I walked the research lab in silence, flanked only by a handful of the Citadel's senior minds.
I had grown accustomed to this new routine, with the Dereniks unable and unwilling to deter our new and growing defenses; the war did not require me at the frontlines. Letho, Dren, Garran, and Ariana could handle the minutiae of the last pockets of Derenik resistance on the planet, as I focused on bigger-picture matters, such as research and development, the growing and expanding government, and the dignitaries who came from every part of the planet.
Today it was the turn of the research citadel.
We passed beneath a towering arch of reinforced glass and entered the heart of the Super Soldier Program.
Beyond the arch stretched a vast hall, illuminated in pale light. Rows of bio-tanks lined the chamber like cathedral pews, each one housing a man. Bodies suspended in nutrient gel twitched with unseen exertion, veins pulsing, muscles swelling unnaturally as their genomes were rewritten in real time.
Dr. Halex stepped forward as we entered, his hands clasped behind his back. "The gene-alterations are aggressive," he said, "but the volunteers are holding. No fatalities so far."
I nodded once.
"We'll need a few more months before the first batch is ready for field testing," he continued. "But if the projections hold, they'll perform at eight times the capability of a baseline human, possibly more."
"And survivability?"
"We expect eighty percent to survive from this batch. We are sure we will get better with time."
He gestured to a large display panel behind him. On it, a name flashed in bold white text:
SPARTAN PROGRAM – INITIATED
I just couldn't resist calling it that…
My Spartans, the greatest soldiers of old Greece. It fit the narrative here, I was sure the perpetuals would have a good laugh when they heard about it.
Maybe I should call my future personal guard my companions.
If all went to plan, we would produce hundreds of thousands over the coming years. Millions In the coming decades… hopefully much more. Soldiers who would never flinch. Who would rarely tire. Who would fight for a new world with bodies forged in science and minds sharpened by war.
They would not be demigods, like the Primarchs. Or even space marines. But they would be Athenia's vanguard. There were little more than two or three million Astartes at the height of the Great Crusade.
We were sure we could have tens of millions of Spartans in a century.
We moved on.
The viral labs were sealed behind four doors and a gene-locked corridor. Dr. Sorrel greeted me in a thick containment suit, his voice filtered through vox-amplifiers.
"The anti-xeno virus progresses," he said, gesturing to a digital map of the Derenik genome. "We've isolated their neural redundancy pathways. The virus spreads through pheromone and contact, kills in silence. We're preparing field tests against captured xenos, but progress is slow."
"Human compatibility?"
"Clean. Triple-checked. The virus threads through xeno-specific protein structures. To a human host, it's inert."
A whisper-weapon. A quiet death, delivered by wind, skin, or water. A genocide in silence…
"We are having trouble with the delayed activation you have ordered, but the schematics you provided have lead us a long way forward."
I gave the nod.
It was a necessity born of desperation. When the next Derenik conquest fleets arrived armed with weapons that could melt steel and strip atmosphere, there would be no hope of holding them back through conventional means.
The planet's defenses, no matter how well-rebuilt and expanded, would crumble under sustained orbital bombardment. Even the Spartan soldiers, for all their promised strength, would be torn apart by sheer attrition.
There needed to be something else. A secret weapon. Something the xenos had no answer for. The virus, engineered in silence beneath the earth, was that answer. It was the only chance they had to destroy the Dereniks' ability to resist forever
I had though a hundred times about doing this. I knew the risks, the parasite of rot in the warp would be angry about this, he might even feed on it and intervene. But there was no other way. What were we supposed to do? Wait for the Derenik Battlefleets to come kill us all? The best we could do in that situation is make them bleed before we inevitably fell. We needed a super weapon, something that tipped the scale of a rebel planet against a well-supplied Empire.
I had searched for the Astronomican.
Nothing.
Only void.
If it had been lit, I would have felt it. It was a presence, a towering spike of psychic order hammering through the chaotic sea of the Immaterium. It was the Empress Herself made signal, guiding humanity's wayward fleets across the infinite night.
