"Took you long enough," Kochav said from infront of them, the two evolved kroots stood next to him, their quills twitching, assessing the electromagnetic current from the maelstrom.
Shadowgaze slowed, boots crunching over scorched earth as the air ahead of them shivered, Helsin and Mira stopped just between them.
Their eyes fixed upward, to a now visible layer of Electromagnetic maelstrom.
"How tall is it?" Helsin asked.
—
"A kilometer or so, any ideas why this happened?" Kochav answered, then asked.
—
Shadowgaze closed her eyes, her hand reaching into the pouch at her side.
The soulstones stirred at her touch.
Grinding in her ears.
Her brow tightened.
"Doom is close," she said quietly.
"Every second is time wasted."
—
Helsin narrowed his eyes, gaze fixed on the Spire's silhouette, barely visible through the roiling distortion.
"They've reached the core," he muttered.
—
"So this is it," Kochav said.
"No more going back and forth."
He exhaled, slow and tired, then glanced toward the storm.
"At least they can't see us anymore."
He looked past them, to the remnants of the force behind.
Five thousand, reduced to a few hundred.
Anchored scales lay scattered and broken across the field.
He touched his shoulder—felt the static still crawling along his skin, his hair refusing to settle—and let out a quiet breath.
"We can still try what we were doing," he said.
"The field is still there."
—
Helsin nodded once.
"The Aeldari will do it.
You take the kroots and scout ahead."
—
Kochav grimaced.
"Fine. But I can't promise results."
He turned, already moving—
"Your gun," Shadowgaze said.
The word stopped him.
—
He looked back.
"Why can't you use yours?"
He gestured toward her wraithbone rifle.
—
"Mine cannot act as a conduit," she replied.
"Yours can."
She extended her palm—expectant, uncompromising.
—
Kochav stared at her for a heartbeat, then sighed.
"You'd better not break it."
—
He unholstered Sanguis Ferrum, placing it into her hand—then added the conversion kit a moment later, jaw tight as he did.
She weighed Sanguis Ferrum in her hand—felt the weapon's refusal to guide her.
The gun did not sing to her.
A barbaric weapon, lacking elegance.
Yet its crude mechanism was perfect for this occasion.
"Forming alliance with Mon'keigh… now wielding Mon'keigh weapons," she murmured, eyes fixed on the ornate Orlock heirloom.
"When had I sunk this low?"
A pause.
Her gaze drifted downward, toward the soulstones nestled in her pouch.
"Not that there is anyone left to scorn me."
Despite her revulsion, the soulstones remained silent.
That unsettled her more than dissent ever could have.
She turned away, walking in the opposite direction.
—
Helsin lingered for a moment.
On one side, a one-handed psyker strained against the storm, brute will grinding against forces that did not care.
On the other, a fallen Aeldari—left behind by centuries—knelt amid the ruin, remaking the still.
He chose neither.
Helsin turned his head toward Mira and nodded.
She returned it without a word.
They walked away together, back to where they came.
—
Shadowgaze moved along the storm's edge.
The reaction followed her like instinct.
Beastmen straightened from crouches and half-rests, hooves scraping ash as they shifted aside without being told.
Felinids melted back from her path, tails flicking, eyes tracking her hands rather than her face.
The Kroot tilted their heads, quills whispering as they tasted the air and adjusted their spacing instinctively.
No one spoke, they just waited for her words.
"Bring the scales forward," she said calmly.
Not loud.
Not urgent.
Yet bodies were already in motion.
"Form two lines," she continued. "Five paces apart."
She raised a hand, tracing the air between them.
"One vertical for every four null scales."
—
A Beastman hesitated, brow furrowing as he tried to reconcile the geometry.
She did not look at him.
A Kroot beside him clicked once—sharp, decisive.
And the Beastman moved.
The space between the lines had already begun resisting the wind.
Dust skittered and veered away, drawn along invisible channels where the air should not have yielded.
She did not slow.
She walked past them, past the workers and the wounded.
Her gaze fixed on one Felinid — fur black as a starless sky.
Rouar Blackmane.
His ears twitched as she drew near.
He turned, and bowed without thinking.
"My lady," he said.
—
Shadowgaze's gaze slid past him, forward—measuring the forming lines, the storm beyond—then she stopped beside him.
"What do you think of this plan?" She asked calmly, quietly.
She resumed walking before the answer came.
—
Rouar fell into step at her side.
"It's a necessary gamble," he said quietly.
