---FILE CONTINUED FROM LOG 3624.45---
++OUTSTATION THREE REPORT STATUS++
++++
++OUTSTATION THREE YOU ARE LATE TO CHECK IN++
++++
++OUTSTATION THREE COM-++
++YOU WASTE YOUR VOICE++
++WHAT IS THIS. REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THIS CHANNEL++
++WORDS WILL NOT CONTAIN THAT WHICH COMES++
++GUARDSMEN ARE ON THEIR WAY++
++THEY WILL BE TOO LATE++
---NETWORK TERMINATED---

"Lord, a message here from orbital defense control. Another three refugee ships inbound from Icarai System."
"Emperor's grace, can't Aureus or Tyre take a ship or two? We're not the only hive with a port."
Parchment flutters as the governor of Gallus Hive tosses the paper to the side.
"Lord, a message here from Colonel Jammus. Requesting emergency authority for the unrest incidents."
"Sign it and send it. I don't need that man standing on my desk again. And get me a drink, this day has drawn on too long."
"Lord, a message here from Aureus Hive. Expressing concern over the loss of contact with two defense outstations."
"I don't care. You can tell him as much. Where is that drink?"
"Lord, a message here from the Brotherhood of the Red Banner."
"I don't have time for- the what?"
The concealed pistol's sharp crack echoes in the grand room. The heavy thud of the governor's body does not.

"Do you think it'll be different this time?"

Jharro shook his head as he stared out of the shattered window, fixing his eyes on the empty, swinging walkway at the end of the street. The alley was deathly silent, even given the armed Arbites patrolling the disgusting streets. He wasn't sure if it was his wife who had spoken, or one of the children, but he had no good answer for them. Every previous riot, every protest, for as long as they had been dwellers of Gallus Hive had been exterminated with no apparent effort from the hive's government. There were drainage ditches which still held the bones of those who had tried.

"I don't know..." He didn't want to say he was afraid.

His fingers closed around the hilt of his grandfather's ancient autopistol. It was a terrible weapon, slow to fire and quick to foul. It was last used against a hive ganger three weeks ago, and Jharro knew it was the loud bang of the shot rather than any sort of aim which had driven the looters away. In the Gallus underhive, life was little more than fear and hiding meager fortresses. Jharro had grown old living in fear.

A flash of red caught his eye: a flickering cloth held aloft by some brave soul leaning out of their window. The flag waved frantically, desperately signalling all their compatriots, before a quick shot from an Arbites rifle dropped the bearer in a lump of lifeless rebellion. But the flag had waved, and could not be unseen now.

Jharro's thumb released the safety on the pistol, and he pulled a stained, tattered white cloth over his mouth. He turned to look at his friends and family huddled behind him, all wrapped in cloaks and jackets, with makeshift masks and goggles to offer them meager protection from the inevitable suppressive gas. Little brass charms hung from their necks, gifts from Father Lazarus: an eight-pointed star that spoke of defiance, and hope.

Something was, in fact, different this time.

This time they had faith.

Jharro pulled the bolt back from the door, and gave them a nod, which looked braver than he felt. "Let's go."

"The red banner waves!
The red banner waves!
Let the stars bleed, brothers!"
-Unauthorized broadcast, Gallus Hive

“All sectors, report in.”
“Sector One, barricades in place, mobs suppressed.”
“Sector Two, insurgents have engaged in the square.”
“Sector Three, mobs advancing south. Arbites holding.”
“Sector Four. Aflame.”

They came like a wall of mad rats, biting and clawing over each other in their haste to reach the barricade. They were a swarm, Underhive scum, pests to be exterminated. A few here and there wore helmets or shoulder guards taken from fallen Arbites, and the sight of that sacrilege was enough to make any patriot's blood run hot.

The pilot light flared at the end of his flamer: a flicker of the Emperor's own wrath. The aquila he had painstakingly etched into the side of the barrel glowed hot with the controlled flame. His hands were steady, they were trained to be steady. The first insurgent, a scrawny pest with a dirty white cloth covering his face, raised a truly aged autopistol to eye level. It clicked, jammed, and horror poured from the rioter's eyes as he was pushed forward on the tidal wave of the crowd.

“Burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes!”

With the power and glory of the Emperor, the front line of defenders opened up with their flamers, and the Governor's Plaza became a sea of hellfire.

Sweat dripped into Yosef's eyes, burning like acid as the room spun around him. Seated in the gunner's chair, his wiry frame far too small compared to the soldier it was built for, he commanded the awesome power of Gallus Hive's Air Defense Station 31. A rotary four-barrelled cannon, it loomed from a perch overlooking a gap between the high towers of the hive. His hands gripped the oversized controls tightly, and he could feel his pulse against the cold metal. His sweaty fingers hovered over the triggers, aching to pull and unleash the gun's fury.

The buildings in his viewfinder blurred as the turret rotated, coming to rest looking over the eastern wall of the hive. It was a narrow gap, but it afforded him a clean shot at anything airborne over that wall.

Father Lazarus's voice crackled over the radio in the seat beside him.

“Vultures fly, brothers. Bring them to the ground.”

In the gap between hive towers, Yosef could see the glimmer of engines, as a flock of Imperial gunships began to rise from their field. He tasted blood: he hadn't realized he had been gritting his teeth so hard his gums were bleeding. The exhiliration was burning him from the inside: that his whole life, squandered in the sewage of the hive, could come to such a glorious moment as this.

“For the Flayed Lord!”

His shout was weak, and barely echoed inside the turret chamber. He swallowed, a valiant feat considering how dry his mouth was, and mustered a tremendous breath within his chest. The gunships were forming up, clearing the lower levels of the hive and cutting through the smog-filled sky. They were bound for the sectors in turmoil, to cut down his brothers and sisters with the fire of unholy cannon and flame. He centered the crosshairs of the guns on the lead gunship, wondering for a moment what the Imperial pilot thought of the air defense cannon swinging out of position. Not that it would matter.

“FOR THE FLAYED LORD!”

His shout was stronger, mighty even, and it shook the gunnery seat as his desperate fingers convulsed on the triggers.

You can taste it in the air, can you not?
Panic. Fear. Horror.
These are primal energies, spewed from each mind as it breaks under the weight of despair. But there is more, do you feel it? That fine, almost unnoticeable swirl through the mixture, lending it a sickly-sweet flavor?
It is the lingering of hope.
Oh, there is no finer whet to my appetite, than to taste hope.

-A'Khel, First Consul to The Flayed Lord

“It started off textbook. Flamers hit them from the flanking barricades, channeled them into the middle. I don't know how many there were, but it was more than I'd ever seen in a riot. Could've staffed a new battalion with all the Underhivers that came surging down that street. They didn't last against the flamers, promethium's a real strong motivator like that. I had three autocannons covering the center, mostly to suppress them until the gunships arrived.

Did they arrive? What kind of a [REDACTED] question is that? Of course they arrived! You couldn't miss the first one, what with one wing gone and the other burning hotter than our flamers. Crashed somewhere to my left, I don't know how many guardsmen it took with it. It was the defense guns, plucking our birds out of the air. Terrible shooting, chewed up more buildings than gunships, but in those confines it doesn't much matter if you can shoot or not. When the...fourth? Fifth? I don't know which bird it was, but one of them went straight over our heads, right into the Herald's Shrine. Blew chunks of holy bricks all over our lines.

That was it. A thousand rioters on fire in front of us, rubble behind us, and our iron birds dropping like hailstones. We ran

I remember..it rained as we ran. Bits of flame, shards of metal...I know there were pieces of our men in there. I felt it patter the back of my armor, heard it click off my helmet. Not enough sedative in the sector to drown out that noise.

You'll hear it soon enough, the screams and the rain. You'll know.”

