first to make sure she didn’t die on him, keeping his attention on the rhythm of her breath and pulse, then later by sheer proximity, because she slept so much more than he did, and finally, in the shuttle, because he’d once heard her whimper in her sleep, the sound pained enough to make him investigate. For all he knew some daemon had tried to pry into her head.
Instead he’d found her just tossing and turning in her sleep, putting strain on her multitude of injuries and hurting herself. Baselines were ridiculous at times, noisy little things even when asleep.
Somehow, that seemed to bother her. She fell back onto the flat on her feet, face set into the careful emptiness of someone trying to hide their thoughts. “I didn’t know that.” At least she kept her voice down still.
“You were asleep.” So how would she even know to begin with? It hadn’t been important either way.
“That- never mind.” She waved it off. “Do as you like. Help me with the blouse? I am tired.” Perhaps it was just that, exhaustion making her moody. The little witch got like that, and the first time they’d ended up all but spitting venom at each other over it under their breaths, in that cramped little hole in the shuttle hangar on Equixus, until she’d withdrawn and told him that she was exhausted. Sleep had indeed resolved her foul mood almost entirely then, and Sahaal was willing to lay tonight’s odd reactions at the feet of the same dysfunction of hers, too.
So instead of arguing a point she’d dropped and he felt was stupid to begin with, he helped her untie and unwrap the blouse before she slipped under a blanket that seemed to swallow her whole. He knelt down on the side of her bed closer to the door, mind slipping into the lightest meditation without much effort.
When she woke, he’d already slipped back into the vents to find breakfast.
–
A few days later, they were fitting Mita for her new arm, or rather the socket her new arm would sit in. It looked odd right now, shiny metal against the still-healing flesh of her shoulder. She was unconscious for it, making it all the more necessary for Sahaal to watch while she was helpless under the chirurgeon’s knives.
It didn’t take long, but even so, it was unnerving to watch so many people who weren’t just strangers, but unwitting enemies of them, handle her in such a state. It made his hackles rise and his fingers dig into the metal of the vent until she finally woke up again, unhappy and in pain, but no more than expected.
It was at the very least a decent excuse for her to retire to her rooms, where the only enemy he had to keep an eye on was the Captain.
Because of course Klegg visited to ‘ensure her comfort’, and then stayed for tea and some board game or other, and even Sahaal could tell that the man was behaving like some courting bird fluffing its plumage to look more impressive.
How Mita could stand his vapid babbling, he didn’t know. She didn’t seem annoyed, but for all he knew, she was just playing her part. She’d done that well so far. It just didn’t make it any less mindnumbing for him to listen to the prattling.
If possible, it actually became more annoying in the following day, though it also convinced him that his little witch could run circles around the Captain, or be rid of him entirely any time she chose to. He’d seen her do the latter, when finally she had grown tired of the man and banished him from her suite under claims of ‘exhaustion’, and how she would spend the rest of the day in ‘quiet contemplation’ only to sigh at the room - at Sahaal, keeping watch on her - the moment the Captain was out the door, a secret little smile curling her lips up.
The thing she would be contemplating - quietly, whispering between each other - was the information they both had gathered, all the better to plan ahead with.
It was about the only useful thing he found to occupy himself with: to map the web of dependencies, alliances and hidden hates that wove through the VoidWalker, and soon enough those tiny, human concerns bored him, too. By then it had become clear that Inquisitor Chianni was quite safe on the ship. Her arm was coming along well, and so Sahaal had chosen to range further from her side and deep into the ship.
First, he’d only gone to hunt - vermin, for the most part, though one particularly unlucky menial had fallen prey to him too, their remains now hidden so well now that not even the rats would find them - but soon it became an excuse to stretch his legs. There were parts of the ship long abandoned and forgotten, hallways and crew quarters given over to nothing but dust and rats. They were the perfect place to challenge his body as it healed, until he could be made whole again.
But not even an inquisitorial rosette could acquire an augmentic fitted to both his flesh and his armour. At least not easily.
It left the taste of unaimed resentment in the back of his throat, nearly enough to choke, after the last time the witch was fitted for her arm. It wasn’t her fault that such repairs were easier to source for her than for him. It still galled him. Especially when she did get her new arm fitted, the work fine enough to almost look cosmetic.
Worse yet, Captain Klegg had made himself a near-permanent installment at her side. Enough so that in the quiet, boring hours when she slept and Sahaal stalked the length of the ship unseen, the crew was gossiping about them.
About the Lady Inquisitor and how regal she’d looked in the coat that the Captain had gifted her. That he had gifted her something so fine at all. That they took their meals together. The implications were more than blunt enough that Sahaal caught and, in the end, brought them to her.
Mita was sitting on her bed, trying to let a metal coin wander over her new fingers as he slipped into the room. She didn’t flinch, her eyes just flickering up to him in quiet acknowledgement.
“The crew thinks the Captain is fucking you. Or that he at least wishes he was.”
He reported it the same way he had told her about a lover’s spat turned deadly between two of the Officers the previous night.
The coin tumbled from her hand and he snatched it out of the air to offer it back to her while she was still spluttering, face flushed a shade of red he hadn’t seen on her before.
The witch took a deep breath, shoulders relaxing consciously, for all that her hand stayed clenched around the coin like it was some talisman.
“Do they? I should have expected that. Klegg isn’t subtle.” Mita chewed her lower lip. “I’ve been considering it. We could use that.”
Her head turned to him, eyes searching his face and finding surprise there. He hadn’t thought- something about the suggestion sat uneasy with him, like he was whoring her out for his benefit, and clearly she could see that much, or perhaps feel it, her mental fingers sliding over his temples.
“You don’t like the idea.”
“You would be vulnerable.” Unarmed, naked - worse, unarmoured - and with him too far away to do much, should anything go wrong. But he could be honest enough with her to admit that this wasn’t the sole reason for his disquiet.
“And you’ve never whored before, have you?” He paused, rolling his own unease over in his head, testing it like he’d test a sore muscle. “I won’t make you.” Because it likely mattered to her, the way it would never matter to him, if their roles were reversed.
But they were not, and she wasn’t some slave or serf to be ordered into someone’s bed.
She leaned back on her hands, looking at him like he’d presented her with an unexpected riddle. “You think of it like that?”
The thought seemed to amuse her, though Sahaal couldn’t quite see why.
“You don’t?” Didn’t she?
“Not really. You couldn’t ‘make me’.” Mita said it with utter confidence, and that would have bothered him more if it hadn’t been true. He couldn’t, any more than she could make him do anything except by asking for it.
“And I have been flirting with Klegg. It’ll be good insurance. Either he thinks it’ll get him more favours, or if someone comes asking about me in the end, he’ll keep the secret, rather than admit he’s let some traitor-witch,” her mouth curled up, less a smile and more flashing her teeth at some hypothetical hunter of theirs, “seduce him. We’ll be safer. And I could do with a little diversion.”
Her mouth softened on that, a true, indulgent smile rather than a threat display.
That was- that was unexpected. Of course it made things easier, if she wanted this, and any risk of it, he’d mitigate.
“If you say so.” It still didn’t sit right with him, though he could no longer put the finger on why the idea stuck in his throat like it did. She wanted it. He’d be there, making sure that nothing worse than some highborn’s cock got slid into her. It’d be fine.
—
It meant at least, that when the Captain started to touch her - a hand on the small of her back, a touch to her arm to gain her attention - Sahaal could sit there and patiently argue that corner of himself back down that saw some noble get handsy with a women and immediately assumed that he would force himself on her, and wouldn’t it be better to spare his little witch that? Intervene before the crime truly came to pass, even if he would have to be more subtle than his father’s teaching indicated?
But no, she wanted this. She said that she did, and knowing that he could read the way she leaned into those little touches, smiled in response to some flattery that even Sahaal could tell was empty, all the while rolling her eyes in the back of his head. She wanted this. If she did not, a single touch of her mind would let him know and then he could still- no, he couldn’t peel the man’s skin off with his own fingernails. But he could do something.
Of course, it didn’t happen like that. What happened was another two weeks of having to watch Captain Klegg paw at her, of Mita starting to call him ‘Kastor’ and smiling and inviting him to tea to her rooms, the tension growing until it was almost its own flavour in the air of the suite, or perhaps that was just the perfume that the captain seemed to have taken too, some mixture of leather and exotic woods that presumably cost more than any of the lower deck serfs made in a year. Until the man finally delivered what he clearly thought of his coup de grace, the finishing touch to his ‘seduction’, like he wasn’t the one being led and seduced.
This time, when he arrived for tea, he brought a great, veiled box with him, suspended on antigrav and Sahaal knew, he knew what it was with the same surety he had known that the Corona was gone from his possession when he woke on Equixus, with the same absolute, bone-deep certainty that told him that his father was right about the Imperium.
That was his armour.
And this highborn ponce was going to gift it to Mita as if it was his to give at all.
It went exactly as he had expected. The witch had answered her door, blouse wrapped just a little too loosely to hide the dip of her throat, and Klegg had, with grand gesture and fanfare, pulled the sheet back to reveal his armour.
It was, once more, flawlessly midnight blue, bronze trims polished, skulls and wings and lightning bolt freshly etched, as if it had come directly from the Mechanicus forges. No trace of the damage remained, not on the outside.
It had fingerprints all over it, where the captain had pawed it the same way he’d pawed Mita all these times.
For a moment, a veil descended on Sahaal’s eyes, a shimmer of pure, unadulterated rage. No, beyond rage. This was wrath, some transhuman emotion that went so far beyond what a simple mortal mind might have conjured. How dare he. How- even the thought choked, beyond words. Beyond reasons. He would break every single bone in his body, stretch his entrails across the bridge, feed him his own balls-
Something slid into his brain like an ice knife, tearing through that veil of rage with a single, cold imperative. ‘NO’
Not a word, not even a order, just a denial that flattened him to the bottom of the vent, hand just a fingerwidth from the grille he could have slipped out of… and outside, Mita walked around his suit of armour, making all the appropriate noises at such a royal gift, but her eyes were fixed on his position. No. He’d agreed. They’d agreed. They needed Klegg alive and hale. He. Would. Not. Kill. Him.
Inside the vent, the tension went out of Sahaal’s body. She was right. She was right and if she could bear to let that man touch her body, he would bear letting him touch his armour. That was fair.
The knife slid out of his brain, and slowly, carefully, he moved into the other room alongside them, just in time to hear Mita say ‘no no. Put it in the bedroom.’ and then, in this artificially breathless voice she’d been using on the captain recently: ‘Say, it looks flawless from the outside. Did your techpriests actually restore its full function?’
Sahaal paused. Surely not…
“Oh, as far as they can tell, yes.” Klegg preened under her attention, like he’d tightened even a single screw in this repair. “I had them restore the cabelings, seals and sensor suits as far as they were able to. Of course we couldn’t test it-” He shrugged, playing coy, “but the VoidWalker is a little short on Astartes.”
It drew a laugh from her, bright and startled, eyes landing on the vent in the wall away, and inside, Sahaal smiled back at her. Yes. This was them, letting the whole ship dance to a tune they couldn’t even hear. Let everyone else think they had a tame Lady Inquisitor on board, alone and injured. Let them all be wrong and only know it when he came for them, midnight clad and claws sharp.
The knowledge warmed him as he watched Mita direct where the suit was to take its place across from her bed, and then command the serfs out. It still warmed him when Klegg pulled her against his chest for a kiss that she leaned into it, and brushed the jacket off his shoulders and when he undid the knot in her blouse and revealed the tattoo that his medical staff had clearly already told him about. He could let Captain Klegg have the lie of Inquisitor Chianni. He had the truth of Mita Ashyn, and that was much, much better.
Even if it meant having to watch them fall into bed together, all that writing and gasping and ridiculous base human behaviour, though at least he supposed he was spared half of the stupid sweet talk when Mita just shoved the captain’s head down between her legs to shut him up, and even though he couldn’t see into her head the way she could see into his at times, even though the angle he had was wrong to see her face, he could tell by the tilt of her head that she wasn’t looking at the man she was using. Not when she pushed him down, not when her head fell back into the pillows with a curse, not when later she rolled them over with the strength of her new augmentic and rode him to her own completion.
—-
Admittedly, he couldn’t wear his armour - the vents were simply too small, but it was there, and perhaps, in the following days, he spent a while standing in front of it, fingertips pressed against the winged skull on its chest, just inhaling the smell of armour polish and fresh paint to fortify his own patience. It was here, it was repaired, he would be wearing it again. All else could wait.
Well, almost all else.
After the first time, Klegg had gotten rather clingy, and Mita played along with it, inviting him back. There had been a few more times, and Sahaal hadn’t expected her to want to do this again, for whatever reason, much less the way she’d clearly enjoyed it, and there had been more gifts too, though nothing that could compare to his armour.
Still, the thought lingered, that aside from him, nobody knew what she had done on Equixus, that she had helped him. She could go back, if she wanted. Did she want it? His nails drew over the surface of the ceramite, the sound sharp enough to hurt his ears. He did it again.
He had the truth of her, harsh and bloody, but she could still go back to the comfortable lie.
“Sahaal.”
Mita stepped beside him, fingertips ghosting over his empty shoulder for a moment before falling away. She didn’t use his name often, and when she did, usually because it was important, too important to wait for his attention to drift to her by anything less than his name.
“Do you remember the first time you saw someone die?”
What an odd question.
“No.” The concept of mortality felt like it had been eternal in his mind, a fundamental truth of the universe that he’d never had the luxury to deny.
She hummed, thought about it for a moment. “Do you remember the first time you killed someone?”
That, he had a better answer for. “Of course. Another aspirant. He tried to stab me in the back to improve his own chances. I was faster and had better aim. I cut his throat.” The blood had been hot and sticky on his skin, plain human blood, not yet genehanced.
“How old were you?” There was some note in her voice, in her mind. She was driving at something, digging for it, but he couldn’t see her goal yet.
“Ten, eleven maybe? As I said, I was an aspirant, freshly harvested from Terra. The memories are… imprecise, this far back.” It had simply been too long, and too unimportant a part of his life to be remembered, aside from the unfading muscle memory it had imparted on him. “We only really remember the important things, from back then.” The first kill, the training, the struggle with and against his fellow aspirants, such things. Not the soft human life before. Not the useless daily chores and torments. “Why?”
“I was curious.” She shrugged, flesh arm brushing against him, and he let her. “I was wondering if- I was a bit older than you, then. I was twelve when the inquisition took me, freshly sanctioned. Fourteen when I first killed someone.”
Sahaal looked down at her, still unsure where this was going.
“They had me practice on prisoners, trying to pry knowledge from their head, if it wasn’t so important that me being clumsy would have failed a mission. Or on serfs, when no appropriate prisoners could be provided. When I was fourteen, they asked me to dig as deep as I could, find everything I could. I did. I still needed to touch people to do that, back then. So when I had everything, and came out of the trance…. You’ve seen what I can do. Her eyes had melted. There was blood all over my face and hands.”
There was distress on her voice, a faint tremor, and he wondered if this actually upset her, or if she just thought that it should. He’d seen her kill. He’d seen her enjoy the power she could wield over people, in fear and death. This tremor was… a relic. The deathshroud of the Mita Ashyn who had gotten a tattoo of the Throne over her heart.
“It was terrifying but also…” Mita swallowed, throat working over the words stuck there. He knew that feeling. “I’d done it right. I’d gotten everything. I hadn’t failed, and failure would have meant death. It meant death at the word of someone else, who could decide, as arbitrarily as they pleased, that I was unworthy of life.”
She swallowed again, voice hardening and look up to meet his eyes, unafraid and unflinching and true, the last of that shroud burning behind her eyes.
“Do you think Kastor Klegg ever had to feel like that? Like his life laid fully in the hands of someone else? That he had to kill or die himself, before he was even half an adult in the eyes of the law?”
That was what she was getting at. Understanding rose sweetly inside his chest. They were the same, the two of them. Used and thrown away by an uncaring Imperium, marked for death for refusing to submit their fates, forged into blades that now turned on their former masters. They’d both been made in blood and death, and now those who had made them would reap what they had sown so long ago.
He’d never expected to find such a mirror of himself outside of another of his brothers. After realizing how long he’d been gone and what they had turned into, he’d never expected to find one at all- and Mita… Mita had felt the same way, buried under duty and faith and fear. She wouldn’t go back to her comfortable lie anymore than he would.
Klegg would be forgotten the moment they left his ship, no matter how often he was a guest in Mita’s bed.
Chapter 8: Chapter 8 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
A little later in the day than usual! I'm back to work so unfortunately it's Afternoon Updates during the week now (nobody hates this more than me, trust me)
Chapter Text
It wasn’t the worst way to travel. They’d exchanged the shuttlecraft for something nicer, helped along by the number of trinkets she’d gotten from Klegg and then sold off bit by bit. Of course Sahaal had to stay in hiding, most of the time, but he was good at that, and they got very, very good at being quiet with each other.
He’d even taken to teaching her battle sign, something that still filled her with a flush of pride when she used it - brushing her hair back with her fingers held just so to ask for his aid, or hailing down a street transport with the same gesture that would let him know where she was headed. She had been privy to secret knowledge for most of her life, but this was different. It wasn’t a requirement for a mission, or a reward doled out by some miser of a master. It was a sign of trust, Zso Sahaal giving her the secrets of his legion and trusting that she would keep them as close to her chest as he did.
They were skirting the edge of the Segmentum Solarum at this point, threading the needle between the higher Imperial presence here and the fact that nobody was expecting a sole inquisition operative to actually be anything but what she claimed to be. But it was necessary. Getting the necessary augments for Sahaal required expert knowledge and specific materials, and both would be easier sourced from somewhere not at the edge of the Imperium. Even with only one arm he was a terrifying fighter, but if they wanted to do more than survive on the run, if they wanted revenge - and they did - they needed to address this. So here they were, with Mita wearing the name of Chianni once more, on Cardrim. She had found out that there was a somewhat covert Mechanicum operation here, excavating xenos ruins beneath the surface. Conveniently, one of the access points was close to the town they had taken residence in - the only one with a shuttle port worth the name.
Sahaal would be ahead already, finding his way into the complex to get her in, then it would be a matter of securing themselves the cooperation of a techpriest. The months on the run had done more to hone the subtlety of her art than nearly all her Inquisition training ever had, leaving Mita confident that she would bend anyone who still had an organic brain to their shared will without killing them. She wandered the edge of town towards the odd rocks the locals had covered in shrines of the imperial creed, pretending to stop and pray at one ever so often, lighting or snuffing candles by some pattern only two people in this corner of the galaxy were likely to understand. It was a map just for her, to lead her deep into the forest of black columns and carved white marble saints. It reminded her of a treasure hunt, except what awaited her at the end wasn’t some shiny trinket but the most magnificent weapon anyone could hope to wield, perched on top of an old, broken shrine like a gargoyle, motionlessly fading into the shadows.
‘You’re late.’ He hopped down, hand cutting a sharp motion into the air that technically read ‘assault delayed’, but she knew what he meant, just as he knew that her reply - hand swept past the side of her face - read ‘stealth’ and meant ‘I had to make sure I wasn’t followed’.
They would have to be very, very quiet until they had achieved their mission’s objective. So there wouldn’t be any vox and as little psychic contact as possible until they were ready to set their plan in motion; The blackstone here had been tuned to amplify a psyker’s gift instead of dampening it. It would be most prudent if they could just move like shadows until they could spring their trap.
