I. Lorgar — A Chapel Without Altars
The room had once been consecrated—stone apse, broken rail, sunlight falling like patient dust. Not a child anymore, Aurelia set no candles. She brought chairs and books and the stubborn warmth of bread. When Lorgar entered, habit made his shoulders bow. There was reverence in him even when there was nothing to revere; he carried liturgy the way other men carry ribs.
"Will you sit?" she asked, indicating the pew. "Let us deconsecrate by conversation."
His eyes were heavy with a hundred hymns. In his hands, scripture had always been a weapon or a wound. "Some rooms ask to be knelt in," he said.
"Then let us teach this one to stand in." She opened a book not of litany but of history. "If a species is a cathedral, what sermon remains when statues step down to work?"
"A speech," he said, almost smiling. "A sermon without a god is merely a speech."
"Only if the listeners expect incense," she said. "What if they expect work? Discipline without an idol can still be devotion. Aim it at humanity and see what lights."
They read. They ate bread without blessing it. She asked which virtue he trusted when no one watched. He answered: obedience. She asked what obedience becomes without love. He did not answer quickly. The silence learned to be honest.
"Stay with me," she said at last, voice simple as the crust between them. "No praying. No kneeling. Just a brother and a sister in peace—reading, thinking, believing in nothing we do not make with our own hands and hours."
Lorgar's fingers closed over the book's spine as if testing a new grip. "To be only Lorgar," he murmured, half to himself.
"To be only Lorgar," she echoed, and set a page between them—not as scripture but as a story they could share.
He left with the ache of envy under his ribs and the odd comfort of being accepted without an altar. Outside, a Remembrancer thought she saw the Primarch of the XVII wipe dust from a pew as one might touch a relic. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he only taught his hands a smaller prayer.