"You may yet leave this world."
—
"Yes," she said. Then, after a pause,
"my personal—selfish—goal."
Her gaze moved across the lines of troops: the wounded, the laboring, the ones who still stood.
The inhabitants of a world that was not hers.
"To leave," she continued,
"and to save this world from doom are not the same thing."
She stopped walking.
"Do you resent me?"
—
Rouar stopped with her.
"My goal is your goal," he said evenly.
"Just as it was for my predecessors."
He lifted his head, meeting her gaze.
"I live to serve—because I choose to."
—
"How domesticated you have become," Shadowgaze sighed.
—
"Yes."
His lips curled upward faintly, arms folding behind his back with practiced ease.
"Without you, this place would have resumed on its barbaric course."
—
She scoffed softly.
"When the future comes due," she said,
"you will regret not having risen against me."
Rouar only shrugged.
"For your loyalty," she continued,
"you deserve to know my true goal."
"The stars are but a path."
Her gaze drifted past him, toward the cave mouth, where Helsin and Mira were emerging from the dark.
"My destination is not among the living."
Her hand tightened around the soulstones in her pouch.
And in that moment, her resolve hardened—quiet and absolute.
Without looking back, she turned and strode forward to meet the two humans.
—
Behind her, three figures advanced into a storm that cared nothing for resolve.
"Feels like needles crawling under my skin," Kochav muttered through clenched teeth.
He glanced sideways at the two Kroots.
"You sure are having it easy."
—
Their quills trembled in subtle, shifting patterns, vibrating in time with currents Kochav could not see.
Their eyes tracked minute disturbances in the air—changes too slight for ordinary senses, yet to them as loud as a scream.
Thud!
Ruk'tan slammed into Kochav, shoving him aside just as a Rogal Dorn's turret cartwheeled through the space where he had been standing moments before, metal shrieking as it tore into the ground.
Kochav staggered, rolled, then pushed himself back to his feet, heart hammering.
Ruk'tan clicked softly, head tilting as he regarded the wreckage.
"And it seems," he said dryly, eyes returning to Kochav,
"your little tricks are… defective."
Kochav tried to reach for his foresight.
Noise answered him, more than usual.
Pressure layered and shifting, like trying to read the future through a storm of grinding metal.
The maelstrom did not obscure possibility.
It scrambled it.
Here, divination was not unreliable—
it was hostile.
Kochav let the attempt die.
There was no path to see.
Only one to walk—
forward, until something broke.
He just didn't know yet if it would be the storm…
or him.
Paces blurred into leagues.
What lay behind them and what waited ahead began to look the same—ash, distortion, pressure without horizon.
Direction meant nothing here.
"Cough—! Cough—cough!"
Kochav stumbled, then dropped to his knees.
Blood splattered the ground before him, dark and steaming. His skin flushed red in violent patches, veins standing out as if something inside him was trying to tear its way free.
His blood screamed—not metaphorically, but viscerally—every nerve flaring as pressure forced itself through flesh never meant to conduct it.
Ruk'tan and Chi'vak glanced back at him.
Just once.
Their forms remained steady, almost entirely unaffected by the storm that was tearing Kochav apart.
Ruk'tan tilted his head, studying the psyker with detached interest.
"So," he said, turning away,
"this is your limit."
He continued walking without slowing.
"You babysit him," he added.
Chi'vak clicked in acknowledgment and dropped into a crouch beside Kochav's shaking form, one clawed hand pressing him down as the storm continued to grind forward.
Despite his failing body, Kochav tried to push himself up.
Standing was agony.
He took a step.
Then another—
and collapsed.
His body sank lower, motion degrading from a staggered walk into a desperate crawl.
Chi'vak watched him without expression.
"Why struggle?" he asked.
—
"Because…"
Kochav spat blood onto the ash.
"…I can."
The words tore out between clenched teeth, lips split and trembling.
—
Chi'vak stepped closer and crouched beside him, gaze lifting past Kochav's ruined posture to the horizon ahead.
There was no destination.
Only distortion, storm, and pressure without end.
"Pain without triumph," Chi'vak said calmly.
"That is a death without merit."
—
"Death?"
Kochav let out a ragged, broken laugh.
His single hand clawed at the ash, dragging him forward reminded by reminder, leaving dark, wet streaks behind.
"If this is dying," he rasped between breaths,
"it's doing a poor job of convincing me."
He coughed again—hard—then grinned through blood.
"I've never felt more alive."