Mita pulled her binox on and stepped around to see what Sahaal had found for them. There was some old shaft dug into the ground behind the shrine, plunging into the ground like a maw. There had been a grate across it once, its edges now cut and molten. Whoever had tried to scavenge here before - some cold trader or xenophile collector perhaps - didn’t matter, or rather it mattered only in that it provided a convenient path for them now.
She gave a sharp nod, and he swept her up against his chest and dropped into the shaft, jump pack flaring sharply only once, to break their fall enough to be silent. Then she stood on her own feet again, Sahaal prowling ahead, and her ducking into his shadow, yet another hidden blade in his arsenal.
She knew full well that he could have done this on his own, find and steal away some tech adept for her to break, but he didn’t want to. There was joy in hunting together, and by now she felt it almost as keenly as he did.
After an hour, they had descended far enough into the tunnels for earth and roughly hewn rock to give way to the same black stone that formed the forest of pillars above, soon lined by a green glow which then became bright enough for Mita to shed her binox again, before they finally heard the sound of industrious looting from further ahead. There was no doubt that this was the Mechanicum agents they’d been looking for. Nobody else would go about their excavations with this amount of incense or binharic chanting on the side.
Sahaal’s head tilted forward so she came to his side, let him tug her against his chest again and then they were going up, driven half by the strength of his own legs, half by the power of his jump pack. They landed high on a ledge she’d not even seen from the ground, and crept forward from there into the next hall, through a gate covered in green glowing glyphs. This was the area they wanted, bustling with red robed figures busy breaking sections out of the walls or piling their finds onto grav-carts.
There was a perimeter of skitarii guards, both expected and disregarded for the time being. The main hall opened into several corridors, one of which would surely hold what they needed.
Both of them observed the crowd below, who was coming and going and in what rhythms. There was something to be said about the priesthood of Mars being so very orderly: if you found the rhythms they lived by, you could slip through the teeths of the cogs so very easily.
Mita picked a corridor for them, less used and less crowded, the door nearly out of sight from anyone down in the hall.
Sahaal picked the moment, once more carrying her down, where the cold green light deepened the shadows instead of banishing them. They slipped past the skitarii, into the corridor, then into the chamber beyond with only the slightest breeze to mark their passing, barely enough to ruffle the robe of some adept who turned with an alarmed beep. But they were already past, up and safely hidden near the ceiling again.
Time to pick a target.
Someone who knew what they needed, could be isolated and carried off without a veritable swarm of skitarii coming after them, which did unfortunately rule out some of the older Magi who all seemed bent on collecting bulky augments and extra limbs the way people their age usually collected mugs.
She settled down to let her mind wander, her touch refined by months of practice, unfettered by the rules that had kept her captive for so long and now enhanced further by the blackstone around her. She skimmed minds like an eagle looking for fish to dive too, keen-eyed yet unseen from below. This one too young and inexperienced, that one too venerable, there one who was a personal favourite of a VERY possessive archmagos… Ah. There.
Her focus shifted, a little mental marker tagged onto the one she thought would serve them. Not quite a magos biologis, but close enough. She could see the knowledge they wanted seething in her mind, the little adept planning her next surgeries and upgrades. She even had some passing familiarity with power armour. That was as good as they were going to get here, and well, if more improvement was needed in the future, repeating this performance shouldn’t be an issue.
Showing Sahaal the one they wanted was easy. She leaned against his side and let his consciousness run along her own like water in a channel. He wouldn’t lose their target again, no matter how many red-robed acolytes and adepts were bustling around, nearly identical from this far up.
Now- to scatter the herd.
Most of the Mechanicus still knew fear even if their bodies didn’t react quite the same way anymore. Adrenaline was hard to come by without the right glands. But fear wasn’t just hormones.
He dropped down into the shadows, silent as always, while above she set to work setting the mood for him. The warp shivered under her fingers as she plucked it like the strings of a grand instrument, thrumming into the blackstone, lights flaring and fading in turn, a heartbeat rhythm. The first heads came up, the first whispers followed, binharic clicks and regular low gothic confusion.
In the middle of the room, sunk into the pulsating shadows, Sahaal shoved himself against one of the pillars, making it groan like a living thing in pain.
A wave of unease went through the room, the first one instinctively recoiling from the pillar. She watched as Sahaal moved further down the line, closer to the back of the room. They wanted to drive the crowd out, after all. Well, most of them.
Mita threw enough kine force at the few lumens in the room to shatter them in a dramatic chain of small explosions.
Another hard shove from Sahaal on a pillar that clearly had been damaged before, fractures bursting up its sides in a series of boltershot explosions, while she leaned into the warp, grabbed the mortal little mind of the nearest adept and wretched it sideways into animal fear. Wasn’t there something moving in the dark? Wasn’t there a shimmer of metal where it should not be? Had they not all heard of the terrible battle that had to be fought to free this planet of the xenos taint? What if-
Her target broke into a heedless sprint for the door, shoving past his fellow techpriests, so she jumped from him to another, summoned another ghostly image into their head - it wasn’t the eyes that saw, it was the brain and the brain was still flesh enough - and another another and then Sahaal was among them, cloaked in shadows, lower to the ground than anyone his size should have been able, his lightning claws raking through flesh and metal alike without the telltale glow of electricity on it, just the unhealthy green of the room reflected on adamantium. Then he was gone again, too fast for her to see. The only reason she knew that he was high behind one of the pillars, clinging to the edge with his one hand, was because she could feel the hot curl of delight from him; then he was moving again and it was all she could do to keep up, playing the lights of the pillars to his advantage, a strobing camouflage that threw those few who hadn’t given in to panic yet into confusion instead, halfblind as they were in the dark.
They broke. The few skitarii they had didn’t live.
Their target nearly made the door when Sahaal caught her around the waist and just threw her back deeper into the room, where it was pitchdark now, the ground covered in glass.
It knocked her out clean.
Good. The room was empty except for corpses and their little adept.
Sahaal chased the last and slowest of the Mechanicum. Just when Mita thought she might have to remind him of their true target, he wheeled and returned to her side to fetch her down from her perch.
Between the two of them, the prey was secured quickly, wrapped like a nameday gift and tucked into the deepest shadow.
Now to make themselves a good exit route.
This time Mita went ahead, her mind a fine enough scout with her binox to compensate in the dark. Maybe she should get those augmentics- No, that was a thought for another time. She felt caught between the currents, the spreading, slowly dissipating fear of the Adeptus Mechanicus tempting her one way, and behind her the hungry focus of Zso Sahaal keeping her grounded, prowling in the shadows she created for him.
The main hall had slipped into disorder. It wasn’t the full, panicked chaos they needed yet, but that would change.
She let him take point, his ceramite midnight clad bulk all the shield she needed to blow out the lumens on the side of the hall. Not where they would come from, not where everyone was looking, except of course they turned at the noise, the spectacle too much for even a mechanized mind to ignore. Half the skitarii didn’t, but their guns had been meant to deter human looters and unpleasant wildlife, not the entire, glorious brunt of a fully armoured traitor marine.
Sahaal’s talons dug grooves into the stone as he accelerated, catapulting him forward and into the half circle of groundtroops, bullets and las-shots ricocheting off his armour and leaving nothing worse than chips in the paint.
Mita threw herself down, the skeins of the warp thrumming inside her mind, like she was seeing half a second into the future, just enough to not be hit by any stray bullets, and then her eyes found him again and the warp slipped from her mind for a moment.
In the half second it had taken her to drop and protect herself, he’d literally torn through three of the skitarii,- limbs severed from their sockets by sheer impact forces, part of someone’s head rolling towards her, the thick gel of an organic eye oozing down a metal cheek like a tear. She looked back up just in time to see him punch his fist into a mostly-metal chest and out the back in a spray of hydraulic fluid. Then he was gone, sunk back into the shadows, racing along the walls nearly in the horizontal, trusting his speed and momentum to hold him.
Trusting Mita to ensure his cloak of shadows never lightened.
Another half dozen lumens died to her onslaught, scattered through the room without rhyme or reason except that wrapped around his mind as she was, she knew where he wanted to go, or maybe he knew where she felt the largest nests of fear like flares, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that between one moment and the next, between the plunges of darkness and the pulsing green light of the room and the screams of the dying and wounded, even the resolve of minds set into gears and pistons broke. The adepts and magisters fled, red robes fluttering like bird wings, a few unlucky ones trampled in the panic or by Sahaal bounding through their frail little bodies to make sure the techpriests really were gone all the way to the surface.
She let go of her awareness of him, sure that he would return to her in due time, and perfectly happy to let him have his fun on the hunt.
Meanwhile, she could get started on working over their new asset.
Chapter 9: Chapter 9 - Zso Sahaal
Chapter Text
The satisfaction of the hunt was still humming in his veins when he returned to find that his little witch had already moved their prize into the main hall, the bound techpriest half motivated by the light bolter pressed into her back and half by the iron grip on her mind.
“That one has what we need?” Mita wouldn’t have bothered moving her if their captive was entirely useless. But it would be good for their captive’s motivation if she knew they wanted something from her. People clung to life so fiercely when they thought they had a chance. And if she did need persuasion… well, she’d learn just how much she could survive. There would be no second Pahvulti situation.
“She does. There are even a few things here we might take already.”
The tech priest jerked in surprise at that. Ah, she’d not said that then, but rather probably had thought of it while Mita had questioned her. Even better. Her mind was accessible, then.
They moved along the work tables in the hall, some overturned or broken, and gathered what would be needed into a hefty bundle in his good arm. It wasn’t the best solution, but the only sensible one. He trusted Mita to keep their captive nice and docile one way or the other, but they did have a time limit.
The Mechanicum would return in force to try and take back their secret pile of xenotech, but this time they would come armed heavily enough to take him down. They might even correctly identify him as a Night Lord, and they could do without the hunting party that would bring down on them both.
So they tried to move quickly, Mita using the techpriestess like an auspex, walking along the benches with her and picking up what her mind caught upon for full circuit, before they left the hall behind and headed back towards the surface in the scavenger tunnel they had descended through. It would have been considerably easier to transport his witch, their captive, and their pile of resources up the main shaft, considering he had to do it all one-handed, but they managed, even if it made him hiss and gripe - much to Mita’s amusement.
He gestured a sharp annoyed ‘shut up’ at her, which only made her giggle out loud instead of just smiling, and he knew part of that was the thrill of - not combat hormones - adrenaline in her system, the elation of victory and driving your enemies before you in their blind panic.
Behind the skull face of his helmet, his own mouth curled up in response to her mirth, a dry laugh eventually working its way out through his vox, setting her off worse and making their captive stare at them like they’d both gone insane. Sahaal ignored her and just let Mita knock her out again before loading the limb body onto his good shoulder like a bag of supplies and setting off towards their current hideout. Mita would find her way back to him. She always did.
—
Their current base of operations was small, a former bunker turned basement in a building that had been hastily abandoned when rumors of ghosts started to circulate, leaving it perfect and quiet and lonely. It had been a gentle kind of eviction, scaring these people out without scarring their minds. His idea had surprised Mita, but she’d seen the sense of it soon enough. Corpses might have summoned the Arbites.
Ghost stories were so commonplace in an Imperium where the divine was so present at every street corner that naturally its ruinous counterpart had to be too, constantly kept at bay by seals and prayer. Entire worlds given over to be nothing but places of worship, no better than the filthy demon worlds they had so studiously avoided on their journey. Still, the first time they’d seen what Mita had explained to him to be a a ‘shrine world’ she had to talk him out of going down and razing the towering basilica he could see from orbit, from orbit, a giant monument to the treacherous Emperor as if he was some pillar of righteousness, as if-
Sahaal cut himself out of that train of thought to focus on the task at hand: adjusting the ties that kept the tech priestess’ mechandrites safely contained. She flinched from his touch already, long before he’d given her any cause for it, but his quiet seemed to almost scare her more. Perhaps she had expected a raving lunatic, if she had ever imagined herself faced with a true enemy of the Imperium. He wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction.
He would give her true cause to fear and flinch soon enough, but first… first she had to be prepared.
It began with Mita, calm and collected, her mind a nano-edged scalpel peeling back the first layers of defenses, revealing the knowledge and the soft spots of their captive, every unhappiness, every slight from a superior buried into her mind, a million tiny doubts. His little witch unearthed them all and gathered them together- and then he forged them into a weapon to use alongside his knives. He had to get creative. They couldn’t damage the adept too badly to work on him, and so much of her was metal, but there were ways around it all. Not all of them with the purity of the blade, but all of them effective. Captain Sevatar could hardly have done it better.
It took less than two weeks to break her down far enough that they could let her go free throughout the room, then another week before Sahaal deemed her tamed enough to take enough of his armour off to let her measure his shoulder and examine his armour. Her leftmost mechandrite was still grinding and sparking when she moved it too quickly but she no longer flinched at it, just took the measurements and then delivered her list of requirements to Mita, voice subdued and rough from screaming.
Another week to gather everything needed, and then another week for the preparatory implants to be inserted and heal. Somehow that one was the worst, his patience wearing into fragments in the face of everything being so close yet so far. Any delay at all was suddenly one too long. He snapped at the adept and Mita in turns for every little thing until the latter lost patience entirely.
“Are you quite done yet?”
She stood in front of him, drawn up as tall as her frame would let her, fists balled her sides and eyes narrowed with fury. Part of him relished in that, seeing his own anger and frustration mirrored in her, they way she was his mirror in all things, and part of him balked at baiting her like that when she’d been nothing but faithful to him.
“No.” He gestured at his empty shoulder, the scar she’d given him - that he’d asked her for - newly painful with the first sockets and connections for his augmentic healing into it, a constant itch wearing on him. “As you can see. You’ve been hale for months, maybe you don’t remember-” He took a step closer, looming over her.
“Oh, I do.” She refused to back down, no matter how much taller and stronger he was. “Not that it’s stopped hurting.” She bared her teeth, and he did the same, growling at her and she didn’t care at all, unafraid, unflinching. “And you damn well remember what I did to get it, and what I did to get you midnight clad again.”
The shiver in her tensed shoulders worked into her mind, curling against his like razor wire when they stood so close, but he wasn’t going to let it go either, now.
“I never asked you to.” He hadn’t, he very, very specifically hadn’t asked that of her.
“But you took it anyway, didn’t you? You watched and kept your winnings from it, just like everyone else-” The razorwire of her mind cut deep, disappointment and anger, but he refused to take that blame on his head. She could lay so many things at his feet but not that.
“I didn’t make you, you decided to make yourself his whore-”
Her hand connected, the metal one, the one where she did have the strength to rock his head to the side, his own teeth cutting into his cheek and filling his mouth with blood. That cleared his head like a bucket of ice water, nevermind that venomous hiss of newly-learnt Nostraman in her mouth, naming him a traitor as accurately as any of his brothers might have, long ago.
For a moment Sahaal stood frozen, breath caught behind his teeth before he slowly, carefully exhaled and let the tension bleed from his body. “I deserved that.”
He did. He’d picked that fight, discipline failing him and now she stood there, trembling with rage and shock at her own audacity and that was his fault. His little witch, who guarded his most precious treasure and had sworn herself to his side, and here he was taking his bad mood out on her as if she was some menial, not his- his accomplice, his Claw, in all things. He stepped back, head turned to reveal the line of his neck, the vulnerable apology he might have offered a trusted brother he’d wronged.
Even if she didn’t understand what it was, he owed it to her regardless.
Another step back, and the tension slowly left her body, the painful rasp of her mind easing into confusion. The taste of it followed him out of the basement room and up into the empty rooms of the building proper.
It still hung around her like a veil when she found him hours later, kneeling in front of a window and watching the anemic sundown of this world. He knew he still owed her an apology, one she would understand, except he didn’t know how and hadn’t made any headway on that front the entire time since he’d left her. Surely it couldn’t be as easy as just saying it. How would she know he meant it, if it was just words?
Now she was here- he knew he didn’t even have to ask about the techpriestess. Mita wouldn’t have been stupid and left her alone if she wasn’t well secured. The thought filled his mouth with the bitter taste of his blood and his own failed control again.
“Mita-” He used her name so rarely, as rarely as she used his, the both of them too used to being the only one worth talking to.
“Sahaal-” She said at the same time, leaving him blinking, and then again when she giggled and he wasn’t sure why. Surely she was angry? But she didn’t look angry, or even felt like it. Just confused. But she didn’t explain, and he felt like he’d lost the privilege of prying into her mind if she didn’t want to share.
So he just watched as she came over, first into arm’s reach and then all the way close, of a height with him while he was kneeling. Slowly, carefully she leaned against his side, testing the waters and he shifted back against her, by now well used to the way she would sometimes fit herself against him as if trying to borrow his own convictions by contact alone.
Just as slowly, and carefully, he turned his head against her, nose brushing through her hair - long enough to tie back again - and inhaled. There she was, alive and unharmed, as close as his blades and just as reliable. She still trusted him, trusted him to put his teeth and Betcher’s glands so close to her delicate skull.
Maybe it would be as easy as baselines pretended it was. “I’m sorry.” The words were soft, barely more than a breath against her skin, before he turned away again.
“Good. You should be.” There was that smile on her voice that she got after combat, as if survival itself was cause for laughter. His lips tugged up at the corner in response.
Proper darkness settled outside, enough for him to go hunting. They were almost out of rations. And perhaps there was something else he could get her as a sign of his sincerity.
Chapter 10: Chapter 10 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
Just a short little chapter today but also: halfway point!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They had been eating as well as they possibly could on this planet. Well, she had. Sahaal had kept to his favourite - raw meat - and their captive techpriestess had no mouth. It had actually taken them a while to figure it out, but ‘nutrient gruel, via stomach tube’ was indeed how she was supposed to eat. Mita had to boggle a little at it, especially while licking crumbs of cake off her lips. Where on this barren, forsaken former battlefield that called itself a planet Sahaal had managed to find cake - With fruits! And icing! - was beyond her, and he refused to tell her, like a tease.
It had certainly helped settle the last of her ruffled feathers back down, even though she’d already forgiven him. The cake was just a nice addition, and she knew she’d needed all the mental fortitude she could get for this.
It was time to make Sahaal whole again. The arm was done, the attachment sockets healed, and the first tests had shown everything was interfacing with his armour correctly. Now it was time for the proper surgery. It wasn’t going to be an easy one. Not in their bunker-basement, with only half the tools they needed, none of the medication that had been used on her and their surgeon slowly starting to fall apart. Perhaps they’d broken her a little too well.
So they had to do this now, or start over on some new adept.
It still didn’t make it any less terrifying for her to watch Sahaal strip his body glove down to his waist and sit down in their makeshift operation theatre.
“You’re sure?” She knew he was sure, of course, but somehow the question still tumbled out of her mouth. This took such trust, letting a broken tech adept do such surgery on him, never mind her own role…
“I am. Begin.” And that was that. Like it was that easy.
Maybe for him it was, and Mita could at the very least follow his example. So she took the position they’d agreed on, behind his back, on his good shoulder, placed her hands on him - one against the back of his head, soft black hair now long enough that she could curl her fingers into it, if she wanted. The other landed on his hale shoulder, spread wide to brace herself for what was to come, yet still dwarfed by the sheer size of the trapezius muscle she was clinging to. There were scars under her hand older than any cathedral dedicated to the Emperor, and for the moment, the thought of what she was about to do was terrifying- and then Sahaal tensed under her hands, fighting himself to stay still under the knife that would heal him, and she was out of time.