-Debrief of Master Sergeant Whent, PDF, prior to execution for battlefield cowardice

For thirty-seven years, Marrius had been staring at the bank of gauges. They were the lifeblood of Gallus Hive, he had been told. Forty-seven years and he could still recite that blasted speech in his head. It made the maintenance monitoring position sound glamorous, like the thing they gave you medals and parades for.

It took him less than a week to realize no one cared. The intricate power relays that snaked throughout the hive, and the immense power plant which fed them, were perpetually besieged by indentured engineers and underhivers to keep them running. Not one of those gauges had so much as blinked in thirty-seven years.

He had been much younger then, full of patriotic duty, and sat at his station were he was supposed to. Gradually, through seniority rather than actual merit, he had been promoted, and put in front of more gauges. Fresh young faces came and went at the lower stations, all of them bright and proud when they arrived, only to request transfers, or waste away in emotional suicide once reality set in.

But not Marrius. He knew nothing of reactors or power conduits, but he knew these gauges. And he knew that if he left, they would find some other poor fool to watch the gauges in his stead.

That moment of pride and nostalgia deadened the feel of the first solid slug blasting its way through his back, painting the console in his blood. The younger monitors screamed, and their screams were silenced in a flurry of wild gunshots. Marrius slumped to the side, listening to the squish of his ruined innards as he moved. Someone shoved him aside, and the deafening racket of a rapid-fire autogun filled the air, accompanied by a shower of sparks from the control console.

For thirty-seven years, Marrius had stared at those gauges. The lifeblood of Gallus Hive. His vision faded into oblivion as one by one, they all went red, and the deranged reactor at the heart of the monstrous Hive began to churn.

++OMICRON ALERT++
++ROUTE TO HIVE GOVERNORS AND MILITARY COMMANDS++
++AT 2307 A SEISMIC AND THERMAL EVENT WAS DETECTED WITHIN GALLUS HIVE++
++ANALYSIS INDICATES CATASTROPHIC FAILURE OF THE HIVE REACTOR++
++DAMAGE EXTENT UNKNOWN++
++CASUALTIES ESTIMA-++
++OMICRON ALERT++
++ROUTE TO HIVE GOVERNORS AND MILITARY COMMANDS++
++ORBITAL DEFENSES REPORT HOSTILE VESSELS ENTERING THE SYSTEM++

The sorcerer A'khel demanded few things in exchange for his service to the Flayed Legion. He fancied himself a scholar, a seer of immaterial things, and did not require physical possessions. He also knew that to make excessive demands of the Flayed Lord was to invite a rapid and painful demise, even for one of his station. But he had demanded a chamber, near the bow of the twisted battleship Naraka, in which he could scry the tides of Fate.

Within the dark, spherical chamber, he sat motionless, gathering his thoughts and will into an ethereal armor. His hand clutched an auto-quill between two fingers, held over a scattered mess of blank papers in perfect poise. Many of his brothers favored elaborate rituals and totems to tie them to the material, when it came time to delve the Warp's mysteries. A'khel had long since dismissed that idea. There was nothing to be gained by keeping one foot in this world while peering into the next.

Next to him, an arcane hourglass sat tall and mighty on the room's single altar. It was a true trophy, fashioned from Eldar wraithbone, and filled with the powdered glass of their soul stones. He had spent decades accumulating enough, sending one seer after another into Slaanesh's gaping maw, but the contraption was complete.

With a flicker of thought, the sand within the hourglass began to flow, and A'khel finally closed his brilliant third eye.

A'khel did not swim, nor did he fly through the aether as other psykers did. He fell, uncontrolled and aimless, surrounded by infinite noise and . He fell, through the ship, tossed into the massive ship's wake as it plowed through the Immaterium. He fell, past daemons and hungry spirits that leeched and gnawed on the ship like parasites, searching for the crew within. His senses bled with the barrage of light, sound, and vision that surrounded him. He spent no effort to decipher it, but instead let it flow into him and through him, as the Naraka vanished from his mind's eye,

He was a speck, a floating morsel within the vastness of eternity. And he reveled in the feeling, the horror of spirits too vast for thought which lay just beyond his reach. Dark presences, which once flickered at the edge of his vision, now swam in and out of his view. They were getting bolder, feasting on the outpouring emotions and vital power that leeched out of his spectral form.