And yet I felt nothing.
We were alone.
Still alone.
The Astronomican had not always been there. It had been ignited. Years after the scattering of the Primarchs. The Empress moving up her plans forward to find her children.
If my pod fell to Athenia moments after the Warp had stolen my brothers… then it could be a few years more before the Empress lit the beacon. Years before the Astronomican flared to life and the galaxy started to shift.
And that wasn't the worst of it.
Even once it shone, once its light pierced the veil, it could take decades for any expeditionary fleet to reach us.
At least when that happened we might be able to send for help… but without navigators it would be incredibly difficult. I was sure I could guide a ship… but if I was not then the consequences would be catastrophic.
I must deal with the Derenik Empire on my own.
And that was if I had arrived when the scattering happened and not before it.
We were in the Pacificus, near Terra, thankfully.
So we were alone for now. With no way to call for help and as far as I knew no way to call for more. My attempts to contact the Empress through the warp had failed miserably. Even after she had talked to me in my battle against the big Khonate deamon.
So that left us alone against the Empire.
The virus would have to be our solution.
It came with a problem, though…
The xenos tech was made partially out of biology and would be affected by the virus. We would need to replace the most critical systems before anything happened.
Outside the containment wing, engineers worked with purpose, stripping old Derenik components for rare minerals, melting down curved, alien circuits into crude base materials.
The reverse-engineered technology of the early rebellion, the plasma carbines, the power spines, we had relied on them to survive.
But they were poison.
That could not be allowed. We would replace the xeno tech with the old Athenian, Human, variants. And we would build reverse engineered version of their tech without their biotechnology.
"Keep going like this Dr. Sorrel, we are ever closer to our greatest weapons becoming a reality." I finally said after looking at the schematics for a few seconds, lost in my own mind and ruminations.
"Yes, my lord. Athenia will prevail." He responded.
"No matter the cost."
I had another political function to go to.
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Voices from every corner of the world echoed in the hall. Accents I did not recognize. Dialects born in underground caves, highland plateaus, and scorched deserts.
Penelope stood at the main gate with her slate in hand, cross-referencing names and banners against a rapidly expanding registry.
"Next!" a man called. A man with scaled tattoos across his skull stepped forward, flanked by silent guards. He was catalogued as Drenn Phrollos, representative of Hive Ares.
It seemed that Dren and its variations were a very common name in Athenia, I had met quite a few of them by now.
Garran watched the exchange from a balcony above, arms crossed, scowl fixed. Mira flanked him, speaking low and fast, cataloguing new arrivals as their convoy columns stretched through the lower hive gates. The twins were currently in Sultrava, fighting the Derenik remnants in Hive Rodas.
The massive floor had been restructured into a civic hall in record time. And functions like this had become common as we waited for the last delegates to arrive.
Delegations from every corner of Athenia had arrived, crowding the marble roads and banners of the New Order. Their robes bore the sigils of local militias, rebel enclaves, old planetary companies reborn as communes, even the crimson clothes of the Grand Shipshard's new Worker's Union.
They kept coming.
Each day brought new banners to the Senate Plaza, and new claims of loyalty and autonomy to sort through. The early trickle of envoys had swelled into a torrent.
A few delegations from Eaena had come too, bringing Athenia's only moon and biggest supply of minerals to our orbit, Penelope had told me that with them came a queer people, always robed, it had piked my interest and I was sure I would find them here.
A few wept openly upon seeing me.
That was always fun.
Apollion… The name always in their lips. The Lightbearer. The Falling Star. A name pulled from old Athenian myths, half-forgotten, reshaped to fit what they saw in me.
It was becoming routine. The extraordinary turned ordinary by sheer repetition.
Talks flared into arguments, arguments into laughter. They spoke of roads, power grids, mutual defense. These were not just political summits anymore, they were the slow knitting together of a world long torn apart.