They’d practiced this, but never to this extent. Still, the motions were the same: she pressed against his mind, against the shield around his thoughts that she taught him how to form, and the shield parted. Not like the breaking of a window or the tearing of flesh, but a door opened to her, so she stepped inside carefully, an invited guest striving to be polite.
She knew where to go, simply followed the tension, those tight strings of control to the growing knot of pain, and then slowly, carefully, cupped her hands around it and pulled it into her own mind. Her shoulder flared into the agony, then dulled strangely. They had no painkillers that could work on a space marine. They had plenty that worked on her, so she’d been careful to dose herself high for this.
But even so, it hurt enough that she didn’t know how he could stand it at all, let alone sit so still, when both her mental and physical fingers were shaking. She tried to calm them, focus on something - on him, the steady double-pulse under her hands, the oddly extended breathing cycle that revealed his third lung, the heat of a transhuman metabolism that meant that even on Equixus he’d never been cold, but most all, the thoughts that swirled around her, quiet and steady and the sheer trust of it all: he was letting her do this.
She had her fingers so deep in his mind that she could kill him by accident and he just… let her. Trusted her not to kill him, not on purpose and not by failing him. It was humbling in a way no master she’d ever been made to serve had managed. They’d spoken about trust and service, but they never, not once, not ever, would have agreed to trust her to like this. The thought became the bedrock she stood on, the trembling leaving her as if the weakness was drained from her, leaving only the unbreakable convictions of Zso Sahaal behind in her mind. She could not fail him here because he knew that she would not.
She’d known they had pulled each other out of downwards spirals of Equixus to find a stable orbit around each other. She’d not known that it ran this deep for him, that his own cracking psyche had been mended on hers, the same way hers had been mended on him.
Time became meaningless in her trance, their trance, nothing but certainty suffusing them.
That was how easy it was for him, and in that instant, it became as easy for her. The pain diffused through her body, dulled by medication, then faded from both their minds. Sahaal turned his- their?- head to look at his shoulder, watch how their little captured adept slid each set of connectors in right, lined up nerves with their mechanical counterparts. Until at least the great joint of it came together, distributing the weight of the arm across bone hard enough to take it and flesh that had healed enough not to bleed, then she stepped back with a nod.
For a moment, nothing happened, his nerves by now too accustomed to there not being an arm, but that was easily fixed- she offered her own experience, let some thread of his consciousness flow into her and ah- there. The first motion was just twitches of the fingers, trying to find the right nerves, then it just clicked together. He balled a fist, lifted his hand to examine it closer - little metal plates sliding over each other, minute joints clicking together as he reached over his shoulder and found her hand where she had pressed it against his shoulder.
The metal fingertips were as delicate as his flesh ones could be, if he wanted them to, and only a little colder for now.
‘Mita,’ His voice was softer in her head, velvet without gravel, ‘I think you can let it go now.’
Right, right, she could, he was fine. She unwound herself from his mind, withdrew into her own head, uncramped her hands- then her knees buckled and the only thing keeping her from becoming a pathetic heap on the floor was his arm around her. It felt like she’d been feeding off his strength to keep upright, and now that the door to his mind had closed, all she had was her own, which had been utterly spent in his service.
For a moment, she was just breathing and waiting for her legs to stop shaking so much. Mita knew, with the instinct that any psyker had to develop - or die - that she had gone beyond her limits here. Not so much in strength, because Sahaal had not fought her control, but in the finesse of her art. She would suffer for it, and soon. This was the quiet before the storm, the respite of what she had once called the ‘pater donum’, except her brain was too drained to even produce contentment. All it gave her was tired emptiness and a moment of clarity before the inevitable followed.
She could already feel it rising, a tide of psykic pain that would swallow her down. With titanic effort she lifted her head and found Sahaal’s eyes. “I will be out for a while-”
Then the wave of consequence crashed over her head, a stab of pain that dwarfed even the loss of her arm, and blackness swallowed her.
—
Mita woke to another near-colorless sunset, the last weak rays of sunlight on her face, wrapped in a nest of blankets and pillows that had to have been scavenged from every corner of the house. It was almost oppressively warm and she fought her way free with an annoyed sound - quiet, but clearly not quiet enough because it drew Sahaal in from outside the room, right to the side of her nest.
She could see him but not feel him, gift momentarily numb with overuse. It was unsettling. She could always feel him, when he was this close. She prodded at that numbness like she was trying a loose tooth, but nothing happened.
“Stop that.” Sahaal knelt down next to her nest, clearly aware of what she’d been doing, and for a moment she wondered why- then she felt a warm, coppery drop of blood run down from her nose. Ah. That was how.
She whipped it off with the back of her hand. The texture of it still annoyed her, wet and sticky, even though she’d spilled plenty of blood herself or watched him spill it, but usually she stayed out of the splatter range if she could arrange for it. Her own blood was even worse, too often calling up memories of the worst part of her time on Equixus.
And that wasn’t even the most annoying part of this all now.
“How long was I out?”
“The rest of the day, no more. Hold still?” He drew something pale from a knife sheath on his arm - and oh how strange to see him with two of those again, even if one arm was metal - and leaned over her. Once upon a time his bulk would have felt oppressive. That was long gone. Now it was a familiar shield.
She did hold still when he undid the ribbon that held her braid, even as she felt him gather everything up into some kind of twisted knot and then wove something into it, but the moment he leaned back, her hands flew up to find out what he’d done.
The object was organically smooth, skin-warm and as she followed the shaft of it down through her hair, she discovered that it was very, very, pointed. If she hadn’t used her augmentic, she’d have pricked herself.
Sahaal was watching her, clearly waiting for some kind of response, like he’d given her any explanation at all to go with this… gift? Yes, definitely a gift.
“Thank you? I… it’s a weapon, isn’t it?”
“A stiletto. You needed something you could hide in plain sight, that people won’t expect and that won’t make any noise when you use it.”
It made a lot of sense when he said it like that. She had laspistols, a light bolter, she had her mind, but all of them were noisy in different ways, and this wouldn’t even be found by most sensor auspices meant to spot weapons.
Mita found herself nodding, hand still trailing along the hairstick-stiletto. The grip-head of it was some ornament she couldn’t make sense of without seeing it.
Her understanding seemed to be what Sahaal had been waiting for, however. He rose, left and part of her was wondering where he’d gone, and what had happened to their captive now that her part was done, but there were more immediate concerns.
She pulled the hairstick out, and looked at it: ivory white, polished, the grip of it geometric knotwork. She was pretty sure it was human bone.
Notes:
I mentioned in some comments a while ago that I'm very much convinced that food scarcity is a trauma that pretty much every Night Lord has experienced during childhood and that that informed behaviour and legion culture, such as that if you want to get (back) onto someone's good side, plying them with food is a good way to do so, or to get across that you're seriously trying to make up for something.
So Sahaal's indeed gone and acquired the fanciest food he could for his witch.
Chapter 11: Chapter 11 - Zso Sahaal
Chapter Text
“We could keep her.” Mita’s voice went through the clear, crystal focus of his practice drill without disturbing it.
“Keep who?”
He moved into another spin. Learning to fight with only one arm had been a deeply trying process, and he was relieved that going back to having two felt, fittingly, like a dislocated joint sliding back into place. Sahaal barely needed to think about it, he just moved with the smoothness he remembered, his body once more fully his to control. No more compromises with his injuries or scar. Just this, and the purity of the blade.
Perhaps that’s why Mita had come to watch him today. Perhaps she meant to learn. The thought appealed to him, enough so that he resolved to offer to teach her, the next time they could afford the time.
“The tech adept. The shuttle is big enough.” He darted a look at her, only to see her shrug, equal parts casual and earnest. She meant that. What a perplexing idea. How had she arrived at that suggestion?
Another spin, a low sweep, combat knife changing from one hand to the other mid motion.
“Why would we keep her? She has done what we needed her for.” His arm was whole, as close to perfect as the circumstances allowed.
They didn’t need her anymore.
“Because-” Mita sighed, the way she did when she thought he was being difficult about something and needed clear instructions. “You liked cutting her. I did, too. I thought we might take her with us until she gives out.”
He stopped dead, knife vanishing into its sheath on his hip. Was this what she thought they were going to do, when they were not frantic on the run?
“No. We’re not going to keep her.” He stopped in front of his witch, close enough that she had to crane her head up, but there was an important point to make, here, and he could see the argument rising in her throat.
“And we’re not going to pick up any others, either. We broke this one, because we needed her, and that was the way to get it, and we did it well. That is a thing we can enjoy.” He had enjoyed it, had enjoyed listening to the begging and crying, the broken binharic sobs. He had enjoyed watching Mita at work, as she dismantled whatever faith the little techpriestess had left.
But that would be the end of it. Mita turned her head from him, mouth set into a pout, and he wouldn’t have that now, not from her. He would not let fall the way he’d let his brothers.
He curled the fingers of his old hand around her jaw to turn her head back and up, to face him.
“Fear is a tool. Pain is a tool. We use them so that people will obey and justice can persist. Enjoying a work well done and taking pride in it is one thing, a good thing, because how could we be truly good at this if it revolted us? But pain and fear won’t be their own purpose. Not for us. If those degenerates from the Emperor’s Children, or any of those chaos addled fools I have to call ‘brothers’ disagree, that will be their downfall, not ours.”
And he would either purge them from the Materium, or drag them back from the brink by their guts, if that’s what it took. But he would not lose himself to their failures.
“I’m not one of your brothers, though.” She glared at him stubbornly, like she’d presented him with a sensible argument here. Like he didn’t know what she was, perhaps better than she knew it herself, sometimes.
“You are my sister, and I will hold you to that standard. You can kill her quickly or I can kill her quickly. But she will not be some paintoy for either of us.”
There would be no discussion on this, no argument beyond the one they were already having. Mita would see reason on her own, or he’d make her.
For a moment, she just sat there, lips parted in shock, long enough for him to go back over his words and try to figure out where he’d lost her, but he couldn’t find anything, and after another heartbeat, she pulled herself together, and out of his touch.
“You’re right.” Which yes of course he was, but it was… gratifying to hear her admit it. “You kill her, I’ll prepare the ship.”
—
Three systems further towards the Eye of Terror their luck ran out, on some backwater agriworld they’d just dipped down to resupply.
Mita had gone to get those supplies, and some information, confident in the protection her rosette and weapons offered while he stayed with the Corona. The lead-lined box sat on his knees, open so that he could run his fingers over the metal of the crown. His witch claimed that the crown was calm these days, so part of him hoped that meant that his current course of action pleased what remained of his father’s spirit; that he had proven himself worthy enough not to need the encouragement, that he would soon be worthy enough to actually wear it.
For now, he just soaked up the comfort of touching the symbol of his task, finger trailing back and forth over the metal while he quietly gave his report and laid out his plans to the memory of the Night Haunter. Mita thought that foolish - she thought his plans for his legion were foolish too, much as she tried to hide it - but in this point, he didn’t- couldn’t- care for her opinion. This was his duty, the last task his father had ever set before him. He couldn’t abandon it, or he might as well throw himself into the next star.
And then a mental scream tore through him, pure, undiluted panic, as if she was standing next to him. He’d snapped the box shut, pulled his gauntlets on and was halfway to the door of their shuttle before anything else registered.
Mita had been hurt, or more likely captured. He had to find her, get her out, and get them off planet - and if by chance anyone who’d laid hands on her happened to die in the process, all the better.
But he could not do any of that if he just walked out of the shuttle, and got himself killed by whoever had gotten her.
So, not the door.
He slipped out through the access hatch on the floor, flexible even in his armour. It would be daylight for a few more hours, but he couldn’t afford waiting. So let them see him, if they did, while he was making his way across rooftops and along walls, slipping between grinding harvest machines as nothing more than a trick of the light, a passing shadow with nothing to cast it.
Mita wasn’t screaming anymore, but he knew where they had taken her regardless. Her mind-voice had long since outgrown whatever category of strength they had assigned to her back when they’d stolen her away from her home, and for him, and him alone, her distress rippled along his mind like a beacon light.
It centered on some market square. From his vantage point on high it looked harmless, the sun at his back blinding any mortal looking his way the same way it would blind him if he turned. They hadn’t moved her, he was sure of that, those idiots. If they’d whisked her further away, perhaps even into orbit, finding her would have been much more of a task. As it was, though…
Below him, Arbites units patrolled around a building that clearly belonged to some local official. It had presumably been fashionable, once. Now it was so heavily armed that he had to wonder what the point of those arbites even was. The locals certainly wouldn’t try to gain entry, and he could see the array of plasma cannons and artillery. It was too much for just a single Astartes, and the thought felt more flattering than it should. He spotted the ‘I’ of the inquisition on several of the guns, unsurprisingly so.
Either they expected her to have more backup than she had, or they expected said backup to be near-daemonic in strength.
Regardless, it barred the first route of entry to him.
So he prowled around the building, observing and counting, but even the roof had been fortified. That left one angle.
He wondered sometimes if humans had problems thinking in three dimensions at once. They seemed so… liable to forget either the sky or the ground they walked on, making it easy to take them by surprise.
In this case, the sewage tunnels were a web of eras half of which had been forgotten. He’d found an access point, sipped in, and then back out in some old drainage system inside the walled garden behind the house. The guard underneath whose feet he appeared didn’t see him before his claws took his head off. Part of him wanted to leave the corpse where it fell, but he still didn’t know where they kept Mita, or how injured she already was. He could not let them start hunting him just yet.
So he hid the body in the tunnel and kept low in the lush greenery of the garden, all the way up to the back wall of the house, hoping to find an easy way in.
Instead he found Mita, or at least her voice. In the top floor of the building, not too far from a window. She didn’t sound pained yet, so presumably they’d tried a softer form of questioning so far. Perfect. She could buy him time until sundown, and he knew she would.
“- wouldn’t know.”
“Not?” Ah, that would be the inquisitor, then. Sahaal guessed at a man, but metallic undertones spoke of augmentation, either to hide damage to his throat, or just to enhance the fear his presence would cause.
“Funny that. The entire Ordo Xenos has never heard of an Inquisitor Chianni, not even in the Segmentum Obscurus. But I could trace her all the way across the Ultima Segmentum. All the way back to a merchant called Klegg.”
Oh for- below them, Sahaal cursed in his helmet. Mita should have let him kill him. Too late now, but that didn’t make this rankle any less.
“Again: The name doesn’t sound familiar. You-”
“No, not me. Captain Kastor Klegg was so generous to supply me with a number of picts of the woman he knew as ‘Inquisitor Chianni’, including a few in quite compromising positions.” There was the sound of paper sliding across a surface, quiet but Sahaal had turned the sensitivity of his helmet all the way up.
Of course the bastard had kept trophies of his ‘conquest’, of course he bloody had. But the Inquisitor wasn’t done yet.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” He paused, but Mita stayed silent. “Master Klegg also told me that you had a trophy with you. A suit of power armour, badly damaged. His tech priests repaired it for you, and documented it. You didn’t try to hide that it belonged to a Night Lord, or that you came from Equixus. What’s curious is that it bears no markings of any warband we know of. So I think what happened is this: you were part of Kaustus’ retinue when the planet was razed, and you fled. Perhaps you kept the armour as evidence, and changed your mind later.
Oh, don’t glare at me like that. I’ve seen the reports from the hive. Stronger minds than yours would have fled.”
Below them, Sahaal growled almost against his will. ‘Stronger mind than hers’. Like she hadn’t freed him from xenos sorcery, like she hadn’t faced down a daemon prince, like she hadn’t worn a primarch’s shadow against her chest. Like that Inquisitor knew anything at all about her.
The sun would be up for another hour at least but the urge to climb up and strangle that man was nearly overwhelming. But they could do this safely, and Mita wasn’t being hurt right now. He could wait. He would wait. Though if she had the same patience Sahaal didn’t know. He was beginning to wonder if they were using some kind of suppressing device for her, or she would surely have reached for him now. Or torn the inquisitor’s mind from his brain.
But she didn’t, and it took more long minutes being crouched in the shadows before he understood why she hadn’t.
More prodding didn’t make Mita talk - why would it - so the Inquisitor left, with an ominous ‘maybe you will be more inclined to talk to me later’ and then something moved in the room above. Nausea crawled up his throat, revulsion so solid it pressed down on his spine like a physical weight.
They had a blank.
Above him, Mita made some quiet noise of pain, so reminiscent of the time she’d left with most of her legs scraped bloody and bobbing in saltwater. He knew how unpleasant the experience had to be for a witch like her, but if they wanted to get out - and they did - he would have to wait. But he could wait in a useful fashion.
With a last thought for her, he slipped back into the garden, and the old sewers underneath, and started to prepare.
—
They had not expected him. They hadn’t even gone and found the shuttle they’d used when they had grabbed his little witch, so really, anything that came after was their own fault.
Mita was retching by the time he returned, the continued presence of the blank wearing on her. She wouldn’t have to endure for much longer.
Two blink clicks and the explosives rigged under the entrance of the house went up. The structural damage was minimal, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to make them all run, and they did, like frightened little animals.
It only took seconds to scale the wall and punch through the lead-glass windows, but his witch hadn’t been idle for even that long. By the time he was there, she had killed the blank.
Pity. He’d wanted to do that. But it also didn’t matter, when instead his witch flew right at him, hand still clutched around the bloody stiletto in her hand. For a moment, she clung on, body still halfway out the window. Clearly she wasn’t going to let go again, so he just pulled her close, jumped and let his joints and the plates of his armour take the force of the fall.
He wasn’t quiet then. Any guards, any staff that had the misfortune to be close enough to see him died, but their deaths were quick things, the slash of blades so sharp there were barely felt, or the impact of a ceramite clad first that crushed bone. This time, there would be no sewers. It was dark, and that had always been hiding place enough for his kind.
So, over the back wall they went, and through another garden. Then he triggered the last explosive, the real one, under what he dearly hoped was the central support of the building. Heat and pressure washed over his back, pushing him forward. They had to move fast now.
Sahaal had left the shuttle as prepared as he’d been able to, and now that paid off. By the time the local authorities responded to the explosion - grounding all craft - they were already halfway through the atmosphere and Mita’s authorizations still worked; that took them the rest of the way, and then out into space.
She sat in the command throne, stiletto still clutched on her hand, breathing hard, eyes wandering between the various consoles and the blade.
“Sahaal… what, exactly, is this made off?”
Chapter 12: Chapter 12 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Even without seeing his face, she knew he was giving her a Look. The ‘why are you asking incredibly obvious questions’ look. She didn’t like that one at the best of times, and now was hardly the best of times.
“Bone.”
Ah, so he was going to be difficult about this.
“Bone doesn’t go through body armour. At least not without breaking.” But her hairpin had.
The explosions had rocked the building, and instinctively her blank guard had turned towards the door. Mita had been so, so sick of her presence, literally, she knew what and who those explosions heralded and she would not wait to be rescued like some damsel, she would not. He’d named her ‘sister’ and she wasn’t going to lose that respect this easily.
