Silence. Any other day, I would have called it Blessed Silence, but there was nothing Bless’d about today. It was not an end to the tumult, I knew that, but merely the calm in the eye of the storm. And speaking of eyes, I could still feel the shadows within slide around the hole in my face where an eye used to be. They crept out from behind my eyepatch with amoebic arms and clutched at the rest of my skull. And yet, they did not speak to me, nor laugh at me. They just simply were. Present, and nothing more.

  Likewise, the blood that dripped from Lucene’s neck onto my (material) blade, and from there down her body, did not make a sound. Despite hints to the contrary, however, I had not decapitated her, if only just. Despite the incomprehensibly brisk pace with which we had conducted our battle, I had caught myself before such a terrible end. Yet now, head held aloft between two sharpened edges, Lucene continued to stare into my one eye with the same resolute fury she had possessed throughout the whole of our battle. Her eyes were like fangs, sharp and narrow, daring me to strike her down. It was at that thought that her Eviscerator, which I had sent soaring overhead, out of her grasp, finally landed on the ground some distance behind her, hilt pointed skyward.

  Its landing caught my attention, briefly, and when I turned my gaze from her, she spoke up, proving my earlier deduction: “Well? Do it, shadow-of-mine. Death will not stop me from coming for you.” I looked back at her. And it was then, finally, that things clicked. I saw the whole gambit, the entire nature of Cronos’s scheme. An undying being of the Warp such as she, she that had taken on Lucene’s face and form to torment me—those that did not stay dead had no known reason to fear death, just as the Phaenonites hadn’t; so great, too, was Lucene’s courage then. But not-knowing a reason was not not-having one. Lucene had come back from the dead, possibly multiple times, but what if she wouldn’t, in the right circumstance? What if she self-destructively threw herself against the embodiment of self-destruction, and in that, succumbed to its grasp once and for all?

  What if I could kill her, finally and totally?

  I stumbled back from that precipice, sorcerous blade dissipating, and looked past Lucene again. I did not intend to look at her Eviscerator once more, but my eyes landed on it all the same, where I spied the initials she had carved onto its hilt long ago—CB, LF, our initials. Such a simple thing, yet the weight of it overtook me, and I dropped Drepane to the ground, shortly followed by my knees. From there, I stared blankly ahead, lost and defeated.

  Blankly ahead, however, meant at her. “What?” she said, frowning, lacking even an iota of knowledge about the situation.

  “You have no idea who we are, do you?” I asked, vocally confirming the above.

  “I am Luciene,” she answered. Pronounced Lucy-en, not Lucene. A small alteration to the name her form once bore. “Should I know who you are, shadow?”

  That hurt more than anything, even if I could see it coming. Not only could she not remember me, which was bad enough, but it was a grim reminder that Lucene was gone. Dead. And this thing before me, this woman, this angel, it was not her. Not really. As close as she came, she was not her. “We were,” I said, and tripped over the thought. “We were…everything. We were everything, together,” I stumbled, and hung my head low. Gingerly, now not within the vice grip of a powersword and a blade of ether, Lucene—or Luciene, rather—began to stand to her feet. She took a single step away from me, and I raised my head to her again. “Don’t go. Please, don’t leave me. Not again.”

  “This flesh I wear, and the bones beneath, I am not the first to have them, am I?” she deduced. I nodded. “You knew the first?” I nodded again. “I’m not her,” she said flatly, and turned from me to step nearer to her sword.

  “We were wed!” I called out to her in exasperation, and she stopped mid-step. “For centuries, we were together,” I explained. “We were wonderful together. We had children together. We were everything, together.”

  “I am not her,” Luciene repeated, voice quiet but terse.

  “And yet you are,” I shook my head. “You are as I always saw you. You speak like her, you fight like her, you think like her. You hope like her.”

  She returned to facing me at last, at that, and I got to behold her in all her glory once more. Wings spread, and with a golden aura about her form, she was a vision of majesty and beauty, exactly as I had always seen her. “She died,” Luciene said. While it was an assertion of mutually-known fact, it was said almost as a question. I nodded again, regardless. “How?”

  “The Dark took her, as it conspires to take you now,” I replied.

  She stared at me for a moment, and then asserted, “And in so-doing, it left you a broken man. And in the cracks, the Dark festers within you, through you. For what can a man of shadow hope?”

  “Light,” I suggested.

  “And yet you’re here, taking mine,” she hissed. “Does the Dark wield you, or you it? Who is responsible for the horrors your body wrought here, and who is absolved of your actions? Are we slaves to our flesh, you and I, or to our actions? These questions are for us to answer, and us alone, and yet I know not their truths.”

  “Nor do I,” I agreed.