And I made time for them. For all of them.
I listened. I sat at their tables and visited their rooms. I let them speak of their people, their hopes, the soil of their home hives, the blood they'd shed. I offered what I could, advice, support, Bloom shipments, engineers. Promises, carefully given. Alliances, cautiously nurtured.
Slowly they fell into the orbit of Hive Athenia, integrating more and more into our existing structure. Hives, cities, space stations gave way for my ministries to rule and administrate them. One day soon the Council would happen and the rest would join us.
My thoughts drifted as I moved through the press of humanity shaking hands.
Then I felt them.
A ripple. A pressure against the psychic currents.
I turned my gaze toward the sensation and saw them.
Five figures, robed in deep violet trimmed with silver, their hoods drawn low. Their presence was a beacon in my psychic senses. As I approached, they stiffened.
Then the tallest among them raised their head, and I saw it: the third eye, closed but pulsing faintly with Warp-light, etched in the center of the forehead. One by one, they opened those eyes.
They saw me.
And they fell to their knees.
The hall fell silent around us, curious eyes turning, hands half-raised in greeting or fear. But I paid them no mind. I stopped before the kneeling five and raised a hand.
"Stand," I said.
The tallest among them, a woman, I now saw, with skin like carved obsidian and a braided silver circlet resting above her brows, rose first. The others followed in perfect unison.
"Your light, Lord Apollion…" she said, her voice low and resonant, "burns like a star behind a veil. No witch, no xeno, no psyker we've ever seen comes close. You are truth. We could not help but see you."
I had grown used to the stares of mortals. The awe. But these were not ordinary men and women. These were Navigators. The ancient bloodlines bred to sail the Warp.
"You hid yourselves well," I said, scanning their robes for any sigil I recognized. "I thought your kind were gone from Athenia. The Dereniks slaughtered most when they smashed the Federation."
"They did," she said. "There are few left of House Velatrix. Once we guided the fleets of the Athenian Federation, then we hid beneath its ashes. For two hundred years we moved in shadow, protecting our young, preserving our bloodline."
She stepped closer and bowed her head again, not in submission this time, but in solemn pledge.
"Now we stand with you. If there are stars to sail, we will sail them in your name. Lord Apollion."
A thrill ran down my spine.
Thank fuck.
I had not even looked for them. In the chaos of rebuilding, in the sea of ministries, militias, and war machines, I had never dared hope a Navigator House might have survived here. Let alone one intact enough to serve.
But here they were. Falling into my hands.
Hopefully there were more than this five…
Navigators were more than just psykers. They were the keystones of any interstellar civilization. Without them, Warp travel was suicide, blind jumps into madness, ending in shipwreck and daemonic horror. Even with them, the dangers were immense. But they were the only ones who could guide us through the Warp's. Small jumps until the Astronomican was lit.
That light hadn't yet shone. I knew it in my soul.
But when it did…
We would be ready.
"I welcome you, House Velatrix," I said, my voice calm but rich with meaning. "This world will need its seers."
The matriarch bowed again. "We will serve."
A Navigator House.
A functioning Navigator House.
It changed everything.
Over the next few days I would come to learn that many more had survived the cleansing of the xenos.
Enough to build a core of Navigators and expand from there.
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The lights in my chambers were dim right now not that it mattered to me.
I rarely slept these days, only when I was with Ari or Penelope.
Or both… hopefully… one day.
I sat alone at the center of the room, the walls lined with shifting graphs and floating symbols. My own genome hovered before me, reconstructed and enhanced by every tool we had, a golden spiral, a human shell wrapped around something not quite human.
Many secrets were hiding in my genes and they could be turned into many things: the Bloom, the supersoldiers, the virus. They had all come at least in part from my understanding of my genes and my biomancy. I was sure I would be able to accomplish much more in time with it.
Suddently, a part of my brain lit up in alarm.
I wasn't alone.
I turned my head slowly.