Her guard had turned, and Mita had been on her in a blink, the stiletto fitting her hand like it had been measured for it. The impact of her body had pushed the blank forward, face impacting the door hard enough to stun and Mita hadn’t needed more. Her head was pounding with the effect of that blankness and somewhere beneath that she was sick with worry about Zso as she’d slid the stiletto through the blank's back - this far from the spine, beneath the shoulder, the angle like so, his voice still deep and steady in her ear now, like when he’d shown her how to do this right - and twisted. The woman had gone rigid beneath her, blankness falling away suddenly like a dropped curtain. The window behind her had shattered and all she’d seen had been midnight and bronze skulls and she’d just thrown herself at him like the lifeline he was.
It had taken until they were back in their shuttle to realize that this should not have gone down that easily. Human bone was hard but not that hard, and the blank had worn armour, not unlike the kind of the Imperial Guard.
So her hairstick couldn’t be bone.
“It does, if you use the right kind.”
This was very frustrating, and her head was still pounding, even if she knew he wasn’t being obtuse on purpose.
She sighed. “Sahaal,” and he turned to her fully, like he always did when she used his name, his full attention on her in a way that always made her squirm a little on the inside but not unpleasantly, “Just tell me what kind of bone this is? Please?”
“Astartes.”
That made no sense, where would he even get that- except her eyes landed on his arm, the one they’d replaced. She knew that he’d eaten his own dead flesh and had always assumed that the same had happened to the bones but… She looked down at the stiletto in her hand, polished smooth and sharp, the head of it carved into a sharply angled knot, the cuts precise but even so… it had always felt like something handmade to her, the impression of care left on the material itself like another tool mark.
“It’s your bone. One of the ones from your arm.”
“Yes.”
Again that tone that told her that he thought he’d been perfectly obvious from the start and usually, that made her prickly but right now…right now she sat there with a weapon he’d carved for her out of his own bone and it was very hard to feel any sort of prickly about that. In fact, part of her felt like crying and she didn’t even know why, just that if she focused too much on that feeling she wouldn’t know what to do with it, so she shoved it away, for the time being.
But there was something else she could do, right now.
“Could you take your helmet off for a moment? And come here?”
Which of course he did, without question, even leaning in to her when she stood on the command throne and gestured him closer. He only froze up for a moment when she pressed her lips to his cheek.
“Thank you.”
Surprise flitted over his features, there and gone, and she wondered if he’d never been kissed before. Most likely not. But well, he had now, and he didn’t look like he’d disliked it either - for all that the helmet went right back on.
—
It was like the anxious flight after Equixus again, swapping shuttles as often as they could, most of their supplies stolen, occasionally hitching a ride with some trade hauler or the other. Sometimes they used her codes and accesses, sometimes naked intimidation. Twice, Sahaal just killed the owner of the transport they wanted.
It seemed to be working. They dipped into the Segmentum Solar, then back out near Sortiarius - the warp storm there would make them harder to track, she’d hoped, and Sahaal had, quietly, asked if they could go close enough to run auspex on it, once more reminding her that he had missed so much during his enforced exile in the Warp.
They shouldn’t have tried. Not because any sort of fleet came after them, any sort of attack, but because the moment they got close enough to auspex it, she could feel the long-absent stirrings of her foresight. Until now, it had always just been snatches in her dreams, snatches he’d been surprisingly good at gleaning meaning from.
The true furor arcanum hadn’t come on in all their months together, but now she could feel it pressing down on her.
“We have to leave. Or hide.” She’d be helpless if anyone came upon them and Sahaal could handle them of course, but the thought of being dead to the world, trapped in a vision, while he fought for both their lives was too much for her to bear.
He could read her well enough by now that he just looked, saw the fear on her face, and then his hands were already flying over the controls of the command throne, shuttle turning- somewhere, she didn’t know, reality pulling out from underneath her grip like unraveling fabric.
–
When it finally released her, she was in her bed on the shuttle, and the first thing she saw of physical reality again was midnight blue ceramite. Sahaal was crouched on the floor by her side, gloves and helmet off, one hand stretched out as if to touch her and then diverting to the little storage container next to her bed to offer her a glass of water.
“What did you see?” His voice was quieter than normal, some urgency in there pulling on her, and her vision spilled out of her like blood from a severed artery, great gushes of words:
“You, us, both of us cloaked in night, in a quiet place, a great abyss, a canyon-maw closing over us with acid-rain spit and neon teeth. You were looking for something, digging through piles of- of trash and corpses-” Mita sucked in a great breath, “You found- a gem, small, midnight blue, clutched in the hands of a corpse. It wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t-” Another great breath, almost a sob, “Until you cut the fingers off and then the refuse around us came alive, cyanotic corpses grasping, grasping, pulling us down,” and she was sobbing now, tears streaming down her face but the words would not stop coming now, “until the gem burst into flames, searing, so bright- and then the light was gone again. There were ashes around us, only ashes and darkness and- and the Corona, you were wearing the Corona and behind you the shadows kneeled.”
That last image was seared into her mind still, brighter than almost anything else, drying her tears. Sahaal, in the full glory of his armour, the red gem of the Corona Nox on his forehead like an entry wound, cloaked in darkness and screams and regal, so regal, fit to fall upon Terra like a great shadow and paint all its gold in crimson until no more false worship remained and his father had been avenged.
What glory. And her right there, hand on the knife that slashed the Emperor’s throat. He wouldn’t deny her that, she was sure of it.
“Do you know where?” His voice cut through her dreaming - seeing? Was this a glimpse into the future too or just her desires? - “If I brought you a map, could you show me where this happens?”
Mita swallowed. “I- yes. I think I could.” It felt so close, a word on the tip of her tongue she couldn’t find on her own.
But she did find it when he brought her a dataslate with a map on it. Her finger found the spot without her mind being asked about it. Quietos, about halfway between Sortiarius and some other demon world. A quiet place, her vision had put it. Yes. There.
She had expected him to leave after that, plot a course immediately, but instead… he stayed. Made sure she was comfortable, brought her food and tea and it all felt so… familiar. Not to her; she’d never experienced this with him before - her faint on Cadrim had been much less severe - but for him. How curious.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” She nodded at the steaming mug of tea in her hands, the pillows arranged around her, the way he hovered close, ready to bring her anything she asked for. They had cared for one another so long that it wasn’t the presence of said care that confused her. But he’d never seen the furor arcanum on her, yet here he was, handling the aftermath of it with such practiced ease that he could have shamed the servants back on Saufar-Inquis.
Her question seemed to startle him, something shuttering behind his eyes, and for a moment she thought she wouldn’t get a reply, the way she sometimes didn’t when she asked about part of his past still too raw to be touched. But this time, the shuttering eased.
“I have. My father had… fits like these.”
And that was all the answer she thought she would get, for the topic of his primarch was usually one of the too-painful ones, but instead he settled down by her bedside again, looking at her but his dark eyes far away.
“His visions could come without warning and last for just moments, or minutes. In the beginning they’d just leave him confused, like time was slipping backwards and forwards for him. I found that the best way to draw him back was-” He paused, gestured at the comfort he’d build her.
“Physical comforts. Food, a hot drink, and everything as quiet as possible.” Sahaal paused again, mouth drawn tight as if he was in pain.
“In the end, the fits lasted for an hour or more. Those always left him raw and starved. It was like they unbalanced him more every time, like some grand tower by the sea, that wave by wave would lose its foundations until all that grandeur turned to rubble. Sometimes the aftermath of a vision would be rage, and the best you could do was get out of the way and hope the wrath would fade before it found you, and sometimes it would break down into black despair. I would have to go find him in the most abandoned corners and coax him out with food like some wild thing, trying not to listen to his whispers while he ate.”
The words faded, and this time, he didn’t add anything, so Mita just sat there for a moment. She knew the tales of course, the history of the Imperium forbidden for the vast majority of its citizens. She’d been given the privilege of knowledge by her superiors, and Sahaal, and now she found that knowledge still had holes too, gaping ones.
She’d known that Konrad Curze had been mad. To learn that at least some of that madness had been borne from the same cursed gift that she carried? That hurt, and how much more did it have to hurt Sahaal, who’d been there to see the slow descent of an untrained seer, overcome by the endlessly twisting skeins of the future or the merciless roads of the past and who had not been able to do anything about it except ease the physical pains that came when the psyche unwound into the warp and never found its way quite back?
Her heart bled for him, and perhaps a little for his mad, murderous primarch, too.
No wonder the Corona felt like it did.
Notes:
And here we go, closing out this...I guess arc? Anyhow, we're about to launch into Something else [rubs my little pizza hands]
Also, congratulations to LegionsOfTheHungry for guessing the stiletto's material correctly chapters back [applies gold star to your cheek]
Chapter 13: Chapter 13 - Zso Sahaal
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Sahaal had been sitting more with the Corona on the approach to Quietos. He would get to wear it soon, he was sure. He’d prove himself, but Mita’s episode had rattled him. It had dragged up memories he had thought safely buried. Now they were at the surface again, scattered like a grave found by wild canines.
Sitting with the crown, talking to it or just sitting there and remembering - remembering not just the end but everything before: his father as the glorious Dominus Nox, and as the wreck talking to rotting corpses - it helped. It didn’t bury the memories back in, but soothed them anyway. As did Mita.
Since her vision she stuck closer to him, at times perching on the arm of the command throne while he sat in it, or tucking herself against his side while they ate, and he wasn’t sure which of them it was supposed to comfort but he could admit - to himself, in the seclusion of his thoughts - that it did comfort him some to know her there. It comforted him to know that she trusted him so close and that in turn he could trust her enough to let her put her mouth against his skin - even if her teeth were dull.
He was still sitting with the crown when she came into the hold, her own small fingers closing around his and the adamantium of the crown. She’d always been reluctant to touch it before. Not anymore.
“We’re there. There’s a high anchor point we should aim for, above the largest city. It’s not a hive, but close.” He blinked at her, knowing what she wanted but still caught in the memories until she wrapped her mind around his, a caress far more intimate and immediate than her hands on his. That jarred him properly back into action.
“You still want to try the name of the one that caught you? You’re sure?”
“Oh, very sure.” A bit of mean-spirited payback, going by that toothy smile of hers, and he could appreciate that - especially when this time, he’d be right there if anything went wrong. They’d kept an ear out for it, and apparently the inquisitor had survived the explosion. At least most of him had.
Carefully, Sahaal tucked the Corona away again, first into its lead-lined box, then the gene-locked cabinet that only the two of them could open. By the time he made it to the bridge, fully armed and armoured, she had secured them a place at high anchor and acquired a small transport craft as well - sans pilot, even. Mita could put on those ‘offended noble’ airs like she was one, when it suited her.
Paired with her clearances and name - she was being Lady Inquisitor Derlen today, after all - she could get anything they damn well wanted.
Conveniently, it was after dark by the time they landed on Quietos proper, because of course Mita was going to be conscious of these details, and ensure that while she swept out into the neon-twilight of Quietos-Capura with the rosette displayed proudly on her dark greatcoat, he could slip into the shade and trail her from above as she found herself a little cafe of sorts, ordered herself the most expensive item on the menu and then sat there, seemingly inhaling the perfume of her tea while he could feel her mind sweep past him, into the city.
She was hunting, his witch-sister, trying to pick up the trail her vision had promised them. He felt her throw the net, and wait, and when nothing bit by the end of her tea, she paid, rose and wandered further into the city.
She proceeded like that four more times, before finally something caught in her web. Her head came up like a hunting beasts, eyes sharp and focused and he knew even before she gave the signal ‘ahead, 3 miles, lone target’ hidden in the motions of fixing her collar that she had found what they were looking for, or at least the trail of it.
He ranged ahead of her, over curiously empty streets and soon he could pick up a trail of his own, but an unpleasant one. As they left the area near the port, deeper into the living quarters of increasingly poor workers, the smell that filtered into his helmet took on a particular tinge of rot and decay that set him on edge. This was beyond the stench you would find in a hive or even the open charnel smell of a skinning pit.
No, this was the scent of death-by-disease, the slow rot that took your strength before it took your life, and the stinging ozone of Warp woven through it.
Chaos had found itself a home here.
Sahaal jumped and Mita just stepped to the side neatly to make space for him. “Something is wrong.”
She could feel it too, then.
“Chaos taint. Nurglite, I think. You should stay back.” She was so much more susceptible to diseases, and perhaps even more to those born of the warp. She could well tell him where to hunt for this wayward brother of his. It would be the more cautious choice.
Of course she wasn’t going to do that. “No. I can feel the Warp before you do. I will be careful, but I will not stay behind. We’re close. I can feel it. Feel him.”
It did somewhat limit his options, if she refused to be sensible about this risk, or worse, made it sound sensible for her to stay close.
“Fine. But if it becomes a fight-” Between two Astartes, one of them potentially warped by Nurgle? She would die.
But at least she knew that.
“I’ll stay back. I would like to keep the other arm.”
That was all the concession he was likely to get, so instead he settled on just staying closer. There was nobody out to see him, at least.
They found the first corpse two streets further, and the stench of death was fresh and somehow… cleaner. This death had fueled no daemons. It was a woman, dead of a disease of her lungs. She’d been dead already when her body had been opened in neat cuts and her organs laid out around her one by one. He’d never seen something quite like that, at least not done to a corpse.
“...Ritual?” Though again, the warp felt absent there. It was still the most likely option to Sahaal.
“Necropsy.” Mita had crouched down and prodded the organs and body with some piece of trash. “He was finding out what killed her, look. Looking for traces of Warp contamination.” There were cuts further into the removed lung, opening some of its structure and revealing black particulate within, the result of years of manufactoria work, no doubt.
“But we’re close, this took time. I think he might be hunting, too”
What an odd turn of events, to find one of his brothers hunting down chaos cultists like a good loyalist. But then again, weren’t they doing the same? At least that made it likely that he’d not gone and thrown his lot in with some cult or other himself.
–
He had not.
It was nearing dawn when they finally caught up, Mita by now tired enough to be perched on one of his pauldrons until they both could hear the sound of fighting ahead. The air was thick with the miasma of chaos, so Sahaal left her on the roof of a building and dove down into the alleyway by himself.
His brother was easy to spot, a blur of midnight in a sea of moving, scrambling corpses, and it felt so natural to drop down next to him, crush two poxwalkers under his boots, step into the fight with his claws crackling with energy. This was what he’d been missing.
The other Night Lord startled, but only for a moment. Clearly he wasn’t going to question surprise reinforcement when he needed it. Between the two of them, they did manage to tear the sorcery-infected corpses apart into small enough pieces to make them harmless, but it took time.
Enough time to learn how his brother moved, his rhythms and preferences.
Sahaal judged him young, but not untried, if probably better served with a bolter at a distance than up close with a knife, though still passable enough with the blade.
The last corpse dropped into three twitching pieces between them and only then did he notice the stench of promethium filling the alley.
Mita stood at the mouth of it, coat stained, just about to kick over another bucket of flammable liquid. He wasn’t even going to ask her what in the name of the burning ruins of Terra she was doing there.
“Nurglite infection can best be rendered harmless by fire. If you’d please-” She gestured at his claws.
That was certainly one way to deal with it. He crouched down and just let his claws spark into the promethium, eyes closed behind his helmet lenses against the sudden flare of heat and light. At least ceramite was more than capable of taking a little bit of fire.
By his side, the other Night Lord yelped in protest. Definitely a young one.
At least the flash of it didn’t last long, and when he headed towards Mita, the other one fell into step behind him naturally before stopping himself.
“So who are the two of you?”
Now, the moment of truth. Mita’s mind bloomed against his, rich with assurances, the echo of her vision. This was what they’d come here to do, to pick up the first part of his rebuilt legion. She stayed there, letting him feel whatever reaction would come.
“I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster, First Captain of the Night Lords.”
There was a beat of disbelief, close to shock from the other. “You’re serious- You’re dead. I mean- They say that you died. That you betrayed us”
“I did none of that. I was trapped in the warp for millenia.” The rest of the story could be told if this one actually joined them.
“You have a pet Inquisitor.” Which, right, Mita was still wearing her rosette, and now she slipped past him, to face the other Astartes down directly, back straight like she wouldn’t bend under the weight of the entire galaxy. But then she had faced down so much worse. Pride rose high and bright behind his chest, and he knew she could feel it, still wrapped around his mind.
“I am Mita Ashyn and I’ve sworn myself to the Talonmaster. This-”
She tapped a finger against the ‘I’ on her chest, challenge and conviction equally strong in her voice. She meant this, every single word she said, even if she’d never taken any formal oaths to him. What use would they have been, when her devotion was in everything she did? What more could words have given him after she’d given him his crown?
“Is a convenient tool, to let him rain fear and blood onto Terra, one day.”
She was still glaring at the other Night Lord, who just tilted his head at him, considered them both and then nodded once, sharply. He didn’t believe them, but he was willing to take the extra firepower. That was good enough for now.
“Fine. I’m Tierce. Apothecary of the Night-Scythes’ fifth claw. Currently without Claw because of,” He nodded back over his shoulder at the charred, smouldering heap of corpses, and from the outside he looked calm enough but through Mita it was obvious that he was rattled. Grieving, and that grief was begging for blood. He could have that. It wasn’t like Sahaal didn’t understand the urge.
“I was hunting down the sorcerer that killed them. He’s hiding somewhere on this planet, spreading his corruption.”
Tierce’ attention focused on them again. “I’ll not leave here without his skull on my pauldron.”
He didn’t even have to ask Mita. Not out loud, not even where she sat in his mind. “Then we’ll help.”
Surprise, again, then a fierce wave of optimism. It never ceased to amaze him how his little witch could get anything done while being so battered by other’s emotions. “Good. Ah, both of you? Isn’t she-”
Clearly Tierce had at least some amount of sense. Instead of completing that sentence, he used battle sign. ‘Flesh-slave, burden’
Not that that helped at all, but Sahaal could appreciate the forethought even when Mita clearly didn’t. Her augmentic hand came up in a single decisive gesture that hardly needed translation.
It still had Tierce make a sound that even through the vox was remarkably similar to the one a stepped-on rat made.
“She knows battle sign?!”
“She’s my sister. Of course she does.”
That earned him no reply aside from another stepped-on rat noise, and a laugh from his witch, resonant with pleasure and pride.
Notes:
And there we are! [releases an OC into the wild (ao3)]
Hope y'all like the first of my weird little bastards.
Chapter 14: Chapter 14 - Mita Ashyn
Chapter Text
Tierce was interesting company. So far, Mita had met exactly two Night Lords face to face. Zso Sahaal, her mirror, whom she knew like she knew herself, and who in her mind always felt like a focusing lens, clear and unmoveable. She had borrowed his strength the same way he borrowed her senses.
And Krieg Acerbus, daemon prince and chaos corruption made manifest, who had taken her arm and had been the very example of evil that she’d been taught to despise. She despised him still, if now for slightly different reasons than before.
Tierce was as different from either of them than the moon was to an apple. He was young, even she could tell, and curious enough to remind her of a cat at times, more distractible than she’d ever seen Sahaal. He’d adapted well to her presence for all that she seemed to confuse him, at times talking to her like she was a serf, at others like they were both acolytes at schola, trying to compare notes.
She’d been right about the necropsy. He’d done that, and used it still to track the source of the chaos infection. There was a shivering excitement in him when he opened a corpse that she wasn’t sure was just the excitement of a hunter on the trail. But it was that, too.
They worked well together, tracking the nurglite sorcerer in flesh and mind into the coast-wards outskirts of Quietos-Capura over the course of days, and while they walked and tracked and put together their clues, slowly but surely he told them what had happened.
