The corridors of the ship were a mess of twisted metal and eerie stillness, a far cry from the chaos of the battlefield outside. I kept my pace deliberate, my steps light, though the sound of my boots echoed faintly off the warped walls. The air inside was cooler, carrying a faint metallic tang, but it wasn’t the kind of relief you’d expect after escaping a fight for your life. It felt... wrong, like the calm in the eye of a storm.

  Something was off about this place.

  I could feel it the moment I stepped through the makeshift barricades and into the husk of this wrecked ship. Not just the weight of its history—though there was plenty of that in the way its battered corridors groaned under unseen stress—but something deeper. A presence, faint but undeniable, brushing against my senses like the distant hum of the Nexus. Not the same, not as pervasive, but enough to keep my fur bristling.

  This was no ordinary vessel.

  I passed a group of survivors in a wide corridor, their eyes flicking toward me with a mix of curiosity and mistrust. Some of them carried lasguns or stubbers, their grips tight even here, in what I assumed was the safest part of the ship. They were ragged, dirty, and exhausted—no surprise there. But it wasn’t just the grime or the hollow look in their eyes that caught my attention. It was the way they moved, the way their gazes lingered on me. Too steady. Too calm. Almost unnatural.

  One of them muttered something under their breath as I passed, a word or two I couldn’t make out, but I felt the weight of their stare until I turned the corner. My tail flicked sharply behind me. These people weren’t right. And if I was going to stay here, even briefly, I needed to figure out why.

  The ship felt ancient, older than almost anything I’d ever stepped foot in. The corridors weren’t entirely Imperial anymore. Twisted, half-melted metal plates and bulkheads jutted at odd angles, signs of Warp corruption that hadn’t been entirely kept at bay. Yet somehow, the vessel was holding together. The faint, rhythmic thrum of its systems—Gellar Field, engines, or something else—hummed in the background, its cadence steady but faltering.

  I stopped near an exposed section of wall where cables hung like veins spilling from an open wound. Blackened scorch marks surrounded the edges, pulsing faintly with residual energy. A small emblem, warped but still legible, caught my eye: an aquila half-melted into the metal.

  “Imperial,” I muttered to myself, tracing the faint grooves of the symbol with a claw. “Or at least it used to be.”

  The sound of heavy boots behind me pulled me from my thoughts. I turned sharply, my green eyes narrowing as I caught sight of the scarred woman—the one who had taken charge during the battle. Her gait was steady, her posture tense but not hostile.

  “You’re looking for something,” she said, her tone flat but edged with curiosity.

  “A few answers,” I replied, straightening up. My tail flicked behind me as I gestured toward the warped walls. “This ship’s been in the Warp longer than it should’ve survived. I’m trying to figure out why.”

  Her expression didn’t change, but I caught the briefest flicker of something in her eyes—hesitation? Annoyance? “You’re not the first to ask questions like that,” she said, crossing her arms. “But answers come slow around here. People focus on surviving first. Everything else is a luxury.”

  Her voice was rough, like gravel grinding against metal, and her scarred face looked like it had seen more battles than most soldiers survive. A jagged line ran from her brow to her jaw, splitting her cheek in two and warping the corner of her mouth into a permanent half-scowl. But her eyes were sharp, piercing, even through the haze of exhaustion that clung to her.

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “Lieutenant Adrasta,” she said simply. “Used to be, anyway. Now I just keep people alive.”

  Adrasta. I let the name settle in my mind as I studied her, wondering how someone like her had managed to hold this group together in the depths of the Warp. “And how long have you been keeping people alive, Adrasta?”

  Her jaw tightened, the scar on her cheek twitching slightly. “Long enough to know time doesn’t mean much here.” She shifted her weight, her arms still crossed. “We’ve been here... a while. Could be months, could be decades. Depends who you ask.”

  “Decades,” I echoed, my voice quiet but pointed. “In the Warp.”

  She didn’t flinch. “The Gellar Field’s still running,” she said, jerking her chin toward the distant hum that seemed to resonate through the ship. “Barely. It keeps the worst of it out. Most of the time.”

  “That doesn’t explain your people,” I said, my green eyes narrowing. “You should’ve been ripped apart, twisted into something unrecognizable. But you’re still... human.”