  “Then in that, at least, we are together. Lost,” she said, sighing, and put a hand over a shaking head. “What’s your name, shadow?”

  “Callant Blackgar. Why do you keep calling me shadow, other than…the obvious,” I said, gesturing to my missing eye.

  “Cal,” she repeated, and then mouthed the rest of my name. That much, evidently, she remembered. “And…Zha Trantos?”

  “A subordinate that you and I raised from youth. She looked up to us, greatly,” I answered.

  Luciene paused at that, clearly aware that there were implications in my statement beyond the words themselves, yet not knowing what those implications were. After a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “I call you ‘shadow’ because that is what you are in my dreams. Your shape and size is the same, but I envisioned you in silky darkness. We fight hordes of hellspawn together before towering doors of brass, but in the end, I always lose you just as the doors open.”

  “The Finality,” I understood, forever haunted by that scene. “It is where you—she—died. We are trapped there, you and I, still fighting the dark. And the light wanes. Luciene,” I began, the name alien to me and not sounding quite right. I shuffled, gingerly, to my feet. “End me. Spare the cosmos of the shade my mind harbors.”

  Luciene stared at me a moment more, and then reached behind herself. Light encompassed her Eviscerator, and with a sighing gasp on the wind, the blade flew into her possession from afar. In one clean motion, she swung it about, going for my neck, and I must admit, I closed my eye on instinct. Turns out, I did not want to see it coming. Yet arrive in full it did not, and though the roar of monomolecular teeth buzzed beneath my ear, I pried my eye open to find that, indeed, Luciene had caught herself as I had. For the first time since our battle began, tears streaked from her eyes. “I see the neverborn malevolence within you, Cal,” she said. “I see it festering, growing. I see the pain it causes, for you and for me—for Zaer. And for Zaer, I so very much want your head. And yet…every drop of my blood screams to spare you.”

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  “Please,” I asked of her, all but begging. “If it gets out—”

  “If it gets out, everything ends. Yes, I see that. But that is not what you fear most. You fear, selfishly, that your involvement in this journey is not yet finished, and that fear is true. You have a part to play yet,” Luciene said, and pulled her Eviscerator away from me. “I know not what you must do, Callant Blackgar, but I know that if I keep you from it, everything I care about dies. So go, and do what you must.”

  She turned her back on me and made to leave, but I would not have it. “No,” I seethed, and she stopped in her step once more. While I fidgeted with my arm, she turned to face me again, and I continued, “No, I think I am done. Take this,” I told her, and tossed my augmetic between us. “Our allies squabble, because that is all they know. Mine will need a symbol to believe in. They’ll see that, and they’ll understand,” I explained, pointing with my one remaining hand to the arm that laid on the ground, just as Silas’s did, some miles away. “But for my part, no, I am done playing this game.”

  And I, like Luciene, turned to leave.

  “Where will you go?” she shouted to my back. Unlike her, however, her words did not halt my step.

  “To die on my own terms!” I said in return. “As I should have years ago, with you.”

  Luciene watched me go for as long as she could, which, given the strength of her eyes, proved to be quite a while. But even she could not see forever, and when I had left her view, vanishing into the dusty horizon of Ranéla, she turned her back to me as well, and set out upon her own path, augmetic arm in tow.

  ***

  “Is this really necessary?” Kor’Kassan asked, the sole member of his surviving crew not presently kneeling on the ground and restrained.

  “Do you have a better way of keeping this bucket of bolts from rampaging through us all?” Bliss asked in return, arms wrapped around Zet’s neck, holding the throatless machine in a chokehold.

  “There are in fact no bolts within my body, you genetic aberrant,” Zet returned, looking up at his captor. His voice was clearly not strained by the hold he found himself in, but his body had been sorely damaged; nothing Necrodermis could not eventually heal, but joints had been broken and armor had been pierced.

  “Yes, it is necessary,” Zha declared, scanning the scene. “Even if it is not ideal, it is, for the time being, necessary.” Bliss had, without a scratch on her body, subdued the Xenos machine as she had been instructed. Mirena, with a fair few scratches and bruises, had subdued the Guardsman and Death Cult Assassin, and was currently holding them at gunpoint, standing to their backs while they knelt upon the dusty earth of Ranéla. Kor’Kassan stood to Zha’s left, unharmed but uneasy, which was fair, as the entire group presently sat in the shadow of a hulking brute of an Imperial Knight.

  “Until when, Trantos?” Kane said, and flinched when she glanced his way. “Are we waiting for something in particular?”

  “For Inquisitor Blackgar to return, yes,” Zha answered with a nod.