His Claw had come into the system with another to raid for resources, and Quietos had looked ripe for the taking. Instead, they had been betrayed. The other Claw had known about the cultists on the planet and let them walk into the trap. He thought they had taken whatever loot they had gotten by that time, and made their way back to their company. The entire thing had happened so quietly that the administration had only just figured it out, and called for help from the Inquisition.
The thought made her laugh. Tierce tilted his head at her like a bird, a questioning gesture that seemed all his. It was rather endearing. “Oh, just think that Inquisitor Derlen might get a commendation for his quick response, if we burn this cult out. Maybe I should write a report and hand it in.”
The idea amused both Sahaal - quietly, in her head - and Tierce - a quiet, raspy snicker through his vox. The plan was actually growing on her. What a delightful way to shame the entire Inquisition, if a group of heretics did their work better than they did, and then send them an entire report on the matter. She would do that, yes, if she found the time.
But first, first it had to be done. She knew she was slowing them down, needing rest and food the way neither of them did. Perhaps once upon a time she would have been worried about tucking herself into a corner between buildings to sleep, when Tierce was such an unknown factor yet. But with Sahaal standing sentinel over her, she slept as deeply as she would have on the shuttle.
Finally, they found the cult’s hideout in the damp, abandoned harbour area, chaos-stench covered by the reek of rotting fish and algae.
In a physical fight she would be a liability for Sahaal. She stayed back, her light bolter taking the heads off anyone who managed to flee past the two Night Lords, which weren’t many, but even those… She was glad she did not have to go any closer. They had been people once. Now they were mutated and infected. Flies crawled from their grey-green flesh, open sores and cancerous growth competing for the skin she could see. There were extra limbs, some functional and some seemingly only dead weight, thick plates of bone that looked like it wanted to ape ceramite, and thin tendrils of flesh that moved like they were underwater.
Over it all hung the pall of chaos corruption and sickness.
It made her stomach turn, and she leaned into Sahaal’s mind again, distracting herself from her sickness - and at the same time, assuring herself of his status.
Two hours later, the parts of the cult that had survived the ambush on Tierce’s Claw were finally put down in a huge, promethium-fuelled cleansing fire.
The local authorities had of course arrived to find out what that blaze was, and Mita had taken control of them firmly. Yes, of course this was an Inquisition operation, no, they didn’t have to worry, of course there would be an official report, her retinue - in her mind, Sahaal laughed - had it well in hand, if they could just stand back there and ensure the civilians stayed back? Thank you very much.
She was struggling to keep a straight face about it, but somehow she managed to have them form an orderly perimeter and with Sahaal sticking to the shadows cast by the flickering pyre to deliver his ‘report’ to her - a quick conversation half in battle sign half in words - it cemented her in the minds of Quietos-Capura’s ruling class as The Inquisitor.
So when she came back and demanded all kinds of resources: food and fuel and weapons and a Navigator, and perhaps a suitably big ship? She got that, all of that and of course they would have to avoid the Navigator seeing Sahaal or Tierce but still. It would enable them to stay in the warp long enough to get past the chain of forge worlds in their way. It was perfect.
They left for the translation point two days later, laden with supplies, with Tierce firmly installed with them, and her meticulous report sealed on the table of the planetary governor with strict instructions to only open it when it could be handed over to another Inquisition agent. With any luck, it would be Master Derlen.
–
If they had that luck, in retrospect, they would have needed it elsewhere. She could tell that something was off just a few hours after they’d entered the warp, three days after they’d left Quietos.
Their borrowed Navigator was sequestered away and likely to stay that way for a while, and while Tierce had used the chance to explore the ship - he was a cat and if he snuck up on her one more time she was going to weld a bell on his gorget - Sahaal had been all but hiding in the hold. Not even with the Corona, even though she had expected him to show his treasure off to their new acquisition immediately.
Instead he had peeled out of his armour and was holed up in a storage compartment, close to the hull of the ship, where it was coldest.
She could immediately see why. It looked like he was feverish, the flush on his skin rendered even more vivid by his natural pallor. Like this, the scars it usually hid were plainly visible, fine lines across his cheeks and forehead, centuries of fighting written on his skin.
But right now he seemed to be fighting something else. He’d not even reacted to her walking in.
“Sahaal?” Was he ill? But Astartes couldn’t fall ill.
His head snapped up at her. “Stay back!”
The sheer shock of him raising her voice kept her frozen in place, and then she took two steps back because he clearly meant it. His mind was snapped shut against her and he growled at her when she made to reach for it.
Not a playful reprimand, not the pleased rumble of a successful hunt, but the deep warning sound of a wild beast that was meant to keep you on the other side of the room.
No coming closer, then. “What’s wrong?” Because something clearly was.
“Fever. Get Tierce. Tell him-” He took a deep breath as if he had to focus on the words one by one. “Tell him. To stay fully armoured. It might be the cultists.”
Which meant it might be warp based. Throne in flames, no wonder he hadn’t wanted her mind close by.
She nodded at him and turned to go find where Tierce had gotten off to. Damn it all into the Eye, she should have taken a vox caster with her, but she’d never needed one before with Zso. He was always just a thought away.
By the time she found the apothecary, her chest had grown tight with worry, the need to reach back to make sure Zso was still alive. He couldn’t, wouldn’t die on her like that, would he? Not now, not when they were finally getting somewhere instead of just running, he couldn’t-
Maybe she should have looked for their warp-blasted apothecary in the little medbay of the ship first. He stood there, giving her that bird-like head-tilt of a question when she wretched the door open, her augmentic hand denting the edge with nerves that she hadn’t shown in months. “Sahaal is sick. It’s-”
“Something from the cultists, probably.” Apparently, no matter how young Tierce felt to her, he could curse as well as someone a few millenia his senior. Mita understood just enough of that sibilant streak of Nostraman and Low Gothic to get that.
“Did you touch him? No? Right, show me where he is.”
It was such a drastic change, from the Tierce she’d seen so far, a little insecure and curious, to this, all serious and like he knew exactly what he was doing, years and years of experience heaped upon his mind.
“He’s in the wall-compartment of the main hold, out of his armour, feverish.”
“Good, it’ll make him easier to move, with any luck he’ll be unconscious too. You stay out of the way. In your quarters ideally,” and there must have been something in her face on how the idea of leaving Zso alone like this sat with her because something in that metal shell of experience softened on Tierce. “I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back out. We’ll need a tissue culture from you anyways, to see how specific this germ is.”
And then he was gone down the hallway, as fast as any of them could move if they wanted to, and she did retreat into her room, pacing the length of it like that would burn off the nervous churning in her guts, the tightness in her throat.
It took four hours and twelve minutes for a knock to come at her door, Tierce telling her that he would collect that tissue sample now, and that she could move freely on the ship for the time being.
The ‘tissue sample’ in question was a little blood and a patch of skin. She found that it was one thing to know that Night Lords were good at skinning people, and another to watch him take a scalpel to her skin for a perfectly circular little patch. Mita tried to focus on the brand-new and suitably charred skulls impaled on Tierce’s left pauldron instead.
“So. He really is Zso Sahaal, isn’t he?” The vox made his voice sound like that warning growl Zso had used on her earlier, but here she could tell it was just the vox doing that.
“You didn’t believe him?”
“Naw, why should I? Everyone knows he’s dead. But what do I care which name he assumes, long as he was helping me take down a battalion of pox-walkers? Except.” He shrugged his trophy-adorned shoulder as he put the skin sample away. “It is him.” His voice quieted a little, until he was hard to understand over the background distortion of his vox caster.
“He’s a legend, both the good and the bad kind, depending on who you ask.”
Did that make it hard for Tierce, having to deal with a name like that laid out under his care? She’d never before thought about whether or not the Night Lords were recruiting new members, or if those new recruits grew up with names that Zso mentioned so casually at times. He had told her about the Kyroptera, about the infamous, worshipped, First Captain Sevatar. About his father. It was startling to think about, but now that she did think about it… it was entirely possible that she knew more about the people behind the names than Tierce did, just by virtue of her traveling companion.
It just made her heart ache again.
But she couldn’t voice any of that to him, because if he was anything like Zso, even the slightest bit, bruising his pride so harshly would put his hackles up for weeks to come.
So what came out of her mouth instead was the thing that laid heavier on her heart, choking her with every beat: “When can I see him?”
“When these,” He wiggled the little containers of fluid and cells. “tell me that you won’t catch the plague off him. Then you can see him. It’s going to take a bit longer than usual, your med bay is… rudimentary. I don’t have the right tools.”
That felt like an understatement of considerable size. The tools he had were in all likelihood much too small for his hands, too. Which did remind her…
“Right, no… narthecium, that’s the term? You’re supposed to have one.” Another of those tidbits Zso had told her, when they’d been discussing what gear he would need replaced and how lucky they were he didn’t need such specialist equipment.
Another of those one-shoulder shrugs, and his mind colored to a mixture of grief and anger she was intimately familiar with, both of it hardening his voice. “I’m also supposed to have a Claw, and a Company that doesn’t stab me in the back. I’ll just have to make do without. I’ll let you know if it’s safe for you to see him when I can tell.”
And then he was gone down the hallway in a way that were he a human, Mita would have called ‘fleeing the conversation’.
—--
It all left her with a lot of unpleasantly free time on her hands. While in the warp, she didn’t dare try and peer into the future, both for fear of what might be hiding outside their Gellar fields, and what she might catch from the med bay. Tierce still hadn’t cleared her, and even with regular updates from him, it was eating at her.
Yes, he told her that Zso was stabilized for now. But that wasn’t the same as seeing, maybe even touching him. Making sure he was still there.
Instead she was sitting with their Navigator for a bit, talking to him, discussing the routes - she had to admit she felt a little bad about that. He seemed like a nice enough man, and between the two of them, they didn’t have to dodge around accusations of ‘mutant’. But it was exceedingly likely that unless he started showing some heretic tendencies before the end of the journey, he’d die. And presumably become rations for Tierce and Zso.
Definitely for both of them, she was holding onto the thought that both of them would be there. Zso couldn’t die on her, he could not.
It occurred to her only later, lying in bed and trying to force herself to sleep, that that was a line of thinking that would have horrified her not too long ago. Now the horror lay not in the cannibalism but in the potential loss of her companion.
The only upside of the illness was that it was easy to sequester their Navigator so that Tierce had the run of the ship. Telling him that there had been an infection carried over from the cultists had made the man hide, and served to explain where everyone else was on the rare occasions where he did come out to get food.
A week of that, then two, and she was starting to feel like she could crawl up the walls entirely without auto-reactive claws or enhanced muscles. Tierce still hadn’t allowed her into the med bay, and all but chased her off the few times she’d gone near. She couldn’t bear it anymore and the thought that perhaps Zso was already dead and Tierce was just playing for time - but, she’d know, wouldn’t she?
She’d know if her mirror was dead, if she’s lost him, if - she couldn’t finish that thought. She’d be alone, so much more alone than she’d been all her life, so far away from everything she knew and - this time she stopped herself from descending into that spiral by force.
Over the last few days, those spirals had become more and more common and harder and harder to stop, panic climbing higher inside her throat.
She couldn’t bear it anymore. If anyone had seen her slip into the room Zso had chosen and curl up on his bed, face pressed into the pillow, she would have clawed their eyes out herself, but nothing else helped. Sleeping in her own bed courted nightmares that she hoped weren’t visions, that she would have prayed weren’t visions, if she’d still had anyone to pray to.
By the time Tierce did find her and told her that it should be safe, she felt like one of the shambling dead herself.
Mita tried to compose herself anyway, like Tierce couldn’t smell the stress on her. It didn’t last, once she saw him. Zso was stretched out on a cot that had been several cots at some point before Tierce had gotten to them, pulse and breathing monitored by small, beeping pieces of machinery. Part of it reminded her of that time she’d seen him in his own mind, naked and bound and part of it was so much worse. She hadn’t known there was something beyond the corpse pallor of his kind, but clearly there was because she’d never, ever, seen him look so… ill. Not even his dead arm had looked like this. The veins under his skin stood in stark contrast, nearly black, and red, inflamed blisters littered every part of him she could see. At least his chest was moving in slow, measured breaths. That was her only consolation.
That and Tierce behind her, taking his helmet off so that for once his voice wasn’t that vox-growl. “He’s stable. Partial sus-an. Not the real deal, but he’s… unaware.”
She only turned to him halfway, as if looking away from Zso would make him disappear into thin air and truly leave her alone. It was, she realized, the first time she’d seen Tierce without the helmet on.
Her first, irrational thought, was that he had black curls clinging to his forehead, which she’d not expected, for some reason, immediately followed by the realization of how few scars he had. Only two, truly. One old and having taken off the majority of his left eye brow, the other fresh and angry, from the bridge of his nose to the side, narrow missing the same eye and gouging deep over his cheekbone.
Those eyes at least were familiar: black, bottomless pits.
“You can touch him, if you like. It’s not infectious. To either of us, by the way. I tested it, it’s more like a poison than an infection, but it weakens him to other infections. I was hoping if I slowed it down enough, his body would purge it on its own.”
Her eyes settled fully back onto Zso, and now that she had permission, Tierce would have had to physically haul her out of the medbay to keep her from going over and sliding a hand over a strong, fever-hot forearm to curl over limp fingers. The skin was sticky, and the smell of illness hung over him but she wasn’t going to move from this spot now. Not any time soon.
Part of her felt odd at seeing his face so… calm, all those lines or rage and worry smoothed away, even though of course she was glad he wasn’t in pain.
“But he isn’t purging it.” Clearly he was no better, in fact he was probably worse than when this had begun.
“No. My best guess is that it feeds on something to… replenish itself, almost. Even our systems have limits and this might have found his. I can keep him alive, I think, and we can hope he recovers, but…” She looked away from Zso’s face for a moment to find Tierce’ eyes, only to have him look away, like he couldn’t hold her gaze. “But this is warp induced, I’m sure. I’m no librarian, if there is some technique of theirs to clear this, I don’t know it.”
“Warp-induced?” Mita had no idea how to heal something like that either, no idea at all, but… “I could take a look? The shape of things in the warp can be telling. I could at least tell you if it fades or strengthens.” At least it would be doing something. She hated sitting useless.
“Why not.” Tierce didn’t look optimistic but then again he’d hardly been doing more than looking, either.
It would be better to let go of Zso, to look at this poison from a distance, but she couldn’t bring herself to. It would be better to get Tierce out of the room, before she made herself vulnerable in trance, too, but if he wanted her dead, getting him out the door wouldn’t mean anything and she could puppet him into some other compartment, maybe, but not while peering into the warp like this. She’d just… have to trust him. Trust her vision of him.
Trying to peer into the warp from the inside was… unpleasant. There were things outside the Gellar fields that she tried not to see, and the thing inside it was only marginally better. It looked like… a weed, a slime mold, latched onto Zso’s body in a pulsing, translucent web, some cave creature venturing into a world never meant to house it. Tiny tentacles seemed to penetrate down into his skin, leeching the life from him one tiny drop at a time. She shifted her fingers to touch one of the tentacles her mind saw. It was electric-cold, sticky-dry, a feeling that made the inside of her head crawl like ants and taste of raw sewage - but it ignored her, even as she steeled herself and willed one of those tiny tentacles out of the skin. It fluttered in the currents of the warp and then settled back and burrowed in again.
She came out of it to Tierce’ hands on her shoulders, easing her down onto a stool. She shuddered away from him and he let her.
“You’re right. It’s like a parasite, latching onto him and draining him dry, but it’s not like daemon. It has no will. I could move it a little.”
“So, you can remove it?” There was hope in his voice. Maybe he didn’t want Zso to die, either. ‘He’s a legend’, his voice echoed in her head.
“No. I’m not strong enough, or trained for that sort of thing.” There were specialists for that, seals and rituals that could purify the body. They had none of that at hand.
“Haunter’s teeth. Of course.” Tierce ran a hand up through his hair. Clearly seeing his hopes dashed wasn’t sitting well with him either. “You wouldn’t happen to have a box full of powerful psykers somewhere on this ship, would you? Could the Navigator help us? They’re kind of like witches, aren’t they?”
Mita stared up at him, struck. That was an idea she would never, ever, have come up with otherwise. It was probably stupid. It was very likely dangerous. It was also at least an idea. Anything was better than just waiting for the end like sheep.
“Stay here. We can try something.”
Chapter 15: Chapter 15 - Zso Sahaal
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
He stood on the island of his little kingdom in the dark, all those pathetic worms cringing and worshiping at his feet, a sea of hooded shapes, clutching at his cloak as he walked through them as they grasped at his armour and he swiped his claws through them for the their audacity, but instead of blood, black tar spilled from their split bodies, marring his armour, sticking his feet against the ground and the water around the island was rising, rising, turning into more black tar as he fought his way through those grasping faithful, forward, towards-
-Mita, standing above the simpering crowd, tall and straight like a cathedral spire, strength shining out of her like a beacon and the only tar-black thing on her were her eyes, black like she was his sister in blood and purpose and if he could just reach her, if he could take the bloodsoaked hand she was offering him, if he could take just another step and-
-his foot caught on rib cages that would not break, tangling around his sabatons, his legs, tar-water rising and rising and rising into grand waves that crashed over his head and-
-he stood on Istvaan, its sand soaked red for miles and miles around, and the fighting was fierce, too close for the Mordax Tenebrae to do him much good, so he used his claws, cutting through ceramite and flesh and things beyond flesh, suits of power armour filled with creeping vines and the spongy flesh of mushrooms and that was not right, that wasn’t what had happened; He couldn’t see any of his brothers, only armour of decaying green, plates crumbling, vines grasping at him faster than he could cut them down, wrapping around him and trying to worm their way into his armour, reach flesh and he knew,he knew that if they reached it he would die but they entangled him further and the ground beneath was churned blood and sand and mud without a bottom, the vines pulling him down and the mud rising over his face, filling his vox grille until it choked him and he couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe couldn’t-
-gasp for air as he was lifted up by the scruff of his neck like a kitten, like he weighted no more than a small child and suddenly the ground was solid again and the mass of vines-in-armour shrank back and withered as the shadow of death fell over them and he turned and-
-his father was there, hand still clawing around the back of his neck, but this wasn’t the armour he had worn on Istvaan, this was the cloak of feathers and the fine midnight silk of the first time Sahaal had laid eyes on him, when they all had first met their father, their Dominus Nox, their Dark King and Fulgrim might as well not have been in the room when his eyes roamed over them all, judging and finding them all unworthy and yet they were on their knees for him, struck by what he was, the justiciar’s blade made flesh, with his crown of knifes, and Sahaal was struck again by that presence, unassailable and magnificent and rolling over him like a great dark ocean and some foolish creature stepped into that ocean and-
-the Night Haunter turned, the gale turning into claws and lightning on his hands and the stupid creature fell to ash and he turned back to Sahaal directly, pulled him to his feet with those same electric claws sizzling over his flesh instead of through it, like ghosts and he couldn’t think couldn’t-
-”Get a fucking grip you useless piece of gutter slime, do you want to die?!” Resist the voice the went through him like blades, like silk, like breath, like combat stims, and he was back into the fray before the words stopped ringing in his ears and his father was next to him now, graceful as a shark in dark waters, beyond the confines of gravity, going through his enemies not with trained artistry but the inherent elegance of someone who was born to his, untouchable, unbeatable and somehow Sahaal kept up with him, following the anti-light glow of his crown as it deepened and deepened and the daemon things around them screamed and shrunk back and turned to run but there was no running from this hunter, there never had been, never would be and the darkness flowed out from his father and swallowed them all, darkness so deep even Sahaal was blind and then corpse-cold lips ghosted over his cheek, breath smelling like blood and ash and the dead of midnight
“Wake up” -
- Zso Sahaal stared up at the colorless grey ceiling and the last time he’d felt so weak had been after his final implantation, when his body had struggled to heal from being flayed and closed and flayed again all over. His hearing returned slowly, the buzz and wailing of dying daemons giving way to the annoying bleeps of medical equipment and above that, breathless with shock, the voice of one of his younger brothers.