  Adrasta’s lips pressed into a thin line, her scarred face hardening. “Not all of us,” she said quietly. “The Warp takes its toll. Those patrols you’ve seen? They’re not just out there to scavenge. Sometimes people don’t come back... the same.”

  I let the weight of her words hang in the air. It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it was enough to confirm what I’d suspected. These people weren’t untouched by the Warp. They’d been tempered by it, forged into something that could survive in this hellscape without breaking entirely. But how?

  “What’s left of the Gellar Field—it’s not enough, is it?” I asked.

  Adrasta shook her head. “No. It’s failing. Has been for a while. We’ve patched it up where we can, but the energy it needs... it’s bleeding us dry. The longer we stay here, the weaker it gets. And when it fails completely...”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

  The survivors were more than just a ragged band of humans clinging to life—they were a mystery I couldn’t ignore. Something about them, about this ship, felt wrong. The way they moved, the way they spoke, the way the Warp hadn’t consumed them entirely. They were different. Like me, but not.

  I leaned against a bulkhead, my tail flicking idly as I let my thoughts drift. The Nexus had marked me, shaped me into something other than mortal, but these people... they’d been changed too. Not by choice, not with purpose, but by the slow, insidious pressure of the Warp.

  “Servius.”

  Adrasta’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I turned to see her standing at the end of the corridor, her posture stiff.

  “There’s someone you need to talk to,” she said.

  “Who?”

  She hesitated, her scarred face unreadable for a moment. “Someone who knows more about why we’re still alive.”

  My ears twitched, curiosity sparking to life despite my wariness. “Lead the way.”

  As Adrasta turned and began walking down the corridor, I followed, the faint hum of the Gellar Field growing louder with every step. Something told me the answers I was looking for were just ahead—and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear them.

  The corridor twisted as Adrasta led me deeper into the ship, the dim lighting casting strange shadows that seemed to shift with the pulse of the failing Gellar Field. I kept my pace steady, my claws clicking faintly against the warped metal floor. The air here was thicker, heavier, as though the ship itself was pressing down on us, urging us to turn back.

  Adrasta didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she was just used to it. Her steps were confident, purposeful, even as the ship groaned faintly around us.

  I, on the other hand, couldn’t shake the unease creeping up my spine. This wasn’t just any ship stranded in the Warp—it was a relic, ancient and weathered, but alive in ways it shouldn’t have been. The faint hum of the Gellar Field thrummed through the walls, uneven but persistent, like a heartbeat that refused to stop even as its strength faded.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, my voice low.

  “You’ll see,” Adrasta replied, not looking back.

  I narrowed my eyes but didn’t press further. The corridors began to widen as we descended deeper into the ship’s belly, the walls taking on a strange, organic texture that set my teeth on edge. I couldn’t tell if it was Warp corruption or just the natural decay of a vessel that had been adrift for who knew how long.

  Adrasta finally stopped in front of a heavy bulkhead door, its surface warped and pitted with age. She tapped a sequence into the control panel, and the door groaned open with a sound that was almost a growl.

  “Inside,” she said, stepping aside to let me pass.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I hesitated for a fraction of a second before stepping through the doorway. The room beyond was dimly lit, the air cooler than the rest of the ship. Cables hung from the ceiling like vines, and faint wisps of steam hissed from cracked vents along the walls. At the center of the room stood a figure hunched over a console, their form partially obscured by shadows.

  “Another visitor, Adrasta?” The voice that emerged was smooth, measured, and utterly calm.

  The figure straightened, stepping into the faint light. They were an older man, his face lined with deep creases that spoke of years—or centuries—of experience. His hair was iron-gray, cropped close to his scalp, and one piercing blue eye, the other scarred and milky white. It gleamed with an intensity that made my fur bristle.

  “This is Servius,” Adrasta said curtly. “He’s the one who dealt with the Beast.”

  The man’s gaze swept over me, lingering on the faint singe marks on my armor and the knife still strapped to my side. “Ah, the outsider,” he said with a faint smile. “I’ve heard about you.”

  “Good things, I hope,” I said dryly, crossing my arms.

  The man chuckled, a low, gravelly sound. “That remains to be seen. My name is Arkyn. I... maintain what’s left of this ship’s systems, including the Gellar Field.”

  I glanced around the room, taking in the array of makeshift machinery and patched-together consoles. “You’re the reason this ship hasn’t been swallowed whole.”