She was sitting on my worktable.
Just… there. Legs crossed at the knee. Perfectly balanced. Pale skin beneath a bodysuit that shimmered like oil on water, constantly shifting through impossible colors.
Her mask, white, grinning, tilted toward me with mocking poise.
A Harlequin. A Solitaire if I was not mistaken. The Elite of Cegorach himself.
I had though I would never be able to catch it, but here it was.
My body tensed. I reached for my blade out of reflex, only to see it already in her hands. She cradled it like a child might a stick, turning it lazily in her fingers.
I stood slowly.
"What," I asked, "is a follower of Cegorach doing in my planet?"
The mask grinned wider. Her voice flowed like a music box spun too slowly, melodic and eerie.
"The thread unwinds, the stitch dissolves,
Yet still the needle spins and solves.
Fate flutters, a spider's breath.
And the trickster? Even he's afraid of death."
For fucks sake…
My fists clenched. "Speak plainly, or not at all, clown."
She giggled. Actually giggled. Then leapt, one impossible step backward, and she was suddenly atop the gene holo behind me, crouching like a dancer mid-act.
"I've seen you before," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Always fleeing. Always watching. Running."
She tilted her head.
I took a step closer, calm but firm. "I've been waiting for you to stop."
A pause. Her body stilled.
Silence.
Then, with slow, deliberate care, she lifted the mask from her face.
Her features were delicate and inhumanly sharp, like a blade sculpted into a woman's form. Long hair like black glass poured across her shoulders. Her eyes, deep violet, ancient and weary, met mine.
I could admit that she was beautiful. But the problem was exactly that… she was too beautiful, to the point that it became inhuman. The imperfections of our race are missing from her perfectly symmetrical face. It became creepy if I looked at her too long. It gave me an uncanny valley feeling.
"I ran," she said, "because your soul was a mirror. And ours were never meant to see our reflections so clearly, child of the Anathema."
She stood fluidly, bare face exposed, bare hands folded together in unnatural stillness. "Cegorach watches. He laughs, yes. But now? He watches."
I stepped forward, unafraid. "Why?"
"Because you've reached fates edge," she said softly. "And behind it… is everything."
A moment passed between us, measured in heartbeats and tension. Then she moved again, this time across the wall, upside down, dancing between shadows like water through fingers.
"You speak of fate," I said. "But fate doesn't frighten me. The parasites said that I had broken it before."
"Then you are either brave," she said, now hanging by one hand from the rafters, "or doomed."
The Eldar stood before me, her movements impossibly fluid, eyes unreadable beneath the strange shimmer of her helm. Without a word, she reached into the folds of her robes and drew forth an amulet, an alien thing of silver and bone, shaped like an eye half-lidded in sleep.
It pulsed faintly with a pale, violet glow, its gaze feeling almost sentient. She held it up between us. The air thickened, reality bending around the artifact like heat over flame..
I tried to pull back, to shield my thoughts, but it was too late. The amulet opened. It bloomed like a wound in space, and the world fell away.
…
I was falling, tumbling through stars and fire, plummeting in a pod toward a dying world.
The pod shuddered as it pierced the toxic atmosphere, heat flaring on the hull. I saw the surface rise fast beneath me: cracked earth, ruined cities sprawled beneath a poisoned sky. Then the hatch opened, and I was carried out by the xenos.
And there, at the center of the alley, was Ariana. Her hands bound, her eyes burning with fire that had not yet been doused. The xenos dragged her forward, mocking and cruel. Her voice cried out, pleading for mercy. But I knew not what was happening.
I watched as the executioner's blade fell. Her scream echoed in the cracked stone, swallowed by the jeers of alien tongues.
I saw myself walk among ruins. The xenos ruled here, merciless and cold. The people I should have saved were shackled, their faces gaunt, their spirits broken. I wore their uniform, a mark of betrayal, a human turned traitor.
