Despite outward appearances, Bliss had not emerged from her bout with the self-proclaimed not-a-daemon unscathed. No scratches or gashes had cut into her flesh, but she had been tossed about, battered and bruised, and her muscles had been pressed and stretched to their—unnatural—limits. So, when she and Zha arrived in their shared den allocated to them aboard the Xenos vessel, Bliss, after peeling off her synskin attire, all but collapsed onto the simple furnishings provided to the Inquisitor duo. The bed, if it could be called that, buckled under her weight.

  Otherwise languishing motionlessly, Bliss’s eyes traced Zha’s contemplative path into their abode, where the younger Inquisitor seated herself on a chair across the room from Bliss. The savant was lost in thought, hand on her chin and eyes staring at the floor. Bliss let the savant think for a time, then with half her face pressed into her mattress, said, “Most people would say, ‘Gosh, Bliss, are you alright?’ or ‘Thanks for saving me!’”

  Zha did reply, though her reply was far from a response. “I think we have a problem,” Zha murmured, eyes still hung forward in contemplation.

  “Just one?” Bliss asked, raising an eyebrow. “I can name at least six.”

  Zha did not reply.

  When the one-sidedness of the conversation became more readily apparent to Bliss, the Assassin, sore as she was, pushed herself off her front and sat up on the bed, its frame creaking with her every move. Bliss sat still for another few moments, then wrapped her arms around her own front. “I miss Callant,” she whimpered. “I had in him in my arms not long ago. I shouldn’t have let him go…” Her voice, and thoughts, trailed off. Still, no input from Zha. Bliss glumly looked up at her partner. “I find myself with far less patience for savants than you’re probably used to, you know.”

  No response.

  Bliss rolled her eyes and sighed, then fell onto her back and spread her arms wide. She stared at the ceiling, blankly, and was tired enough to see every thought from her mind fade away. She found, in that empty clarity, that the next thought to reach her mind was indeed what she was most worried about. “Were we wrong to leave him behind?”

  “No,” came the immediate response.

  “So you are alive,” Bliss grumbled.

  “Mr. Blackgar is supported by Ms. Law, and vice versa. They can take care of each other, and will be happy to do so. Like it or not, you and I are wrapped up in the daemon’s plots,” Zha began to elaborate.

  Bliss sourly interjected, “I very much hate it.”

  “—and that means it probably won’t try anything while we’re so far away from it. At the very least, it won’t kill them both until it has run its course with us in front of Mr. Blackgar. I think they, Mr. Blackgar and Ms. Law, are probably fine and it is better for them that they are not involved with this,” Zha explained.

  “I don’t disagree there,” Bliss admitted, sighing. “Alright, Zha, keep running your mouth: what’s this ‘problem’ you think we have?”

  Zha’s eyes glimmered, having been invited to speak on her ample thoughts. “We’ve heard the name Lunacius before. And from your recount of the battle, we’ve heard the name Mordefir, too,” she said, frowning. “These can be no coincidence.”

  “Refresh my memory,” Bliss said with another sigh, not possessing the near-infinite memory her savant partner had.

  “Foxon Silverman claimed, to Mr. Blackgar on Amnes Minoris, that Gale Ryke had gotten wrapped up with a daemon-prince by the name of Mordefir, and indeed, Mr. Blackgar had encountered something of the Warp when he executed the Phaenonite Ryke on Hestia Majoris,” Zha explained. Bliss sat up, painfully, again, meeting eyes with Zha. “Later, when you and I conducted our interrogation of the Heretek Antonax, once-captured by the Space Wolves, we heard our first utterance of the name Lunacius.”

  “Lunacius, on Vaktez,” Bliss quoted, remembering the event. At the time it had seemed, to all four Inquisitors listening in, to be the senseless rambling of an addled mind. “Where is Antonax now?”

  “Killed, shortly after we confirmed we routed the Phaenonite cell with Absalom,” Zha replied. “So that lead is very literally a dead-end. But it can be no coincidence that we have encountered these names in the past and now find ourselves meeting their owners.”

  “I concur,” Bliss nodded. “Mordefir was red. Callant always had this thing about colors, remember?” Bliss asked, and Zha nodded in agreement. “When Callant recounted his killing of Gale Ryke, he mentioned that the daemon present gave imagery and feelings of redness, even though Callant did not lay eyes upon it. Lunacius, as we’ve seen him, was every shade of purple. Those are both two of the four colors Callant encountered in his visions with Ouranos.”