  Arkyn’s expression tightened slightly, his eyes flicking toward the faintly glowing console behind him. “It’s not as simple as that,” he said. “The Gellar Field is failing, and no amount of patchwork repairs will hold it together forever. But you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you?”

  “I have,” I said, my tone hard. “What I don’t understand is how your people are still standing. That field shouldn’t be strong enough to keep out the Warp, not completely.”

  “It isn’t,” Arkyn admitted, his voice quiet. “The Warp gets through—enough to affect us, to change us. Some of us more than others.”

  I thought back to the patrols I’d seen, there had been scars and subtle mutations that marked nearly every survivor. They weren’t untouched by the Warp, but they weren’t consumed by it either. It didn’t make sense.

  “Why haven’t you been overrun?” I asked.

  Arkyn’s piercing blue eyes locked onto mine. “Because we’ve adapted,” he said simply. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The calm, the resistance. It’s not natural—it’s the result of years of exposure. The Gellar Field doesn’t block the Warp completely. It filters it, tempers it, just enough to... reshape us.”

  “Reshape,” I echoed, my voice flat.

  “It’s why we’re still alive,” Arkyn said, his tone unflinching. “But it’s also why we’re stuck here. The longer we stay, the more we change. Some of us become... useful. Others don’t survive the process.”

  I clenched my jaw, my claws tapping against the edge of my armor. “How long have you been here?”

  Arkyn hesitated, his gaze drifting toward the far wall where a faded chronometer flickered faintly. “Longer than we thought possible. Time doesn’t work the same in the Warp. Days, years—they lose meaning. All we know is that we’ve been fighting to hold on for far longer than we should have been able to.”

  “And now the Gellar Field is failing,” I said.

  “Yes,” Arkyn said, his voice grim. “And when it goes, we go with it.”

  Adrasta, who had remained silent until now, stepped forward. “That’s why we need you,” she said, her scarred face set in a hard line. “You’ve been through the Warp alone, survived things no one else could. If anyone can help us find a way out of this, it’s you.”

  I stared at her, my tail flicking sharply behind me as I processed her words. They weren’t asking for help—they were demanding it, in their own way. And while part of me bristled at the thought, another part—the part shaped by the Nexus, by the threads that still lingered within me—knew they were right.

  “If I help you,” I said slowly, “you’ll give me whatever information you have on navigating the Warp. Any charts, data, anything that might help me find my way out.”

  Arkyn nodded. “Agreed.”

  Adrasta’s sharp eyes softened ever so slightly, though her expression remained guarded. “So? Will you help us?”

  I let the silence stretch for a moment, the hum of the failing Gellar Field filling the room like a heartbeat.

  “Yeah,” I said finally, my voice steady. “I’ll help.”

  The war wasn’t over yet.

  I lingered in the room after Adrasta and Arkyn left, the dim glow of the console casting flickering shadows across the warped walls. The rhythmic hum of the Gellar Field pulsed faintly through the floor, uneven but persistent, a subtle reminder of just how tenuous this sanctuary was.

  The scarred woman—Adrasta—was clearly used to leading. She had the weight of command about her, the sort of presence that only came from long years of making hard decisions. Arkyn, on the other hand, was an enigma. His calm demeanor and sharp gaze suggested he was more than just an engineer, though I couldn’t pin down what. Together, they’d managed to keep this broken vessel and its fractured crew alive in a place where survival shouldn’t have been possible.

  But there was something more to it—something they weren’t saying. I could feel it, like the faint tug of a thread just beyond my reach. It wasn’t just the failing Gellar Field or the unnatural calm of the survivors. It was the way they spoke, the way they moved, the way their presence lingered in the air like the faint hum of the Nexus. Different, but similar enough to keep my instincts on edge.

  The survivors were marked by the Warp, that much was obvious. The Gellar Field wasn’t holding it out completely; it was letting it in, tempering it, reshaping them in ways they didn’t fully understand. Arkyn had said as much, though he’d framed it as adaptation. But what kind of adaptation let you walk through the Warp without being twisted into a daemon’s plaything? What kind of adaptation let you survive where countless others had been consumed?