“You have the fucking Corona Nox?”
—
Apparently Mita had not seen it fit to warn or really explain anything to Tierce before she’d fetched the lead lined box from its storage and just laid the crown onto his chest, with the reasoning of ‘it feels alive, maybe it can help’ and admittedly, Sahaal wasn’t sure if it could have made things worse.
He had gained a profusion of small, pitted wounds all over his body and lost two weeks of time - his memories turned into an untrustworthy jumble of impressions shortly after they had translated into the warp. The vision-dream was the clearest of them all, or maybe that was just because he was still cradling the Corona in his hands. It felt… warmer, like it had been worn recently, but maybe that too had merely been his own fever-heat warming it, though he wanted to believe otherwise.
His father had chosen him to wear it, and he had chosen him again, just now, to keep it, hadn’t he? Maybe Mita was right and there was more than some impression of him left in the metal and the stone, some essence of the Night Haunter alive still, millennia past his death. He wanted it to be true, more desperately than he cared to admit.
Sahaal suspected Mita knew anyway. She perched on the bed beside him, close enough for her leg to press against his hip. She looked smaller here than she had in his dream, frail. Tired, with deep shadows underneath her eyes. She was still trying to explain to Tierce how they’d come into the possession of the crown and why she had thought to use it.
His brother-apothecary did not look like he was enjoying the explanation very much.
“So you had this very powerful artifact that has active psychic emanations. And you thought it might help, so you asked me out of my own apothecarion-”
Ah, so that was the state of things. Sahaal kept his face blank and his gaze focused on the central blood gem of the crown. It would be good to have an apothecary supporting his mission. Even a very young one. Tierce clearly saw this tiny little medbay, nearly unsuited to Astartes needs, barely a proper medicae, as his territory already.
Good.
“-to place it on my patient, and hope for the best. Am I getting that right?”
“Did you have any better idea at the time, aside from ‘wait and hope for the best’? Which is not materially different than what I did.” She was sounding very reasonable, his little witch, even though she was clearly tired. Slowly, carefully, he took one hand off the crown and placed it against her back, a silent support that she didn’t mention but leaned into anyways.
“That’s not- Look, I understand the logic but you placed the fucking Corona No onto a warp-infected body. Do you even know-”
“Yes.” Her voice was sharp and brooked no argument. “Yes, I do know, I probably know it better than you do, and it worked, didn’t it? It healed him.” She leaned back into his hand a little further, on the defensive now, and while he could see the point Tierce was making, she was right. There had been few other options and it had worked. It had shown him his father again, in all his grandeur. He couldn’t fault her for that.
“Tierce.” His throat ached. Even his insides hadn’t been spared this disease. It still made both of them stop their bickering to look at him, Tierce all but standing at attention. “Let it go. It worked when you had no other options, but you are right that it was a risky decision. We will not be repeating this.”
They both deflated a little, Tierce adding a little, “Understood, Captain”.
Good enough.
He nudged at Mita, careful and just enough to get her attention. “Mita, you should rest.” She clearly needed it, and he needed to speak to Tierce, brother to brother. She looked at him for a moment, searching his face for something, before nodding and leaving, passing Tierce close enough to touch, though neither reached out. But clearly they trusted each other that much. Good enough as well.
The apothecary came to his side without needing to be asked for it, the same way they switched languages to Nostraman. Sahaal needed to know what he’d missed.
“How bad was it?”
“Very. I had you in partial sus-an to slow the infection down. I was hoping your body would purge whatever the problem was. You were also under strict quarantine until I figured out that it wasn’t infectious. Your witch was anxious the entire time. I would have considered sedating her for her own good, but that seemed a bad idea unless I wanted to keep her under for longer.”
Sahaal didn’t like that phrasing. “Something happened.” Some argument that had impressed on a fellow - albeit young - Astartes that Mita could not be disregarded like any other baseline.
Tierce shrugged. “Shouting match, a week ago. She wanted to see you, I thought it was too big a risk. She became… thorny. In my head.” The way she usually got angry. Except of course, Tierce was a stranger. Mita wouldn’t have seen any reason to reign herself in. Sahaal remembered that first meeting he’d had with her well enough to see how that might have gone. “Felt like she’d knocked a few teeth loose for a second, before she decided she’d made her point.”
“You didn’t hurt her.” Obviously. But even so: Sahaal would have expected any of his brothers to retaliate in kind. If not right there, then the next time Mita’s attention lapsed.
“It’d have been stupid. She’s your witch. If you’d woken up with her maimed, I’d be next on the flaying table.”
He took a deep breath, eyes settling on the Corona. “I am glad her idea worked. Even if it gives me hives.”
It would have been unfortunate to gain Tierce, and immediately lose him to Mita’s pride and temper, no matter how justified. It occurred to him that he would have to make sure she would keep to the discipline he wanted to impose as well. Not just when it came to hunting and combat, but amongst each other, too.
—
Tierce let him go a few hours and examinations later, Corona back in its case. It felt stupid to wear it now, in a mostly empty ship.
By then, the marks of the disease had turned into scars already, still tender but closed. His hands looked pitted like the surface of a meteorite, some patches of skin discolored red and angry still. Doubtlessly the rest of him looked no different
He had expected to find Mita in her room, but that was empty and looked like it had been for some days. Had she not slept? No wonder she’d looked so worn out when he’d woken. But he had to talk to her, so he had to find her, and unlike his witch, Sahaal had no way to just reach for her mind, at least not at this distance.
So he tracked her the regular way, by scent and knowing her, and he did find her. In the room he had chosen for himself, curled up on his bed and dead asleep. She didn’t even wake when he opened the door. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her sleep, far from it, but there was something different in finding her in his bed, and for her to not even wake up now… He considered, for a moment, settling down next to her, but he didn’t want to wake her when she so clearly needed the rest.
So instead he settled on the floor, pulled a dataslate from underneath the cot and started flipping through everything else that had been logged for the ship while he had been ill.
–
It had been a good idea not to wake her, considering that it took her nearly eight hours to wake on her own, with a drowsy, "Oh, hello", like this wasn’t technically his bed and she the intruder. “Am I in the way?”
“I had two weeks of bedrest. No. But I was looking for you. There are things we have to consider now.”
“Ah.” She sat up and stretched, then scooted forward on the bed, into touching range again, like she’d done in the medbay. Was that because he’d been ill? Had she been worried? “Because we have someone else with us now?”
“Yes.” Good, she did understand the basic problem.
“There will be more, in time, and you will have to be around them. You cannot treat them like idiots when they aren’t behaving like idiots, or they will put a knife between your ribs, no matter what I do to them afterwards.” And he would be doing all kinds of things to them afterwards.
She opened her mouth and he just kept going, well aware that if she got a word in now, he wouldn’t get to the other point.
“I will not let your temper reign over them, either. I have seen where that leads, letting someone’s pride and impulse run unfettered. There will be focus here and that includes you. If one of our brothers offers you an insult, I would not stop you from retaliating then. But an apothecary telling you something you don’t wish to hear is not an insult. He is not the enemy.”
Her mouth snapped closed again, hard enough to make her teeth click. She needed a moment to wrestle her seething anger down, he could see it on her face.
“What would you have me do, then? I’m not one of your marines, and you might call me sister, but they certainly won’t-” And now, apparently it was his turn to just be talked over. “So if I want their respect, I’ll have to take it. How do I do that, you suppose, if I cannot do it in a fight? I’m not going to be your tame little witch for them.” Her mouth pulled into a hard line, shoulders set. She wasn’t going to budge on that.
What a good thing then, that she wouldn’t have to.
“Of course not. You’re my lieutenant,” Their legion had examples of adopting in ‘strays’ after all. “If they disrespect you, knock them flat. I know you are capable of that.”
She’d done it to him in the middle of a firefight. He had full confidence that any Night Lord trying to intimidate her would find himself on the floor and lucky if his brains stayed inside his skull. There were a few he remembered who would have been improved by such a treatment.
“But I will not have you lash out just because it entertains you, or because your temper slips. Our enemies must fear you, always, as much as they fear any of us. But our brothers should respect you.”
Her mouth softened again at the corners, then the rest of her posture followed. “You’re right. I’m not Kaustus,” and she’d told him enough of the man that he knew what she was getting at. “I’ll try and keep a lid on it. Do I have to apologize to Tierce? For…?”
She gestured vaguely at herself, at the crown’s case, still by his side. The last bit was an honest question, not petulant, but true interest.
“Not in words. Fetch him food personally, next time. He will understand what you mean.”
He could see her file that information away carefully, the way she did when they were trying to figure out where to go next, which target to choose, and then her eyes sharpened and settled on him and he could see her start to sort through things he had done for her and recategorize them with the same ruthless efficiency.
“So. Your Lieutenant?”
“Who else?”
Notes:
- I love dream sequences and you all gotta endure that now
- with all my apologies to ADB but i disagree on the notion that Konrad Curze was never graceful. Absolutely refuse, an he can meet me in the pit about it, too. My terrible sad wet cat of a primarch is actually more terrible, if in the middle of all that slaughter it still kicks you in the teeth that at the base of it he's the exact same thing as Sanguinius
- that argument between Mita and Tierce is also in the 'extra scenes' document because it's gotta be from his PoV
Chapter 16: Chapter 16 - Mita Ashyn
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Their Navigator didn’t live.
Mita had very much expected that; the man was a good Imperial citizen, which meant he was going to be a problem for them specifically, sooner or later.
She did feel sorry about it, but she had seen it coming. Perhaps she was a little consoled by the fact that it netted Tierce nearly word for word the same speech that Sahaal had given her on the topic of ‘we only torture people for a purpose and ‘it’s fun’ is not sufficient purpose’, and their poor Apothecary had looked very much like a child on Sanguinala being told there wouldn’t be any gifts. Or sweets.
He’d looked very, very young too, which once would probably have made his disbelieving ‘but they taste better that way?’ even more horrifying and now just forced her to suppress her smile and her urge to try and ruffle his curls.
How strange what a year could do to your life. But she liked the change.
Their Navigator’s last job had been, unbeknown to him, to take them to the asteroid belt that was the last position Tierce had for his company.
The Night-Scythes had apparently gotten away with a minimal amount of chaos corruption until now and Sahaal was willing to take his chances there. And Tierce… Tierce wanted to see blood for his dead Claw. They would start their hunt here.
—-
“I think that went pretty well.”
He would.
Mita watched Tierce flick blood from his blades and then clean the rest off with the cloak of the marine whose throat he’d cut. Apparently that one had been in charge of the betrayal that had ended with him alone on Quietos, and now he’d gotten his pound of flesh from him.
In the back of her mind, Sahaal grumbled something agreeable. Sure, half of the Claw that had come to talk to them - presumably drawn in by the fact that Tierce was with them, and alive, and needed to be neither of those things - had gone for their weapons immediately, assuming superior numbers.
Which, to their credit, they had. They didn’t expect Mita to swipe one of them immediately, mental claws raking across his open mind and dropping him the way she had dropped Sahaal, when they’d first met. Neither did they expect to find themselves face to face with Zso Sahaal and, perhaps more importantly, the Corona Nox, once more active in all its gut-churning splendor.
It had been like that ever since he had put it on before heading to the meeting on some Emperor-and-Chaos forsaken dead world. A shudder had gone through him when the metal touched his skin and Mita had felt… something, that nearly-alive presence inside the metal and stone contracting, and then settling like a cloak around Sahaal, and somehow it seemed to have… sharpened every part of him in that fraction of the second, like a lens focusing in every detail at once.
Beside her, Tierce had inhaled sharply, so she knew it hadn’t just been her seeing that.
And then what turned out be Fourth Claw had seen him, too and three of them had stopped like they’d run into the end of their tethers, jerked back, minds awash with awe. It had only lasted a moment, but by the time they’d gotten over that and aimed their weapons again, Sahaal had been on them and the blood started raining down.
But the other half of the Claw seemed to be willing to just let the fight play out and see what Sahaal had to offer, netting them four survivors and one balefully silent captive, eyelenses glued to her like he very much knew who was responsible for his current migraine. Good. Let him. She was quite deliberately not watching him, instead paying attention to the… negotiations between Sahaal and the not-captive parts of Fourth Claw. Perhaps also because that allowed her to not pay attention to Tierce - still without a narthecium - digging the gene seed out of his fallen brothers with way too much relish. Though at least he seemed to be doing a very neat job of it, the first lumps of meat she’d seen him separate had come out almost clean.
Better to pay attention on the negotiations, at least until her personal victim thought she was distracted and tried to come at her again, low and fast and murderous intent blazing in his mind - and she knocked him out again with the same mental sideswipe as the first time, letting momentum carry him at her feet.
Sahaal didn’t even glance over, just gestured to her a quick ‘mission accomplished fully’ because of course he’d known that she would take care of herself.
–
The negotiations had gone well enough to get the company’s Captain down from the Eternal Eclipse. He hadn’t been particularly impressed, and Mita caught the word ‘traitor’ from him, hurled at Sahaal like a spear. Maybe he should also join the migraine-ridden pile of power armour she was seriously considering using as a footrest - except Sahaal’s voice was in her ear still, ‘do not lash out because it entertains you,’ so she resisted that temptation - but she had to trust her mirror. She would not take this fight from him.
Not even when the other captain and Sahaal both drew blades, because they were going to do something stupid like trying to settle this in a duel.
She had seen Sahaal fight before, many times by now. She’d even seen him fight other Astartes, just now, Tierce by his side. This was different, and she realized with a jolt that it was a show as much as a fight, the goal not so much to dispatch the enemy quickly, but to make clear that they both could do so, at any time they chose, but that they were playing with their food.
It was- She didn’t have words. If there weren’t the sparks of blocked blades and grinding chain teeth she could have forgotten that they were armed and armoured, so light on their feet, so fast she barely saw the exchange of blows until they were locked together for half a blink before parting again, more a series of pict images than real motion.
It was captivating enough that she didn’t even notice Tierce coming over until he was right beside her, arms bloody up to the elbow and humming with pleasure still. She barely looked at him even then. If she did, she might miss something.
“Captain’s lucky that Zaresh is one of the old guard. Nikea,” He nodded at one of the corpses on the floor, the one that Mita knew he had enjoyed seeing die, “Wouldn’t have gone for an honor duel. But I guess he knew that.”
Another clash of blades and Sahaal turned, arms coming up leaving his chest unguarded to block one blade. Mita’s heart was in her throat and of course the other - Zaresh - took that invitation, chainblade trying to chew through the seal under his arm except this one was the augmentic and instead of slicing through yielding flesh, metal ground on metal. Zaresh hesitated in surprise for less than a split second, but it was enough for a fighting claw to find his neck. He tore away, making the wound worse, great surges of blood and beside her Tierce tensed - she wasn’t sure if it was medical training or hunger for the kill, because he didn’t know either, and neither did the rest of the present Night Lords as the same feeling rippled through them - as Sahaal followed the other one down, claws back at his throat, pinning him.
He said something and she couldn’t resist sliding into his mind now, just to understand-
”You can live. Yield. It’s a waste to kill you.” And here she had all the intricacies of Nostraman she wouldn’t have understood yet, the subtleties of ‘yield’ that implied rulership, the accent on ‘waste’ that was honest regret.
“Kill me, or your little witch will be the first blade I put in your back.” She knew, there, that Zaresh had seen her for what she was, something to hurt Sahaal with if destroyed, and there was nothing but conviction there. He would kill her, the same way gravity pulled on planets.
A moment of rage, cold and possessive from Sahaal and fierce pride-joy at having found at last this chink in his armour from Zaresh, then it was done. The head rolled a little ways before Sahaal bent and placed it back reverently. Mita was still in his head, knew that he was honoring his brother and then he pushed her out, gentle but unyielding.
—
The Eternal Eclipse was a Light Cruiser, fully warp-worthy - if in need of a few repairs, and they did just so happen to have a little ship they could butcher for some - with a mostly full complement of serfs, a Navigator, and what turned out to be two Claws worth of Night Lords, Third and Seventh. Two and a half, if you counted everyone hauled up from the surface again.
Her crew wasn’t happy to see them, Astartes and mortals alike, but Sahaal had won that duel and Fourth Claw had mostly come back on board dead, making it clear that any attempts on his life should be considered very, very carefully even without the heavy presence of the Corona still around him. And it was heavy around him, nearly a physical weight to Mita’s ethereal senses.
It was wearing on her more than when she had worn the crown against her own chest, but it took her two more hours of walking the ship by his side to figure out that that was because she was being stupid about it. When the Corona had been a burden to handle, she had tried to shield herself from its mental presence any way she could. Now she was reaching for Sahaal ever so often, sharing impressions of various Night Lords with him - this one is courting chaos without knowing it, that one will be easier to sway if you can sway that one instead - or just leaning into his strength for a moment.
Naturally, right now, that meant leaning into the Corona as well. That was foolishness.
It didn’t stop her. She would have to get used to it now, wouldn’t she?
She would not give him up to his ghosts, no matter how much he loved them.
So she stayed with him, walking the length of the Eternal Eclipse in his shadow, back straight. She would not be cowed. Never again. Not by the Imperium. Not by the Night Lords watching her like she was a particularly appetizing morsel. Not by the echo of their dead primarch.
—
It took only a few hours to pull their own ship into one of the hangar bays of the Eclipse, and start dismantling it for parts. She watched from a perch on high, oddly reminded of a little crevice in the port of Equixus’ hive. There was something like nostalgia in there. Once upon the time it had just been them. Now it was starting to be more, and she wanted that, wanted what it promised but the change was like breaking in a new pair of shoes, pinching and uncomfortable.
Tierce by himself had not chaffed her so.
He was below her right now, talking to his brothers. Trying to convince them that Sahaal was worth it, she knew that. The success looked to be mixed.
She also knew that hanging above her in the tangle of cables and rafters was another one. This one had the taste of chaos upon him, though he wore it like an old scar, not like living corruption. Her eyes drifted up to find him, let him know that she knew, and for a moment she saw starless eyes and an impression of feathers, then he was gone.
—
Others tracked her like that as well, shadowing her without trying to get any closer. She wondered if they were waiting for a chance to take a swipe at her, if all of them saw her as Sahaal’s exposed, soft underbelly allowed to wander the ship alone.
And she did wander alone, trying to gauge the state of the serfs: not good, for the most part, but not actively starving. What mutilations they had were either compensated with augmentics or relatively small. Missing fingers or patches of skin were left to scar, but entire limbs were replaced, if crudely. Zaresh had clearly tried to preserve his mortal resources. They could work with that.