  “It did not seem like he wants to,” Luciene answered, wings beating in a slow descent from above. Her crew breathed in a sigh of relief at her voice, while my allies looked on at her with a mix of dread and awe. She landed on the ground behind the line of captives, but facing Zha, Kor’Kassan, and the Knight. Speaking of the Knight, it was its Volcano Lance that, in a flash, thrust forward, barrel directly in front of the angel’s face.

  Meeting that provocation, Luciene calmly and confidently lifted my augmetic into the air, brandishing it almost as a trophy. In response, energy began charging within the Volcano Lance. Luciene held her ground, staring down the barrel—literally—of a Titan-killing superweapon inches from her face as its innards heated up, beginning to glow red-hot.

  “Galen.”

  The charging paused, and the great Knight looked down at the far-less-imposing form of the woman standing next to Kor’Kassan. Then, with some reluctance, the Lance pulled away. Heads swiveled upon the Knight’s momentary surrender, and then a Laspistol landed on the ground. “Cal!” Mirena shouted, and in a heartbeat deserted the deserters she was guarding, running for—then past—Luciene.

  “Let her go,” Zha instructed her two remaining allies. “Let her go,” she said again, more softly, for herself. Then she looked up to Luciene again, watching Mirena’s backside grow smaller in the distance. “Is he alive?” she asked the angel.

  “He was when we parted ways, but he does not wish to be. He gave me this willingly,” Luciene explained, jostling the augmetic arm in her grasp.

  “You’re a weapon against him,” Bliss said flatly, a tear rolling down her cheek.

  “I’ve come to learn that, yes,” Luciene nodded. “Release my friend, Carmichael.”

  Bliss stared at Luciene for a moment, an ocean of emotions swirling beneath her skin, and then looked to Zha. Zha nodded, and Zet subsequently fell forward, out of Bliss’s arms. At that, Luciene began to stride toward the group, and as her aura fell upon the scene, any wounds that anyone had suffered began to heal, Necrodermis included. “Rise, my friends,” Luciene commanded, and Kane and Mir did so. Zet was a bit slower to his feet, waiting for Bliss to circle around away from him. Bliss and Luciene reached Zha at the same time, where Luciene handed the latter my arm. Water formed at the edges of Zha’s eyes as fingers curled around inert mechatronics. “There is hope yet. For him. She runs toward him now. But no one survives the Dark alone. We’re only getting through this together.”

  ***

  “As are we,” Veralith agreed, the scene of Luciene’s meeting with Trantos displayed before her eyes by an array of amorphous lights. Warp-energy seeped through the room, twisting and corrupting all corners and sides of the structure, melting them away such that there were no corners or sides. No Gellar field protected the Blackstone Fortress within the Warp; instead, the Vaktez Quartet invited the Empyrean into their abode, drinking up the foul forces like a nectar. Veralith was using it to shape scenes across the cosmos into view before herself and her siblings. Her siblings knew that they—mostly because they had her—were more than capable of throwing back any daemons that might have made the mistake of invading their ship.

  “It appears to me, sister, that our enemies grow stronger,” Mordefir asserted, nodding toward the display.

  “Strength,” Veralith muttered, smiling coyly. “Yes, in the physical sense, their forces are bolstered by each other. But our success demands their strength.”

  “And what of Cronos?” Lunacius asked, swiping a claw through the dancing lights before them. It did nothing to affect their view of the scene. “Are we to entrust the daemon to two mere mortals?”

  “Those two mortals are of greater character than you give them credit for,” Veralith chided. “For his part, the daemon’s host has managed to thwart the daemon’s plans on this day. Unknowingly, perhaps, or perhaps not. But Cronos wanted to taste an angel, and it has not. The daemon’s host has bought us precious time, time which we should not waste. Galpalos?”

  “Yes, my sister?” Galpalos spoke up, raising his head from his work. Though he stood at the seeing-plinth like the rest of the quartet, his attention was mostly focused on his medical work. But even a highly-focused bioengineer knew better than to keep Veralith waiting for a response.

  “Is it ready?”

  “Almost. The Hive Mind is…resilient, its many mouths adaptable. But we are close to a solution that can change rapidly enough,” Galpalos answered. “If we could perhaps make a stop in Grandfather’s Garden—”

  “That would not be wise,” Mordefir shook his head. “It is currently aflame, burning in Anathemic agony. Which perhaps is why your work has been stifled. But the flames will die.”

  “They better. Our window for ending the swarm shrinks day by—” Lunacius began, but his sister cut him off.

  “We know the stakes,” Veralith interrupted. “We continue with the plan, and we assume the Everchanging will be made ready for its grand deployment when the time is right. Until then, Lunacius, you’re up. It’s time to meet and greet.”

  “I have always looked forward to dancing with an Angel,” Lunacius admitted, nodding and smiling smugly.