  Zha nodded again, then added, “From my time reading Ordo Malleus materia to study what I could on Cronos, I learned that there are indeed four colors often associated with the daemonic, and the other two—sickly green and sky-blue—indeed match those shown in Ouranos’s vision with Mr. Blackgar.”

  “Ouranos was keeping them captive as an ace-in-the-hole, to be released in case he ever died,” Bliss noted, a slight relief washing over her. At least, if nothing else, it was looking like that bastard had indeed been slain by my hand. “Four daemon princes…,” Bliss muttered, thinking on it.

  “If Silverman is to be believed in that evaluation,” Zha pointed out, then shook her head. “And I very much doubt that he is. According to Ordo Malleus, the true name of a daemon grants power over it. But Lunacius was pretty lax about giving his to us.”

  “You don’t think he’s actually a daemon, then?” Bliss suggested, and Zha shook her head again. “If not, then what? A mutant? A sorcerer?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know. He called himself a ‘once-mortal’ and an ‘ascendant,’” Zha observed. “If we take that at face value—”

  “—he was pretty egotistical; he may not have cared to hide things—” Bliss added.

  “—and coupled with the fact that you successfully made him bleed, which daemons do not, I think we can safely deduce that Lunacius, and the others of Mr. Blackgar’s ‘colors’ like him, are not beings born of the Warp. That is not necessarily a good thing. Our usual armaments and wards for witchcraft may find no purchase against these beings, whatever they are, if that is the case,” Zha warned, then shook her head. “I must speak with the Angel and squeeze what she knows from her.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Need a hand for that?” Bliss offered.

  Zha shook her head. “You are in no further field condition, Ms. Carmichael—”

  “—so, you did notice after all—”

  “—and besides, you are hardly on good terms with that mechanical Xenos, who currently tends to her wounds. No, I will negotiate that info from her on my own,” Zha decided, rising to her feet. “Get some rest, Ms. Carmichael. I will return shortly.” Zha started to the door of their room, waved it open, and then paused before looking back to her partner. “And thank you, Bliss, for saving me.”

  Zha left before Bliss could reply, so the Assassin instead laid back upon her bed and stretched out again. “Savants never miss a beat, do they?” she muttered, then shook her head. “You’re worth saving, Zha. And for that, I fear Cronos will save you for last. I think I’m to reunite with Hager before this is over.”

  ***

  Just as Bliss’s bed could hardly be identified as such, the medicae Zha stepped into, of Xenos make, was anything but. The Xenos, Zet, had many devices primed for biological recovery and reconstruction, some of which were filling in the hole that Lunacius had stabbed through Luciene. Zha trusted none of them, nor did she trust Zet himself, who watched over Luciene’s recovery. But, she admitted to herself, she was unsure whether she should or should not trust Luciene proper. Living Saints such as she tended to ally with Imperial forces.

  “A visitor,” drawled the cool robotic tone from Zet’s body.

  “I know,” Luciene nodded, sitting upright on an operating table while she was stitched back together. “Come in, Zha,” the Angel insisted, though Zha was not waiting for her permission, and had already begun to close nearer to the pair. Once standing before Luciene, Zha took a moment to study the Angel over in silence—a silence which Luciene broke. “You can end the fa?ade, you know,” Luciene said, locking a golden gaze with Zha’s darker eyes.

  “Fa?ade?”

  “The ironclad Inquisitor is not who you are, it is but a shell. I see the girl behind the woman, the innocence within the violence. Your heart is pure, it is your mind that is troubled—a pity, for a savant. Beneath adamantium skin is a softer being, and I—”

  “No,” Zha said flatly. “You may be right that some bit of my younger self lingers on. But I killed it long ago because it was too weak to protect the people I care about. Who I am now is—”

  “Someone that saw me as a mother-figure, and Blackgar as a father-figure,” Luciene asserted, then smiled gently as Zha shifted uneasily. “You are not as different from your original self as you suspect. You are still a girl lost in a universe of horrors, seeking safety and security where you can find it. You can hardly be blamed for that.”

  “That is—I don’t—you…,” Zha stammered, thoughts muddied and thrown into disorder. From that disorder came anger, and her fists clenched, but she shook herself out from that. “I didn’t come for this.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Luciene shrugged. “Nor did you come to check on my condition, which is a bit rude, I must point out. You’re here for something more material.”