She didn’t try to convince the serfs to speak with her, provided they even could. Tongues seemed to be in shorter supply than expected, and those who had them mistrusted her.
Always, always, she was followed by at least two Night Lords, who took care to let her know that they were there, though if they thought that would scare her, make her run and thus give them an excuse to chase her, they were going to be disappointed. They would pounce eventually, and when they did… she had practice now, striking at Astartes minds. Let them come at her and find out why their crowned brother thought her a worthy companion.
—-
Her only respite from the ceaseless stalking were the captain’s - now Sahaal’s - quarters. She slept there for now, and none of her aspiring hunters were stupid enough to try and intrude there. At least, not after the first one had ventured very close and Sahaal had rather literally thrown him down the hallway instead.
Her other sanctuary was the apothecarion. Tierce was the only proper apothecary the company had left and as such his reign there was nearly absolute, if sometimes a little shaky with youth. But he tried, and he had made it equally clear - albeit in a much more cheerful manner than Sahaal - that if anything happened to her in his apothecarion, the culprit would become his next anatomy specimen.
She still couldn’t rely on that protection much. If she did she’d look weak, like she was hiding, and she had come to understand very, very quickly, that if she was weak, she was a preything, a plaything. So Mita endured, and waited, and eventually, on their next warp jump, finally, they did try.
It was almost a relief, like a heatwave breaking.
She was down near the engines, just another tour of the various corners of the ship, when she felt the movement behind her, suddenly much, much too close for comfort. She didn’t turn, didn’t check, just lashed out blindly, letting her mind find its own target, half in a kinetic blow that might not do much on a space marine and half of it a blow to the mind, rough and unaimed, but it did connect solidly. She rushed forward, not to flee but to ensure she didn’t end up trapped beneath her would-be attacker’s bulk and make herself easy prey for the other- because there was always another. Night Lords hunted in packs, if they could help it.
As her first attacker stumbled forward, hands emerged from the shadows beside her, so she struck just as blindly, except this time she didn’t try for kine force. She fed pain into those hands, pure and simple, the suffering she had seen on the serfs weaponized like a blade of her own. The hands jerked back and then she was past, mind flung wide ahead of her, in case there was yet another of them aside from the two she’d temporarily left reeling-
There was, though he just dropped onto the walkway in front of her, right underneath a lumen, eyes focused past her. That was the one with the chaos ‘scars’ on his mind, and she could see why. Half his hair seemed to have been replaced with raggedy, sharp-looking feathers, and his nails curled into true claws on fingers with too many joints. Silver shimmered on his head, a more ordinary sort of vanity than she’d come to expect on any of them
“I did tell you she’d make you hurt if you tried.”
Three of them would be a little too much to handle but what choice did she have? So Mita spread her attention, light tabs on the ones behind her, still dazed - tabs enough to catch the reply of ‘Fuck off Sylask, we’re not sharing’ despite her still incomplete grasp on Nostraman - and the one in front of her. Sylask, apparently.
He hopped up onto the railing with a lightness that prickled on the back of her neck. Had his mutations hollowed his bones like a bird’s, too? No matter right then. Her eyes stayed on him as he sauntered over on the railing.
“The only thing you could be sharing right now is the migraine she’s given you two idiots.” Still in Low Gothic, and clearly for her benefit. She had to wonder why.
He was close now and Mita readied another strike, mental reserves pulled together and eyes narrowed. Apparently he could tell because he stopped, head tilted in such a familiar way…
She realized that what she’d taken for fine silver chains woven through his feather-hair was, in truth, him going grey. She hadn’t even known that Astartes could do that.
“Peace, witchling. Not gonna do their work for them when you laid them out so nicely for me”
He strolled down past her, and she turned with him just in time to see him hop down and land on the less-conscious Night Lord’s stomach, crouching down to slice four thin lines into his cheek with his claws, almost like a caress, his voice going sweet and sing-song as more lines joined those first four.
“Now, I’ve been told that the two of you have been behaving very badly in the apothecarion lately, what with stealing equipment. Is that how we treat our sole apothecary? Stealing his things?”
Maybe she didn’t want to see this. Mita stepped back as quietly as possible, but Sylask didn’t seem to notice. Fine by her.
Notes:
[release another OC into the wild] Everyone say 'hello Sylask'
Obligatory 'ask me about my OCs i love talking about the trash gremlin collective'
Chapter 17: Chapter 17 - Zso Sahaal
Notes:
This one's a short one because we're doing some ramp-up for in two chapters. I'll be worth it, I promise.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Surely before their primarch had died things had not been this bad. Surely it was the ten thousand years of abandonment that had made being in charge of any number of Night Lords larger than three such a headache. Surely what made his old Raptor units look so disciplined and sensible wasn’t nostalgia, or the fact that he had had gotten to shape his units to his personal standards over decades.
Surely there was a way he could fix this without venting people out an airlock for expediency’s sake.
Sahaal very much felt like the airlock was a valid option right now.
They were in orbit around a nicely backwater colony world, no orbital defenses to speak of - at least not anymore- he’d been delighted to find the Eternal Eclipse had a handful of combat crafts and the pilots to go with them, in a decent enough state to take out the smattering of defense satellites.
The plan had been easy. Go raid the surface for slaves - they desperately needed more mortals for all kinds of tasks on the ship - and supplies. He’d led the first excursion, his little witch at his side, hoping that if she could show off her own talent for fear and violence, Third Claw would stop trailing her like she was a wounded cervid they were trailing.
Having her put them into Tierce’s care with cranial bleedings hadn’t done the job quite as thoroughly as he’d hoped.
On the second one he had taken the remains of Fourth Claw, and all of Seventh, and Mita again, for the same reason. This settlement had been bigger and it had gone well. Fourth Claw clearly remembered his own abilities as well as how it felt to have a little slip of a witch turn their brains inside out. Seventh wasn’t brave enough to try him on their own. They’d come back with transports loaded to their limits.
So the next raid he’d sent Seventh alone and now he was standing on the bridge of the Eclipse and fought the urge to rub his temples. It wouldn’t be doing him any good with the helmet on anyways.
The only parts of Seventh claw that had returned with their loaded up transport this time were Sylask, who was apparently trying to be respectful but was watching with him a predator’s eye for weakness, and their techmarine, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Were my orders unclear?”
“We were to acquire the list of materials you sent us for, then return.” The techmarine shifted minutely back on his feet, bracing for a blow, like he hadn’t been one of the two people who actually had followed their warp-kissed orders.
In the back of his head, Mita was swallowing her own laughter.
“And the rest of your brothers have not done that, because…?” Sahaal was wondering, in some secluded corner of his mind, if this was where First Captain Sevatar’s attitude had come from. It certainly was more productive than tearing things apart in a rage.
“They wanted a little sport. So they went hunting.”
And short of tying them to the outside of their shuttlecraft - which Mita thought would have been a fantastic idea - there had been little way to stop them. Fine. If he had to enforce discipline himself, he would do that.
He opened the vox link. “Fourth Claw, meet me in the hangar bay. We will be fetching our wayward brothers.” His head turned to Mita, leaned against some console next to a terrified slave.
“Lieutantant Ashyn.” Because she couldn’t be Mita to them, not yet, not until they could see past the fact that she was small and mortal. “You have the bridge until I’m back.” She snapped him a legion salute, and then bowed, slow and deep and came to climb into the command throne with all the air of an exile queen, expecting Sylask to get out of her way and not take a swipe at her, and he obliged.
She wasn’t getting the same predator’s watch from him, and Sahaal couldn’t help a pang of mixed pride at how well she did, and envy about the fact she had clearly gained some recognition there already.
Her eyes went straight ahead, at the displays and readings showing the ship’s status and auspexes, but her mind curled over him for a moment, leaving behind the feeling of a hand on his shoulder, a wish for luck.
—
Seventh Claw had apparently come to regret their spontaneous hunting expedition.
They had started regretting it about ten minutes after Sahaal had found the first of them wrist deep in two different mortals’ stomachs and he decided that perhaps the offender could stand to experience that treatment himself. Astartes were very sturdy and he had full confidence in Tierce’ skill.
The screams had drawn the rest of them, and Fourth Claw had been very eager to assist in subduing them and prove that they were reliable.
To their credit, they had been that since Captain Zaresh had died. So Seventh Claw’s regrets were ongoing, all the way back into the hangar of the Eternal Eclipse. He did let them make their way down to the practice cages under their own power, armoured, even if every one of them left bloody footprints on the way. But there was punishment and there was humiliation, and he wasn’t going to let some mortal slave see his brothers brought so low, even by his own hands.
Of course it continued down by the cages, protracted lectures on how he expected them to follow his orders, while Tierce wandered between them, making sure they would live to take the lessons.
His witch-sister ended up complaining about missing out on it, but some things couldn’t be helped. Someone trustworthy had to be on the bridge, no matter how much she wanted to dip her hands into Astartes blood or how much he would have enjoyed letting her do it, but surely the white leather ribbons he was planning to make for her would make up for that.
–
The lessons did stick, but when he had hoped that this had made his stance on these things clear, Sahaal still found himself disappointed. Not as many times as he’d come to fear, but enough. The humans they had - both slaves and servitors - were valuable resources and had to be treated as such. That meant not wasting their lives. That meant preserving the lives of those particularly useful. You could replace menials relatively easier. Mechanics and pilots? That was harder, even before the issue of replacing their own numbers came up.
They would need aspirants and fully grown Night Lords.
The logs of the Eclipse had coordinates to try and recruit the latter, and the former… would happen in time, too. Tierce had a neat little stash of geneseed, raw or already cultured and suspended before implantation. Suitable aspirants would be found.
—
Recruiting his grown brothers to his side was a mixed success. Zaresh was clearly not the only one who thought his millennia of absence constituted betrayal, and the Corona was as likely to inspire awe as attacks. He could feel it stand between him and Mita at times, like when he had her curled against his leg while she slept on his bunk, but her mind stayed far away as long as he wore it and only curled close in sleepy comfort when he took it off.
But he needed it, and the will of their father that it embodied, his last inheritance made substance. Even if living up to that inheritance took up more and more of his time to try and forge the scattered tatters of his legion into the blade their father had wanted at the Imperium’s throat.
Even among his brothers, even among those of them he judged loyal there was some distance now, distance that had not existed when he had ‘just’ been First Captain. They had doubted him then, but part of that had been that he had always been one of them, standing in the shadow of Sevatar and which one of them could have measured up to that?
Now he was a legend himself, his own story half a myth, half a cautionary tale, wearing an artifact they had all heard about but very few had actually seen.
It made him feel it all the more keenly when he and Mita kept missing each other, when he came to their room to find it empty, save for the scent or her warm skin soaked into the sheets, for cycle after cycle.
She was his mirror still, his unguarded reflection shining out of her eyes the same way he knew she could see herself in his. He knew he could leave the Eternal Eclipse in the hands of his witch-sister as long as she drew breath, that she would be with him all the way onto the walls of Terra and that was more than he could say for the majority of his brothers.
And yet, the majority of their time now it felt like they were slipping past each other, Mita coordinating the raids and offering targets that would bleed the Imperium of more than just a few million mortal souls, while he fought on the ground or herded what remains of their legion he could. He would have preferred her at his side, drenched in their enemies’ blood, but that wasn’t a good use of her talents.
No, she knew the secrets of the Inquisitions. There were oubliettes that could be emptied out onto the streets of one planet or the other with devastating effects.
So she busied herself with that, and he attempted to ensure their slowly growing warband would not fall to chaos or infighting.
Notes:
[gives Sahaal a short moment of coming to terms with the fact that he's out of practice herding the cats that are his brothers.]
I love tormenting him in subtle ways.
Chapter 18: Chapter 18 - Mita Ashyn
Chapter Text
Sahaal had been here. Mita knew it when she woke, curled into one half of the bed instead of sprawled the way anything sized for Astartes proportions allowed her to. She knew it by the way she wanted to roll over into the other half of the pillow and press her face into the fabric and inhale like there were traces of some precious drug left on the fibres.
It was a ridiculous feeling and she resisted, but the feeling didn’t go away. She hadn’t seen Sahaal in what felt like weeks now, on the same ship, but never in the same time. She wished he’d woken her. It had been so long since they had spoken properly, or just spent time together, basking in each other’s presence. She missed him, something like starvation gnawing at the pit of her stomach.
As she braided her hair up with the inscribed white leather ribbons Seventh Claw had so ungraciously donated, she decided that this was a hunger she would suffer no longer.
Touching the vox bead in the collar of her coat connected her to the bridge, where one of Fourth Claw’s survivors was standing duty.
“Where is Captain Sahaal?”
“Training cages, ma’am.” That would be Ashra, then. Nobody else called her that and meant it. She wasn’t sure why he did, except that it pleased his idiosyncrasies. “Would you like him to expect you?”
‘Do you want me to call ahead’, except Ashra seemed to be terminally allergic to such informality. Half the time his phrasing could have come straight out of an antiquated etiquette instructional, and Mita had once asked Sylask - quietly, privately - which spire they had stolen this one out of. She hadn’t gotten a reply beyond a sharp-teeth laugh.
“No, I will find him myself, thank you. Fleet status?” Admittedly, two ships and the smattering of fighters and shuttles was hardly a ‘fleet’. But it was more than what they’d started with.
“Unchanged for now, ma’am. The Shroud should rejoin us within this cycle, warp permitting.”
“Good. I will come to the bridge once my business with Captain Sahaal is concluded.” There was always the urge to echo Ashra’s formalities, years of manners training raising its head. Oddly enough, the Night Lord seemed to be drawing some joy from that, his voice lilting up into a smile.
“You need not feel compelled to rush on my behalf, ma’am. The bridge is very pleasant today.” Which meant he was enjoying terrorizing the crew by being pleasant at them, which tended to be more unsettling than any other option short of skinning one of them right there.
Fine with her, as long as everyone behaved.
–
The area around the training cages was packed with everyone who didn’t have anything pressing to do crowded close to watch their captain. Pride curled low in Mita’s stomach, and it only grew when the first Night Lord noticed her and stepped out of her way, all of them in time making her a path to the bars of the cage. They would kill her in a heartbeat - if she was lucky - if she showed weakness, but she had never let them see her weak. That was Sahaal’s privilege alone.
That thought curdled her pride like milk left in the summer heat. It was his privilege, yes, and yet. Yet she stood on this side of the bars, watching him fight barehanded against one of his brothers, the sort of brawl she had no hope at all of getting involved in, skin on skin and blood on blood and the entire savage beauty of his kind doing what they were made for: fight.
He won the bout, his joy bubbling through her mind like expensive amasec, momentary elation followed by the memory of a conversation with Sylask rising unbidden in her mind.
The older Night Lord had been lounging in a tangle of cables as if it was a hammock, telling her, ‘Tierce and I are shared flesh, like you and the captain,' clearly not expecting her utterly confused look for a reply. So he had explained what the turn of phrase meant: a privilege to physical contact so natural, a trust so absolute, that it barely registered anymore, the same way you couldn’t feel your own tongue in your mouth.
It had sat bitter with her then, and did so even more now. They trusted each other absolutely, but this… she would never share this immediate, physical connection with him that he could share with the brother he offered a hand up from the floor, and suddenly she wanted, with a fierceness that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She wanted him, not for the satisfaction of climax but because… because they belonged together in all ways, all things, and the thought that she might be excluded from any aspect of him hurt as sharply as acid.
It hurt as much as not seeing him for days on end.
How soothing would it be to carry his bites and bruises instead; the living, physical proof that he was hers, and real, not some warp delusion. She wanted that evidence, and the taste of his mouth and the touch of his hands and whatever else they could coax from his body and the idea itself made her mouth run dry for a moment.
Hot on the heels of that came the thought of how it would be one more shared defiance. Zso Sahaal had been made for war, and murder, by the will of the Emperor they both longed to kill. Wouldn’t it be the first pass of the knife to turn him to the opposing purpose for a little while?
Especially when they saw each other so rarely, working on the same purpose but so far apart? There was a half-formed sliver of fear, that one day he might not need her anymore, rearing its head ever so often as more and more of his time was consumed by his brothers, and ever less of it left for her, after so long of it having been just them, only them, against an entire galaxy wanting them dead.
Long ago, when they had truly talked for the first time, in the jail the Eldar had made of his mind, he had asked her if the love of a single being in the galaxy could possibly be enough. Back then, she had thought that to be the Emperor, so far away on Terra and in the end, her answer had been ‘no’. But that had been long ago.
She swallowed, noticed how her hands had curled into the thick fabric of her coat, and uncurled them, smoothing the wrinkles back down. She wanted, and for once, she did not know if Zso agreed with her. If he even could imagine it without some lengthy explanation of her part - usually she wouldn’t mind doing that but this felt so foolish. What if he didn’t crave her presence with the same heartrending intensity she did? What if he did? What if the casual intimacy of sharing a bed was as much as he could bear to give her?
Her mind felt like rending apart at the seams but there was no answer that she could pluck out of the ether of his mind, or rather, perhaps there was, but the thought that she would have to take it instead of being given… no. No. She would ask him and know his answer and that would be it, one way or the other.
Mita took a deep breath and reached her mind between the bars of the practice cage, trying to keep the touch light enough to conceal how her mind was wheeling around itself. She would have his answer honest, or none at all.
"Come see me when you’re done. I will be in our quarters."
And then she stepped back and slipped out of the room to wait.
—
She made her way back and settled in to wait for… oh, she wasn’t sure. The sparring could go on for a while, and part of her felt bad for delaying her duties for so long, there was a selection of raid targets she’d meant to go over… but every time she reached for the dataslate that listed the options, her mind wandered back down to the cages. How long would it take? How many hours? She knew he’d likely promised matches to some of his brothers.
In the end, it took less than one before the door to their quarters slid open to admit him. Sahaal was still wearing only the torn of fatigues he fought in, still had blood splattered across him, like he hadn’t even thought to take the time to clean himself up before seeing her.
She wanted to say so many things. She wanted her voice to be strong and sure and hide how helpless she felt before him for the first time in a long time.
What came out of her mouth wasn’t any of the things she’d meant to say. No grand speech, no confident demand for truth.
Just her voice, trembling with tears she hadn’t cried in years.
“Zso. Are you mine?”
Notes:
>:3
additional notes:
- releases the final OC into the wild (Ashra)
- Ashra is the guy Mita knocked out twice in Chapter 16. This taught him some things about himself
- he's calling her 'ma'am' because he's AGGRESSIVELY self-censoring himself out of calling her 'mistress' because he suspects that if he does that to the Captain's Girl on air, he's so fucking dead people will use him as a cautionary tale for new recruits for the next several thousand years.
The excessive formality is entirely unrelated, that's just him being extra and a horrible nerd.
Chapter 19: Chapter 19 - Zso Sahaal
Chapter Text
His little witch was upset. The thought had been swirling in the back of Sahaal’s mind ever since she’d asked to see him. She’d tried to hide it from him, like he couldn’t tell she was bleeding from some secret wound. He would have to go soothe some egos about the way he had cut today’s fights short, but he couldn’t leave her injured like that.
The way she’d sat on their bed, hunched upon herself, eyes large and wet in a way he hadn’t seen in years, told him he’d been right to hurry. This was Mita in pain, surely there was something to fix that-
And then she’s opened her mouth and asked,
“Zso. Are you mine?”