—
"You have lost coherence, Mon'keigh," Chi'vak replied flatly.
He stepped forward and planted a foot between Kochav's shoulders, pressing him down into the ground.
Kochav's vision dimmed at the edges, stars bursting behind his eyes—
yet his hand still scraped forward, mind gone, instinct refusing surrender.
A one-handed human, crawling without progress.
Pitiful.
"Your companions are fortunate they cannot see you like this," Chi'vak muttered.
He hooked a clawed hand around Kochav's ankle and dragged him backward through the ash, erasing the bloody tracks as the storm continued to grind on—
…as if correcting an error rather than saving a life.
Shriekkkk—
Chi'vak froze.
His quills went rigid, every filament locking into stillness.
His eyes snapped upward, tension coiling through his frame as something cut through the storm beyond sight.
Pweeeeed—
A white glare tore past, close enough to burn the air.
Chi'vak reacted without thought.
He flung Kochav aside and stepped clear an instant before the projectile screamed past his position.
His gaze tracked it as it vanished into the maelstrom—
a Vraskariin scale.
Dark, iridescent, chitinous metal, lightning crawling along its glowing edge, space itself shuddering as it passed.
Where it struck was unknown.
Where it went did not matter.
All that remained in its wake was a tunnel of destabilized current—a wound burned straight through the storm.
Dust and ash recoiled from the path, pulled aside as the new current forced coherence where chaos had ruled.
"Sometimes…" Kochav rasped, his face half-buried in the scorched earth, fingers twitching weakly against the grit,
"all you need is struggle."
He drew a breath that burned.
"And a bit of luck."
Luck—an absurd variable.
Unmeasurable. Unrepeatable. Unpredictable.
Yet present in every system that formed the universe.
—
Chi'vak went silent for a long beat, processing Kochav's words,
as one would evaluate a flawed equation.
How could a creature survive by resisting its own instincts?
The answer did not present itself.
At last, he spoke.
"Then keep struggling."
"And show me the result of your defiance."
—
Wishh—
Another scale tore through the storm.
Thud.
It struck the ground between them and drove itself upright, humming with restrained violence.
Chi'vak's attention snapped back to Kochav.
A bloody hand rose—fingers ruined, shaking, barely obeying him.
With a single, brutal motion, Kochav slammed his palm into the ground and forced himself upward.
The scale sank deeper in response—
as he finally stood.
He turned to face Chi'vak.
His body shook, pain screaming through every nerve—and then it stopped being pain.
It calcified.
Resolve set where agony had been.
A crooked, infuriating smirk pulled at his blood-wet lips. His eyes were unfocused, swimming in red and blur—
but he did not fall.
He resisted.
"I doubt that scale's going to hold for long."
He glanced back at it.
The chitin was already trembling, light crawling unevenly across its surface.
"Let's find something useful in this graveyard."
He took a step forward.
Then another.
Behind him, the curvature around the embedded scale shuddered—wide, violent, and already decaying.
Like everything else in the universe, it too had an expiration date.
—
And so, they moved.
The storm thinned, warped by the anchored scale behind them.
Wind still screamed. Static still crawled across skin and metal.
But within the corridor, the world hesitated.
Bodies lay where momentum had ended them.
Xarcarion armor peeled open like cooked shellfish, ceramite warped and split by forces that had cared nothing for rank or color. Crimson markings were scorched black. Ivory insignia had melted into formless stains.
A man lay half-buried in ash, one arm stretched forward as if he had still believed distance mattered.
Another had fused to his weapon, fingers locked around a trigger he never finished pulling.
Wreckage followed—support rigs toppled, Hydra barrels bent skyward like broken ribs, a Rogal Dorn's tread torn loose and flung kilometers from the hull that no longer existed.
No auspex pings.
No vox chatter.
Just wind, static, and the faint crackle of dying energy bleeding into the ground.
Kochav stepped around a body cut too cleanly to be called torn.
The ground beneath his boots thrummed faintly, pressure bleeding upward through bone and blood.
Each step sent needles along his skin, his nerves protesting contact with a world that no longer agreed on rules.
Behind him, the anchored scale screamed again—metal protesting the storm's insistence.
Light along its edge flickered, uneven, already decaying.
Chi'vak paused once.
The Kroot's quills were rigid now, angled forward, every filament tasting the air.
He crouched beside a fallen engine, and pressed his claw to the ground.
The storm pulsed.
Almost random.
But it was rhythmic.
Like something breathing through stone.