A'khel laughed, and spread his arms as if to invite their feast.

The last grain of sand fell through the ancient hourglass, and with a crack like thunder A'khel was ripped from the Warp and thrown violently back into his body. He convulsed, cast across the room like a child's toy, though no visible force impacted him. It was a long moment before he rose, staggering to his feet as the papers formerly at his feet blew about the room, caught in the ephemeral eddies from his return.

He laughed through bloodied lips and broken teeth as the papers began to drift to the floor around him. Each one bore a disaster of insane scribbles, half-madman and half-daemon.

Within those scribbles, A'khel saw his future.

“All sectors, report in.”
“Sector One, barricades in place, mobs suppressed.”
“Sector Two, insurgents have engaged in the square.”
“Sector Three, mobs advancing south. Arbites holding.”
“Sector Four. Aflame.”

They came like a wall of mad rats, biting and clawing over each other in their haste to reach the barricade. They were a swarm, Underhive scum, pests to be exterminated. A few here and there wore helmets or shoulder guards taken from fallen Arbites, and the sight of that sacrilege was enough to make any patriot's blood run hot.

The pilot light flared at the end of his flamer: a flicker of the Emperor's own wrath. The aquila he had painstakingly etched into the side of the barrel glowed hot with the controlled flame. His hands were steady, they were trained to be steady. The first insurgent, a scrawny pest with a dirty white cloth covering his face, raised a truly aged autopistol to eye level. It clicked, jammed, and horror poured from the rioter's eyes as he was pushed forward on the tidal wave of the crowd.

“Burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes!”

With the power and glory of the Emperor, the front line of defenders opened up with their flamers, and the Governor's Plaza became a sea of hellfire.

Sweat dripped into Yosef's eyes, burning like acid as the room spun around him. Seated in the gunner's chair, his wiry frame far too small compared to the soldier it was built for, he commanded the awesome power of Gallus Hive's Air Defense Station 31. A rotary four-barrelled cannon, it loomed from a perch overlooking a gap between the high towers of the hive. His hands gripped the oversized controls tightly, and he could feel his pulse against the cold metal. His sweaty fingers hovered over the triggers, aching to pull and unleash the gun's fury.

The buildings in his viewfinder blurred as the turret rotated, coming to rest looking over the eastern wall of the hive. It was a narrow gap, but it afforded him a clean shot at anything airborne over that wall.

Father Lazarus's voice crackled over the radio in the seat beside him.

“Vultures fly, brothers. Bring them to the ground.”

In the gap between hive towers, Yosef could see the glimmer of engines, as a flock of Imperial gunships began to rise from their field. He tasted blood: he hadn't realized he had been gritting his teeth so hard his gums were bleeding. The exhiliration was burning him from the inside: that his whole life, squandered in the sewage of the hive, could come to such a glorious moment as this.

“For the Flayed Lord!”

His shout was weak, and barely echoed inside the turret chamber. He swallowed, a valiant feat considering how dry his mouth was, and mustered a tremendous breath within his chest. The gunships were forming up, clearing the lower levels of the hive and cutting through the smog-filled sky. They were bound for the sectors in turmoil, to cut down his brothers and sisters with the fire of unholy cannon and flame. He centered the crosshairs of the guns on the lead gunship, wondering for a moment what the Imperial pilot thought of the air defense cannon swinging out of position. Not that it would matter.

“FOR THE FLAYED LORD!”

His shout was stronger, mighty even, and it shook the gunnery seat as his desperate fingers convulsed on the triggers.