For a moment he could just stand there, and stare because why was she even asking that? Of course he was hers, in all ways and why would she- but the tears started to roll down her face like rain, so he knelt before her, hands cupped around her face like it was the most fragile treasure he’d ever laid eyes on, because she was. His little witch, his sister, his mirror, feeling the need to ask if he belonged to her. Like the only person who had more of a claim on his soul hadn’t been dead for ten thousand years.
“Yes. Until we’re dead.”
He’d never been more glad that she’d learnt Nostraman. Low Gothic did not suffice to cover the absoluteness of his sentiment. Yes, forever, even if you’re mortal, even if combat takes me before you. Yes. Until we’re both dead and dust.
That eased some of the gloom around her but he still didn’t know why she was crying, what he’d done to hurt her so- and then she leaned forward and pressed her salt-stained lips to his mouth and her mind against his and finally he knew.
He didn’t understand why she wanted their shared flesh, not really, only that she needed it like air and he would give her anything she needed like this- Then her dull little fangs nipped at his lips, making electricity shiver down his spine and maybe he did glimpse what she wanted from this. His lips parted as he tried to return the gesture, mindful of his own sharp teeth- yet when the points dug in too sharp and copper washed over his tongue, he tried to lean back and Mita followed him with a hungry little noise that dragged him back like a magnet.
Her mouth opened and this time he licked into it, omophagea buzzing in the back of his mind before the wave of her desire spread through him. She- he- no, they, they wanted this, together, some hunger he didn’t know he could possess taking hold. It made him lean over, over her, caging her against the bed and instead of being worried she welcomed him, arms around his shoulders, nails scraping down his back with her need to pull him closer, feel more of him, until those blunt little claws of hers caught on a spinal port and he *moaned*.
It felt alien in the best way, every single nerve in his body on fire and she the only thing in the galaxy who could soothe his need.
She used that tenuous hold, pulled him closer, and he followed, crawling over her on the bed, mouth on her lips, her jaw, her neck - where her pulse raced against his lips like she was terrified except she clearly wasn’t - until the fabric of her clothes was between them. She tried to fumble it open but he had no patience for that. Clothing was replaceable and this, here, now? This wasn’t.
A single pull of a fistful of fabric and then buttons were flying through the room, bouncing off his skin and Mita was laughing underneath him, breathless and delighted, all her tears dried. She fisted her fingers into his hair and pulled. It didn’t hurt, it couldn’t, especially not now, but he let her move him as she pleased, back to her mouth, like he was going to complain about another taste of her.
The thought crystalized in the back of his mind; he *had* seen her do this before, shove someone’s head down between her legs to do- he had no real idea what, except that it made her scream, if done right. Surely he could learn. Surely he could make her scream his name the way he’d heard her scream others. Surely he could make her *forget* that any of them had ever existed.
This time when he mouthed down her neck, she let him, even arched against him as he went lower, past the sweep of her collarbone, over her sternum - it was like he could taste her heart underneath, teeth catching on the heaving, soft skin of her breasts, another mouthful of hot copper blood and desire that swept the rest of the world away. There was her, and only her, and the fire searing his body from within, pooling in his groin.
He paused anyways, mouth smeared crimson, eyes rolled up at her in half-worry, despite the pleasure of her writhing underneath him. Their gazes met. Whatever distance Mita usually kept between their minds shattered with an intensity - so much touch, his own hands nearly meeting around her waist the chemical sting of his mouth on her lips and the bite on her chest the mine mine mine of wearing his mark the molten heat between her thighs where she really wanted him, now now now don’t stop - that made him break contact, eyes closed and panting against her chest until her fingers uncurled, smoothing down over his neck in slow, long sweeps. The devouring need banked down to something he could think past enough to lick across the bitemark on her chest, defacing that old tattoo of the throne once more - it would scar that way, her allegiance laid out clear to all the world - how the thought thrilled her when it filtered through to her - before moving lower.
It was work, tasting every inch of her, the soft give of her chest under his teeth, without cutting her worse than some scrapes, even before she slipped him the thought that he could suck those very same marks into her skin too, large, bright bruises across both her breasts that made her arch into his mouth. When he ran his tongue over the hard tips she sighed his name like a prayer. So he did it again, and again, and again, until she had both legs hooked as far around his chest as they would go, hips rolling against him with every motion of his tongue.
She did shove him back with a breathless groan eventually, far enough for him to admire his work: The flush painting her skin from her cheeks down to her stomach, the purpling marks and vivid red bites still oozing blood, her braids undone on their bed and spreading around her like a dark, fractured halo, but mostly the smile on her mouth, soft and wide and delicious, especially as it split wider into a true laugh. Her hand slipped from his shoulder to his cheek, letting him lean into it like she knew he felt nearly floating above his own skin, half-caught in her pleasure. He had missed her as much as she’d missed him, he realized. They needed this the same way.
“Mercy, please. Throne in flames, who taught you that?”
Sahaal turned his face a little more against her hand, caught the tip of her fingers in his mouth, the points of his teeth set so delicately against her skin, purely for the delight of seeing her shiver, legs tightening around him for a moment. He let her go again, but only because it’d be hard to talk otherwise.
“You, just now.” He leaned down to kiss her again, because they both wanted him to. “Teach me the rest?”
“Hmmmm, if you want?” Mita sounded a touch doubtful, the thread of it so obvious in his mind now that he *could* follow it down: was he truly offering her what she thought he did? So he made his answer as plain as he could:
Shoving the memory of the first time he’d seen her with a lover forward as he kissed her again, this time deeper, hungrier, with more teeth: her sumptuous quarters on the VoidWalker, the head of that worthless captain between her legs.
This, he wanted to know how to do this for her, overlaid the memory with what he was offering: his head in her lap like that, her thighs over his shoulders, his name ringing off the walls of the room.
Her hesitation vanished like water on desert sand.
“Yes please. Let me- I need some space to get these off.” She wiggled back enough to get her hand between their bodies, open her pants and get them out of the way as fast as the fabric would let her. Much as he loathed to let her move even that far, it was clearly necessary.
“And you.” She fixed him in a look that, on anyone else, would have made him growl, and on her just made his skin prickle in anticipation. “Get naked, now.”
The fatigues very nearly didn’t survive his haste, so by the time he was naked, Mita was still peeling her sticky underwear off and he’d known that scent on her before, but it had never been for him like this.
She looked up and just stopped, little scrap of cotton forgotten between her fingers in favour of letting her eyes rake up his body. Just her eyes at first, sliding all the way from his calves up over his thighs and then a ghost’s touch joined them, unseen hands kneading firm muscles, ghosting over his cock like fingertips - and he’d never been this aroused before in his life, not for any fight, not for all those rivers of blood he’d spilled, all those centuries of every desire of his being bent to the will and war of his primarch momentarily stepping aside in the face of Mita looking at him and licking her lips like she was starving without him. Like she needed him.
He stepped close again, knelt, and those ghost hands travelled higher, pressed down over his stomach, followed the edge of black carapace over his pectorals, teased along the scarred edge where his flesh met the metal of his augmentic, a spot that before had always been nearly dead to the touch but now pulsed with need.
His sister was very distracted by her witchcraft’s exploration, enough so that he had to twist her underwear out of her hand and toss it to the side before she twitched out of her reverie, ghost-hands replaced by her very real ones as she gripped his shoulders and pulled herself up against him until she could reach his mouth in another devouring kiss.
Sahaal’s hands found their way back to her thighs, pulling her flush against his body those last few finger spans Mita hadn’t managed on her own, skin sliding against skin, her breasts pressed flat against the smooth surface of the carapace, legs spread around his ribcage as she ground herself against him, wet enough that he could feel it like this already - suddenly he was the starving one and even her own metal hand curling over his shoulder didn’t stop him from pressing her down into the bed and freeing himself from her embrace enough to lick and suck his way down her body.
Astartes memory was nearly indelible, but this felt like more, like he’d be able to feel the give of her stomach under his mouth forever, or the way her leg hooked over his shoulder, heel digging into the muscles beside his spine, her dragging his augmentic hand up to her face to lick the metallic fingertips, the little gasp when he lifted her hips in one hand to get the angle he thought he needed, mouth finally descending on her cunt.
He had a vague idea of what exactly she needed here, his tongue sliding over her heated flesh like when he’d kissed her, drawing a sharp little inhale from her, then a distant echo of it from his omophagea feeding her pleasure back to him once more.
It was so easy to learn her like that, how to curl his tongue deep in the liquid heat of her - wet, like she was bleeding but slicker, musk and acid instead of copper and salt - to make her moan his name, pressing against knots of nerves he knew existed but never before would have thought to use for anything but pain. Except now all he wanted was her pleasure, the way she would writhe in his hands, legs and core clenching around him like she needed him deeper even when her own body would not allow that, even when he was already pressed so close that he was all but inhaling her, even when he was salivating for the taste of her enough for their mixed juices to drip down onto his lap, each drop another searing ember on his thighs, his cock, and the only thing that kept him from touching himself to the rhythm of her moans was that it would have meant taking a hand off her.
Her hand tangled in his hair, directing him this way or that when he wasn’t fast enough to follow the demands of her body, until she was shivering against his mouth, inside his mind, her entire self contracting around-against-inside him in a rush of liquid, an ecstatic wave that rolled his eyes up into his head from the feedback alone.
But he didn’t stop. Not until the prolonged, decadent shivers and spasms of her died down and she whined at him, telekinetic push shoving him back from her oversensitive flesh.
He could have let go, but that was just as impossible as before, so instead he laid her hips back down on the bed and leaned over her, nuzzling along her neck while she dragged him down into a hug, body pliant in the afterglow that wound around both of them, minds tied so close. His own body was still burning up with need, trying to find the peak she’d reached without knowing how to ask for it, but he could ignore that for a moment.
As if he needed to ask. As if she wouldn’t know his mind, witchcraft or not, his little witch, his shadow-mirror.
Her voice was roughened from screaming for him, and soft like down, whispering into his mind before her blood-red, bite-swollen lips formed the words into reality in between kisses.
“Get on the bed? On your back, I want this to be good for you, too. Let me show you?”
The bed was at least large enough for them both, not that Mita needed the space, considering that the moment he had laid down, she climbed onto him, legs spread wide to straddle his thighs, and through their connection, he could feel both the strain in her hips and her delight at just being there, smug and proud and tempting enough to make him lean up, one hand splayed wide across her shoulder blades, and taste that smile.
She let him, for a moment, and then some puckish impulse of hers plucked at his mind and bid him to lie back down, so he did, hand still on her back but sliding lower, cupping the swell of her ass, squeezing it experimentally and getting Mita to arch her back for his efforts, displaying her chest and all the marks he left on it, bites and bruises and no matter if she wanted him flat on his back, she was getting his face between her breasts, licking her dried blood off her skin and adding another bite.
At least until her fingers wrapped around his cock and his spine turned to water, letting her push him flat with one small hand on his chest while the other traced up and down his cock, light teasing touches that had his hips rolling up into her touch.
Her legs tightened hard around his hips and she rode the motion like she was riding a horse, barely needing his hands on her ass to hold her there, both of her hands on his cock again, stroking him, each motion more slick than before as his own arousal started to drip down his shaft. It only took moments to find a rhythm together, like the first time they’d truly fought side by side, that same synchronicity taking over so perfectly.
He knew she was reading it off his mind and his body, how to curl her blunt claws over his balls - blunt edges against delicate skin, nearly a threat in the most delicious way - how much pressure she needed on that spot right under the head of his cock to make him gasp her name.
She was sending him on the climb to the same peak she’d reached; no teasing, no drawing it out, just her eyes focused on his face, her hands on his flesh, mind twisting around his to send those same unseen hands as before all over him, kneading, touching, drowning him in sensation. Until everything else fell away and only she remained, the center of the hurricane, so close but not enough, never enough to make him take that final plunge no matter how tight his body had drawn underneath her.
“More?” Mita paused for a moment, hands still on him, watching him with nearly predatory focus. It was almost as good as her hands on him. Almost.
“Yes,” But… “How?” When this just wasn’t enough, when she was mortal and thus so breakable at times and his body was burning with a need he only knew to slake with the plunge of the knife, which was entirely out of the question. Either the thought was visible on his face, or his mind, because her eyes softened.
“I’m not that fragile, Zso.”
She slid forward on his body, legs strained so wide, wet cunt dragging up his body, over his cock and he knew what she wanted, what they both wanted and she clearly thought they could get it, too. But then, they had been taking what they wanted for years now, hadn’t they? Why not this too?
He pulled her forward a little more, trusting that she wouldn’t hurt herself, then her hand was on his cock again, getting the angle she wanted and keeping him in place as she pushed herself back. Her body parted around him, stretched wider than his tongue could have done for her, a frisson of pain that leapt from her to him; but she kept pushing, sinking back onto him until he could *see* himself move inside her, the soft skin of her belly rising in a small mount that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.
Sahaal had a very, very detailed idea of how fragile a human’s insides were, but the pain in Mita’s mind was a dim, faint thing, something to revel in instead of avoid. Her head fell back slowly, the entire vulnerable column of her neck on display and then she rocked her hips and all thoughts vanished from his mind.
They moved together, one mind in two bodies, braided together as tightly as their now-shared flesh was, hips rolling in perfect synchronicity to let Mita take him deep, to let Sahaal sink himself into her not to the hilt, but to the limits of her body.
It felt so good, even better than her hands had, the tight silken grasp of her around him, sucking and rippling with every motion. Her mind swallowed him the same way her body did, every sensation mirrored back, refracted, the feeling of his cock sliding into her the same as her feeling of being filled like that, the weight of his hand on her ass and the sting of her nails catching on an interface port on his stomach fading into one another until he couldn’t pick them apart anymore and then he just stopped trying.
They leaned together, another searing kiss, sharp teeth in their lips and blood between them, omophagea feeding him her memories through his flesh before sending them back into her mind, reflecting them back at him, an endless cycle of pleasure and need and want want want. Every sensation fell over them both, her body still over-sensitive and his new to everything she did to him.
Only snapshots were clear: the tension of her legs around his waist, knees digging in hard enough to bruise them both, the sound of their bodies sliding together slickly, a moment of their eyes meeting, Mita’s pupils blown so wide her eyes were almost black on white. It was the same plateau again, so close to release yet so far, balls drawn tight to his body but he needed something more, needed-
Mita’s own climax crashing through both of them, as she reached that peak again and this time, this time they were tangled so close she just dragged him off that cliff with her, the fire that had seared his veins crystalizing in his stomach, bursting like a star behind his eyes as her body milked him, pleasure feeding pleasure feeding pleasure feeding-
The world cleared up again to the reality of the plasteel ceiling above him, the slight weight of his sister on his chest and the feeling of her mind slowly, carefully, slipping from inside his the way he could feel his cock - still hard, and he wanted to do this again, as often as she wanted him to - slipping from her body as she wiggled her way up to kiss him.
There was still blood to lick off her lips, but even without it, he’d have known the hazy glow of satisfaction from her face. He’d just never been the one to give it to her before. He wanted more of that, too. But first…
“Was that answer enough?” That he was hers, that they belonged together in all things, minds and souls and bodies wound around each other like strands of a rope?
“Hmmmm, perhaps I need another demonstration at some point?” Of course they shared this want too, now. Of course they wouldn’t have to convince one another.
“So we do it again” When had his voice gone so rough?
It startled a laugh out of her, breathless but bright. “Right now? Yes please, but I’m not doing all the workthis time ar-”
He didn’t let her finish that sentence, in favour of rolling them over. Mita spilled onto the bed, her legs already falling open for him before he was on her again, and the rest of her sentence turned into a long, drawn out moan that he drank down eagerly.
Notes:
Sufficient amounts of smooching, one hopes?
The next chapter is only gonna be a little epilogue and then I think I shall get cracking on the 'missing scenes' collection. And the 'spin off'
Chapter 20: Chapter 20 (Epilogue) - Tierce
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Sylask was sitting on the cot in the back of the apothecarion, in the little extra room that was supposed to be for extra tricky cases and had instead been Tierce’s room for the last- oh, since he’d been made apothecary, really.
The older Night Lord was there, with his upper body bared, for what was technically a regular examination of his mutations but realistically was a good excuse to get petted and preened without him having to admit he liked being petted and preened.
Tierce was very fond of him.
Even if he was being ridiculous about this.He wasn’t going to put up any sort of fuss if Sylask wanted to be groomed. But oh well, he got to do it now, fingers running through the trail of feathers that dripped down Sylask’ spine like chunky ink and pulling out any loose ones, straightening the crooked ones out and snipping down what would get in the way of the interface ports otherwise.
He’d made it halfway down his ribcage when Sylask’s head jerked up sharply, eyes fixed on the ceiling and half his head-feathers perked up in a tuft that Tierce had privately vowed to never tell him made him look like a startled feline.
He was the only one who got to see that particular behaviour from him, and that was a privilege he’d like to keep, please and thank you.
But right now he had no idea why he was getting to enjoy that particular delight. They were very much alone.
“Something up?”
“Hmmm, you could say that.” Sylask was staring at the ceiling like he could see through it, and maybe he could. The warp had done strange things to his senses. “They finally worked it out. About time too, I have a favour riding on this with someone.”
“... rewind a bit, for me? Who worked out what?”
“Seriously?” The feathers smoothed back down, but only halfway, as he turned to look at Tierce. “Right. Captain Sahaal and the witchling?” He waited for the nod of acknowledgement. “Yeah, they’re finally fucking like underhive rats. Took them long enou- augh!”
Tierce hadn’t meant to, truly, but in his defense, he had still had his hand in that mess of feathers and might have accidentally closed his fingers a little too hard around that handful. Maybe pulled out a few, too. His head dropped forward onto Sylask’ shoulder, heedless of the way the other had twisted halfway away, landing more on his upper arm than his shoulder blade.
“Do you have to- Haunter’s teeth, did you have to phrase it like that?! I’ll never be able to unhear that.”
A long-clawed hand carded through his hair, razor points skimming his scalp while Sylask laughed at him, the light rumble rising through his chest.
“You’re the one who told me they weren’t doing it before, little blade, so don’t you go pretending the notion hadn’t crossed your mind.”
“Trust me, I’ve been trying not to think about it.” He was trying to sound put-upon but that was really hard while he was getting petted, and the last three words or so came out more purr than words. Unfair.
“You’re going to have to get used to it. Ashyn’s not walking away from this one without a few love bites.”
Right, no more purrs. “You stop talking right now or I will tranq you and sew your mouth shut, I swear on the fucking Corona.” He didn’t want to know what these two were getting up to right now, much less that kind of detail, eugh, gross. Mita was so off-limits for even imagining that sort of thing she might as well be in a different galaxy.
Of course that only made Sylask slip off the bed and sidestep any attempt to drag him back, his laugh rising to a high chitter until Tierce had enough and launched himself after him with a growl.
Notes:
[takes a bow]
Thank you everyone who came on this journey with me! This is hands down the longest thing I've ever written in fandom. It's certainly been the fastest (50k in two weeks). You hope you guys had as much fun along the way as I had.
I'm very normal about Mita and Zso, and their new collection of bat gremlins, and I'll continue writing about them.
There's a 'missing scenes' collection in the works rn, and - upon repeated requests - Tierce and Sylask will be getting their own thing. Look at me, writing OC fiction in fandom. Scary stuff.Anyways, again, thank you all for reading, and sticking it out with me. Love you loads. <3
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