Kochav felt it too.
Not as foresight—there was none of that here—but as pressure behind the eyes.
A reminder that this place was abnormal.
He looked down at his hand.
The blood had dried black, flaked away by wind.
As long as he kept moving, he existed.
The scale screamed again and the corridor narrowed.
Chi'vak clicked softly as a warning.
Kochav nodded, already adjusting his steps.
They moved on—through bodies that would never be recovered, through machines that had died mid-purpose, through a battlefield that no longer belonged to anyone.
The storm gnawed at the edges of the anchored scale behind them, its pressure uneven, distracted by the debris littering its path.
Blood was everywhere.
Abundant.
—
Kochav stopped.
He bent down, seized a corpse by the arm, and dragged it back across the ash.
The body left a shallow groove before he dropped it at the base of the scale.
Then he turned and went back for another.
And another.
Broken armor followed. Twisted plating. A severed track assembly dragged into place and jammed upright like a crude rib.
None of it stopped the storm.
But it slowed the scale's destruction.
Static crackled differently now—less focused, more agitated.
The air near the base shuddered, heat bleeding away into flesh and metal that had already paid their due.
Kochav worked without urgency, without ceremony.
This was not fortification.
It was a triage.
Behind him, the scale's glow steadied for a heartbeat longer.
And that was enough.
—
Chi'vak watched the mound rise.
Flesh and alloy together, layered without distinction, piled until the scale vanished beneath them.
Armor plates interlocked with ribs. Power cabling threaded through sinew. Nothing whole. Nothing spared.
To lesser senses, it was refuse.
To Chi'vak's Vraskariin-honed perception, it was geometry.
The storm lost its edge further.
Currents bled into the mass, dispersed, broken into heat and vibration that the dead absorbed without complaint.
The pressure flattened, smeared, forgot its own direction.
The scale endured longer than it should have.
Chi'vak did not approve.
But he understood.
Chi'vak stepped past Kochav and seized another body by the leg.
He dragged it into place without pause, stacking it where the field pressed hardest.
A collapsed torso folded over twisted plating, weight settling where pressure screamed loudest.
Kochav glanced up.
Their eyes met for a brief moment.
No words.
Then both turned back to the work.
They built with what remained—flesh, iron, ruined purpose—layering mass where the storm bled itself thin.
The dead were not honored.
They were applied.
Here, bodies were leverage.
Here, corpses became shields.
And for a little while longer, the scale endured.
—
From above, the formation took on a different shape.
At its center, the scale's glow burned through gaps in piled flesh and metal—steady, watchful.
A pupil.
Around it, bodies formed a rough ring, limbs and armor curving into an unintentional orbit.
Bone, plate, and ruin layered into a crude iris, each corpse another fragment dragged into alignment by necessity rather than design.
The storm pressed against it—and hesitate
And in that brief, unnatural pause, the dead watched the living pass beneath their gaze.
Then a Beastman emerged from the haze.
A thick rope was looped around his neck, pulled taut as he leaned into it, shoulders bowed against the storm.
Each step dragged the cart behind him, wheels shrieking as they cut through ash and static.
The corridor bent the worst of it aside, but not gently.
Lightning skittered along the angled scales, pressure scraping past his flanks instead of crushing him outright.
He pushed on anyway.
When he reached them, he stopped.
The rope slipped from his neck and fell slack into the dirt.
He huffed once—a wet, heavy breath—and wiped a hand across his muzzle.
Kochav met his eyes.
A single nod passed between them.
Then the three of them set to work.
Each scale was planted at the very edge of the last—never in a straight advance, but offset, deliberate, angled—until the line bent back on itself.
—
And by the time Ruk'tan returned, a single zigzag line of scales had taken shape, each one buried beneath corpses.
Flesh and metal completed the circuit, blood providing continuity where design had failed.
An improvised cable,
a conductor.
"What is this?" Ruk'tan asked,
his eyes flicking between the grotesque arrangement before him.
—
Kochav coughed hard, his body hitching as fresh blood sprayed from his arm—
revealing the darker, dried layers beneath.
"Scales are capacitors," he said hoarsely.
"They need something to connect them."
Something conductive, something easy to find.
He looked up at Ruk'tan, his face smeared with blood and ash, eyes burning with stubborn clarity.
"So we use the most metallic liquid available."
"Turns out," he added weakly,
"we're full of useful materials."
The storm screamed at the edge scales—at the capacitors.
Structure met structure.
Then it warped.