The battlefield was a blasted landscape, seared clean of life in a flood of fire and littered with charred bodies and mangled metal. To the ignorant, the scattered debris and scorched earth might have suggested a titanic battle, in which two forces of military magnificence settled their fates in honorable warfare. But Lazarus was not ignorant, and he knew why the sand under his feet had been seared to a greenish glass. He knew why the twisted machines and contorted bodies all shared iconography. There was no war fought here, only a massacre. Blinking away the acrid smoke hanging in the air, he looked to the east where a massive force marshalled on the horizon: the Flayed Legion. Traitor astartes, renegade madmen, vicious raiders, they went by many names. However true these whispers and legends were, they served to mask the cunning machinations of its sinister warlord.

The army on the horizon was not moving. While it bristled and roared like an invader, none of the Land Raiders rolled their treads and none of the heldrakes took to the air. They were a false front, one of the Flayed Lord's favorite tactics, designed to tempt an enemy into arraying according to the Lord's terms. The Legion had only gathered to draw out their targets.

Lazarus heard his flock of faithful scamper through the wreckage behind him, their breaths wheezing through ungainly gas masks which filtered out the black smoke and burning fumes. They fell upon a mound of twisted, half-melted metal with picks and tools, prying away the melted armor plates to reveal intricate machinery which might have escaped the devastation. In their fervor, they tossed aside a nameplate, which slid across the shattered glass of the landscape, declaring a once mighty name in fine Gothic letters: VALORN. A noble house of Imperial Knights, who had valiantly answered Derevan's calls for assistance. The hive city had thought itself impenetrable with a full Knight house at its defense, a legion of defenders ready to die for its safety, and three immense Deathstrike missiles acquired through a backdoor arrangment with a nearby forge world.

Curious how the defenses had fallen against each other. Lazarus and his men, secreted inside the hive months ago, had only to sieze the city-ending missiles and direct them into the grand formation of defenders and Knights, and the battle was over before the first shot.

Many such piles of wreckage dotted the battlefield, each one the ruined remnants of an Imperial war machine. The scavengers were close behind: salvage machines and demented tech-priests who would pull apart the once-sacred machines to make new abominations from their remains. Lazarus would not remain for that, he had not come to this fresh graveyard to bask in his enemies' ruin. Once, perhaps, he might have done so, but that was a lifetime ago, and he had seen too much of the Long War to savor such things now. He was here for a different reason.

He reached the outermost wreck within moments: a scattered field of arm and leg components, and a scorched crew compartment. This knight had been at the forefront of the charge against the Legion. It had taken the Deathstrike blast from the rear, opposite its shields and armor plating, and the shockwave had torn most of its bolts apart. The pilot's compartment had come to rest on its side, with the hatch twisted nearly out of position, staring out at the enemy force it was now powerless to touch. Lazarus knelt, grasping the edge of the metal hatch and heaving it away. Inside, amongst the snapped cables and rent metal, was the near-corpse of Lord Elias Valorn, head of the House Valorn knights. The crumpled, burnt body opened one eye weakly at the intrusion, the other eye was a bloody mess where some metal shard had torn away flesh down to the bone. With dry, crisp lips the fallen lord tried to speak.

"On my-...my honor..."

Lazarus shook his head, seating himself on the glistening, burnt sand. "Your honor will do you little good now. It is done."

The frail figure raised a hand, bearing a bronze ring with the house sigil emblazoned on it: a pair of crossed swords. "...I swear..."

Lazarus reached out, gently taking the lord's hand and lowering it, cutting short any dying oath the man might have been about to intone. "Promises will not matter either. You lived, Lord Valorn, but your life means nothing to this galaxy. Your death, however. Your death will have far more meaning than your life ever did."

He patted the broken lord's hand, sighing almost wistfully at the imminent finality of it all. By tomorrow, he would be onto another world, bringing another hapless civilization to ruin. And again and again. The Legion champion lifted his shotgun from where it lay next to him, and swung it to point into the shredded compartment. "Would that we were all so fortunate."

The retort of the shotgun shook the burnt sand, ended the last gasp of Lord Elias Valorn, and set in motion the fall of a hundred worlds.