  I leaned against the wall, my tail flicking sharply behind me as my mind churned through the possibilities. The survivors couldn’t have all been psychically gifted—if that were the case, they’d have burned out long ago, their souls snuffed out by the Warp’s predatory hunger. And yet, they weren’t nulls either; they still carried a faint resonance, a faint flicker of Warp energy that clung to them like a second skin.

  Then there was their cohesion. Groups like this didn’t survive without breaking apart. Fear, paranoia, hunger—something always splintered the fragile unity of stranded humans. But this group was intact, unified. That wasn’t normal.

  I tapped my claws against the hilt of my knife, my eyes narrowing as the pieces of the puzzle shifted in my mind. Maybe they weren’t psychically gifted in the conventional sense, but what if there was something else? Some shared trait, something subtle and overlooked, that had allowed them to resist the worst of the Warp’s influence.

  “Low-grade blanks?,” I muttered under my breath, the thought slipping out before I could stop it.

  It made sense in a way. If the survivors were all from the same regiment or planet, and that group carried a faint, low-level resistance to psychic influence, it might explain why they hadn’t been entirely consumed by the Warp. The Gellar Field’s filtering effect would have amplified that resistance, creating a kind of symbiosis that kept them functional. Not unscathed, but functional.

  It was a theory, though not one I could prove. Not yet.

  The question was whether this resistance was intentional—some kind of experiment hidden within the ranks of the Imperial Guard—or a quirk of biology that no one had noticed until they were thrown into the Warp. If it was intentional, the implications were... disturbing. I doubted the Imperium would have done something like this openly, but the Inquisition? The Mechanicum? They were both capable of atrocities in the name of progress.

  I let out a slow breath, my claws flexing absently at my sides. Whatever the truth was, it didn’t change the immediate reality. The survivors needed help, and I needed information. If working with them got me closer to navigating the Warp and finding a way out of this mess, then so be it. I’d play their game—for now.

  Pushing off the wall, I made my way back toward the upper levels of the ship. The corridors were quieter now, the distant hum of activity fading as the survivors settled into their routines. I passed a group of them huddled around a crude map spread across a metal crate, their voices low and urgent. Patrol routes, I guessed.

  One of them glanced up as I passed, their eyes lingering on me for a moment before returning to the map. The tension in their shoulders was obvious, though whether it was distrust or simple exhaustion, I couldn’t tell.

  I didn’t stop to ask.

  The room they’d assigned me was small, barely more than a cubicle carved out of the ship’s wreckage, but it was enough. A metal cot bolted to the wall, a storage locker that probably hadn’t been used in decades, and a single glow-globe flickering faintly from the ceiling. Spartan, but functional.

  I sat on the edge of the cot, letting the weight of the day settle over me. My gear was spread out on the floor in front of me—rifle, pistols, knife, and the meager remains of my ammunition. I’d taken stock earlier, but the sight of it still made my tail flick with irritation.

  Fourteen sniper rounds left.

  Two full bolt pistol magazines.

  A single frag grenade.

  Not much to work with, especially if the survivors expected me to take point on whatever task they had in mind. I’d need more supplies, and soon.

  My gaze drifted to the knife lying on the floor, its engraved blade catching the faint glow of the light above. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. The Nexus’s threads still lingered faintly within the metal, a reminder of what I’d used it for and the cost that came with it. My chest ached faintly at the memory, the hollow space where a piece of myself had once been.

  I didn’t know what I’d given up to strike down the Beast, but I could feel its absence, like a missing tooth I couldn’t stop prodding at. It was small now, but it wouldn’t stay that way. The Nexus had marked me, and I wasn’t na?ve enough to think that mark wouldn’t come with a price.

  I exhaled sharply, sliding the knife back into its sheath. That was a problem for later. For now, I had to focus on the survivors and the mystery of how they’d managed to hold out for so long. Maybe my theory about low-grade blanks was wrong. Maybe there was something darker at work here, something they didn’t even realize was keeping them alive.

  Or maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe they were just lucky.

  I doubted it.

  I leaned back against the cold metal wall, my tail flicking absently as I stared at the ceiling. The survivors needed me, and I needed them. But the Warp wasn’t done with any of us yet, and I had the sinking feeling that the answers I found here were only going to lead to more questions.

  “Let’s see how long this bastion holds,” I muttered to myself, closing my eyes.

  Tomorrow, the real work would begin.