  “In a sense. Information. A savant’s stock and trade,” Zha answered, rebuilding some confidence in her position. “Lunacius and Mordefir. Did you know them previously? Had you heard their names before?”

  “No, never,” Luciene shook her head. “You, Zet?”

  “I have no record of them,” Zet answered, though his metallic body remained stoic and unmoving in his reply.

  “What about a planet by the name of Vaktez?” Zha continued. Luciene shook her head again. Zet, however, made an unnatural musing noise, so eyes fell to him.

  After a moment, Zet answered, “In your dialect, a planet by the designation of Vaktez was once a part of what you call the Ghoul Stars within the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy. However, it vanished some time before your Emperor tried to reconquer the galaxy for mankind, or before what you know as the Heresy.”

  “How did it vanish?”

  “Destroyed.”

  “How?” Zha repeated, growing impatient.

  Zet paused again, scrying through stellar records of untold eons. “There were once blackstone pylons on the planet, not unlike others of the galaxy—such as your Cadia. Much like Cadia, those pylons—of C’Tan origin—were destroyed immediately before a catastrophic eruption of Empyreal energy, which consumed the world. Given seismic disturbances on the world detected by those pylons, it is likely there was a great war on Vaktez before this occurred.”

  “A war led by Lunacius or Mordefir,” Zha muttered. “Or the other two.”

  “Other two?” Luciene asked.

  “That’s what I want to figure out,” Zha shrugged. “Names that you have heard through the years but cannot place to a face—I would like to know of them.”

  “You ask of thousands of years of history,” Luciene scoffed, shaking her head. “Not even my memory is good enough for that.”

  “More recently, then?” Zha suggested.

  “Blackgar comes to mind,” Zet mused, and Zha shot him a dry look. “Cronos too. Though I imagine that one is obvious and not what you’re looking for.”

  “Are there no others in that digitized brain of yours?”

  “It is not digitized, but rather the product of—you don’t care,” Zet said. Then he raised an epiphanic finger. “There was our Angel’s mentor, Veralith.”

  “Veralith?” Zha asked, wincing and squinting.

  “Yes, but I’ve met Veralith, and so can place the face,” Luciene denied.

  “No, wait,” Zha pleaded, holding one hand to her head and another outstretched toward her allies, gesturing for them to give her pause to think. They did so, staring at her blankly, while Zet’s drones and remote machines continued to suture Luciene’s recent wounds. Then Zha righted herself and seemed almost content for a moment before returning to an air of simple confidence. “Aerialon. I must send word to my fleet to go to Aerialon, and we must arrive as well.”

  “I don’t—” Luciene started, not understanding, but Zet clarified things.

  “Aerialon is a planet in Imperial space, within the Ixaniad Sector,” Zet understood. “What is there, and how did Veralith’s name make you think of it?”

  “There is a temple to Veralith on the world. Mr. Blackgar, Mr. Hager, Ms. Carmichael, and you—err…Ms. Flint—once worked with the priestess of that temple during the Phaenonite Crackdown we pursued, which, later in the operation, is also when we first heard of Lunacius and Mordefir. And, yes, there’s no way it can be a coincidence; there is a Necron body, if not several, beneath that temple,” Zha explained.

  Zet tottered in place for a moment. “Well, yes, it is a Necron Tomb World. I suppose I should have mentioned that,” he admitted. “I, erm, should probably not set foot upon the world’s surface. My doing so may awaken my brethren thereof. I assume you do not want that.”

  Zha stared at him for a moment, then drawled, “Nooooo, I don’t. But I do want a conversation with that priestess—or, their successor, anyways; it has been some years.”

  “I should make for a good conversation starter in that regard,” Luciene agreed. “But I must admit, I have trouble believing in any nefariousness behind Veralith. She saved me, was there when I first awoke as…whatever I am now.”

  “Luciene, that only solidifies my understanding of her treachery,” Zha sighed, shaking her head. “That implies she knew about The Finality, which is where you died.”

  “But she was kind, insightful, and helpful when I needed help most.”

  “Or she was using you.”

  “Or still is,” Zet chimed in, before backing off as Luciene glowered toward him.

  Luciene returned, with a softer gaze, toward Zha. “I’m sorry, Zha. I just have trouble believing your allegations. But I am willing to pursue this course of action if you deem it necessary.”

  “I do.”

  “Then the truth will out. I only ask you to keep an open mind about my mentor.”

  Zha grimaced. “I…I do not know if I can allow myself to. An open mind may be all your mentor needs to end me.”