++BATTLESHIP NARAKA++ ++TWO YEARS LATER++

The belly of Naraka was immense space, filled with hangars and docks to service the Flayed Legion's swarms of fighters and bombers. Somewhere within its infinite labyrinth, daemonic Titans were rumored to sleep, awaiting the call of the Flayed Lord to return to service. Deeper still, the sparks and shrieks of machines and daemons worked tirelessly to reconstruct the impossible from the corpses of the unsalvagable.

A'khel, sorcerer and seer, stared in open admiration at the towering sight before him. He had always held a sense of wonder in regards to the Imperium's Knights, not that he would ever voice such in front of his fellow champions. The war machines were tough and agile, powerful yet adaptable. They could hold against an army, or be wielded like a surgical spike. For years, he had longed to present his Lord with one, for it would be a great coup in the perpetual struggle for His favor and attention. But now, A'khel spread his arms and basked in the iron skeleton that stood before him, glowering in the red light of the hangar.

Built from the remains of a dozen ruined Valorn Knights, this triumph was both trophy and mockery of that fateful day. It stood, covered in ritual blood and mechanical grease, as a swarm of slaves and servitors scurried around it, trying to breath profane life into the piecemeal titan. Cobbled together from corpses may it be, A'khel knew it would grow to surpass the sum of all its parts, bearing the Flayed Lord's banner to the heart of any fortress.

With an ecstatic whisper he spoke its name.

VALORUS CRUX.

And now, he needed only to find a suitable soul to pilot it.

The hapless pilot screamed in agony and panic, his cries muffled by the squeal of metal and roar of pistons. Valorus Crux shook, restrained only barely by hundreds of cables and tethers, as within its crew compartment the daemonic spirit fought with the newly ordained pilot. A'khel cursed loudly, his ominous third eye having already predicted the outcome of this match up. He turned away, mentally crushing a nearby metal beam as the screams within the Knight ceased, accompanied by a spray of blood on the inside of the crew window.

"Your new toy is more trouble than it's worth."

Medraut, one of the Legion's champions, smiled with glistening pirahna teeth at him. The blades decorating the champion's armor clacked together noisily as the Astartes approached, and A'khel steadied himself for the inevitable taunting. He was not in the mood.

"All things require time and blood. It is only a matter of how much of each is needed."

Medraut barked a laugh, and gestured to where a crew of slaves were pulling the pilot from the now-dormant Knight. The man, chosen for his 'exceptional loyalty' was a crumpled mess, with blood pouring freely from his eyes and mouth. Since it's assembly, the daemonic spirits gathered within the Knight's shell had fed heartily on the thick remnants of anger, fear, and death left from the dozens of Valorn pilots, and it had grown hostile.

The bladed champion grinned widely. "You want to impress Him with a war machine that eats common slaves? You'll only impress Him with your ignorance." He spat in the direction of the dormant Knight. "The machine doesn't respect you, why should He?"

Medraut turned on his heel, brazenly showing his back to the sorcerer as he walked away. It was a challenge, but A'khel had little desire to match his might against the other champion. Yet, as the servants dragged away the dead pilot's body, A'khel hit upon a curious realization. The machine did not respect common slaves. It was built by nobility, and died with nobility. The blue sheen of his third eye flickered as he examined the possibilities. With a sudden rush of motion, he stormed towards his sanctuary, already tasting the threads of fate he would have to unravel. He had invested far too much in this gift to fail now.

* * * *

The marshalling of House Valorn inspired awe and terror in equal measure. In the lower hangars of the Imperial transport, a dozen towering Knights stood together in a row, weapons powered down but still present. They were preparing to transit to the planet's surface, to answer a distress call of the highest order. Arrayed together, they gave the appearance of a living wall: unstoppable force and immovable object given a single form. A host of civilians clustered in a massive circle around the group of knights, most of them in awe-struck silence. The hordes of dirty lifters and loaders stayed at the back, their faces streaked in grease from moving the massive Knights to this deck. Armsmen of every stripe stood with their weapons locked to their shoulders, standing at rigid attention in neat lines. Several Imperial priests moved among the throng, accompanied by scattered groups of chanting singers, praising the Emperor and proclaiming the might of his chosen emissaries and their terrifying Knights.

From a nearby catwalk, Cassandra Vonura stared at the formation in wide-eyed wonder, her hands gripping the rail tightly. It had been years since the full force of the House was gathered for one task, certainly the first time in her lifespan. She glanced sideways at her cousin Amanda, one of the Valorn heirs, and nodded down to the titanic machines.

"Look at them all. It's like this is a call to prayer and not an embarkation."

Amanda nodded, though her eyes watched the Knights moreso than the scattering of serfs and workers. "In some ways it is, Cassie. They come to offer their respect to the Knights." She turned and gestured to various groups which had clustered together around the hangar. "The armsmen there, and the lifters, even the ceremonial choir. When the Knights march to war, part of all of us goes with them."

As if on cue, the first Knight took a thunderous step forward, advancing towards the heavy landing craft which would ferry them down to the planet below. The surrounding civilians all took an involuntary step back, some raising their hands in praise, others kneeling down as the Knight stalked majestically across the deck. Amanda placed a hand on Cassandra's shoulder and gave her a gentle squeeze.

"And so it begins." She stepped away from the railing. "I'm going to find Sera and get her out of whatever trouble she's found herself in. Are you coming?"

"I'll be right behind you."

Cassandra stayed a moment longer, still intently watching the gathered serfs prostrating themselves before the titanic machines. She didn't see respect in their movements. She saw worship.

* * * *

The memory of that conversation drifted through Cassandra's mind as she knelt before the shrine, muttering rehearsed prayers in an empty motion. Why she should recall that moment with such clarity was a mystery to her, but she attributed to the galaxy's mockery of her state since the tragedy on Deveran. She rose, pulling her ragged cloak around herself, and left the shrine to step back onto the tired streets, merging with the press of citizens filing down the street after the midday sermon.

Her guilt was a physically painful thing. She had stood on the walls of the hive when the Valorn knights walked out to meet the Flayed Legion, and had been staring curiously at the missile's trailing smoke when the weapon took a hard dive into the center of the Knight formation. The blast had blinded her for a day, but she heard the reports a thousand times: the Knights were gone, and the hive was evacuated. She was roughly shoved into a transport, former nobility wedged between two shivering refugees, and sent with them to the nearby hive world of Isthmus.

The 'guilt of the survivor' is what the priest had called it, and had assigned her a daily regimen of prayer at the shrine and fasting through the dusk hours. It didn't make her feel better, but it did get her out of her dirty hovel on a regular basis. Life on Isthmus was little more than a slow crawl from one day to the next, slinking past the thousands of murders and assaults that marked the passage of time in the forsaken city. Since that fateful day, her days were filled with despair, and her nights filled with horrid dreams of lidless eyes staring at her from above.

Someone ran into her, jarring Cassandra from her morose trance, a man in a long coat going the wrong way against the crowd. He said nothing, and with her eyes downward Cassandra did not glimpse his face. But as they collided, she felt his hand place an item into her pocket: it felt small and metal, like some sort of jewelry or coin.Sudden fears of impressment ran through her mind like a bolt of fire. Many of the more cynical traders and their crews were known to slip tokens or coins into passer-bys pockets, only to later accuse the bystander of taking payment for a contract, and pressing them into service. She frantically dug the item out of her pocket, glancing up to see where the individual had gone. He was moving slowly through the crowd, as if deliberately remaining in her field of view, before cutting off to the side towards an arching bridge overlooking a dizzying fall to another sub-level. Cassandra raised the token and started towards him, meaning to shout, but her words caught hard in her throat.

In her hand was a bronze ring bearing the emblem of two crossed swords: the lord's ring of House Valorn.

The noise and chaos around Cassandra went quiet as angry blood pulsed in her ears. She clenched the ring in her fist, lowered her shoulder, and with more determination than she had mustered in years plowed through the crowd towards the man in the long coat.