I had been raised among the collaborators, taught to serve the enemy. I learned to suppress the rebel spark within, trading honor for survival. I enforced their laws, crushed human resistance, and sold my own people into chains. I became the hand of the oppressors, cold and unyielding.
I ruled with cruelty, fearing nothing but failure. The xenos saw in me a useful tool, a blunt instrument to keep the masses in line.. Their witches taught me all they knew of the dark masters, and I learnt well at their feet. I let the dark masters fill me with visions of glory and an eternal rule.
I let them into my soul. And they would never leave it.
Then, the Empress came.
She arrived like a tempest, radiant and terrible. Her presence split the skies. The collaborators bowed, trembling before her judgment.
But to her eyes, I was a lost cause, a stain upon humanity's honor. My servitude was weakness, my cruelty a blight, my soul twisted beyond salvation.
I expected death.
Instead, the Empress reached out her hand. Her voice cut through the dust and smoke, calm and steady. She told me what humanity was before the fall. She showed me a vision of people unbroken. Of might unmatched, of the greatness humanity could achieve if it unified once again.
She gave me a choice.
Die as a traitor.
Or live as something else.
I did not care for humanity; I only saw her endless might.
I took her hand.
She named me her son and gave me the Second Legion. I left that broken world in her colors, not the xenos'. My former soldiers shouted as we burned their strongholds to ash and Athenia became a world of the Imperium.
World after world fell.
We freed slaves.
We broke alien warfleets.
We planted her banners in every world…
The parasites came back in slowly, a creeping force that never stopped at the back of my mind. They offered what the Empress had denied. They taught me not to care. They taught me how to rule without pity, how to break worlds faster.
My legion changed with me. Their banners darkened. Their cheers became war cries. They were no longer liberators. World after world was put in chains and taken to the altars for the glory of the dark masters.
And then, one day, Frigga, my sister, arrived…
She spoke like a judge to me. Her wolves came right behind her, and my legion did battle.
We fought across the ruins of a city I had conquered. My soldiers fell first. My generals fled. Her blade struck faster than my psychic might could prevent, the glowing sigils of her armor preventing me from hurting her.
I dropped to my knees before her.
She did not hesitate.
In a moment cold as the void, she condemned me.
The sentence was swift: death. No trial, no mercy.
The final strike descended.
Silence.
…
Then, the vision shattered like glass.
I was back in my chamber, heart pounding.
The Eldar smiled softly, her eyes gleaming with infinite sadness.
I though of calling my powers and attacking the eldar. But… that was not really an attack against me was it not? And the sadness in her eyes gave me pause.
That had felt real… too real. Frigga's blade taking my head… I could still feel the cold steel in the back of my head as the pronounced herself my executor in the name of the Empress.
The Eldar lowered the amulet, the eye folding shut with a whisper. Her gaze pierced me, ancient, sorrowful, and wary.
"You saw it," she said. Her voice was music and glass. "A thread that was never meant to be pulled. A path that should have remained sealed."
I said nothing, my mind was still realing. From the visions and from the psychic attack on my mind.
"You have broken fate, Alexander Apollion, Second, Fallen Star. Shattered it with your very presence."
My fists clenched. "Fate was already broken. It lead to ruin..."
"Not to him," she said softly. "Not to the one who dwells in the maze between truths. The Changer of Ways feels the wound. He feeds on it. And he is watching you..."
I felt a chill spread across my spine. The Warp stirred again, this time with menace.
She paused, her voice lowering like wind before a storm. "You are not a pawn on the board anymore. You broke the board with your presence. And that makes you a threat to every game the great deceiver has played for a million years."
"And what would you have me do?" I asked, voice tight.
She tilted her head. "Keep walking, the Great Harlequin wishes you to not stop what you are doing, the Great Enemy is angry, but it is also reeling. But walk with light behind your eyes, and a blade ready. The Changer never forgets a piece that moved without his hand."
"I… will take it into consideration…" I finally said.
What else was there to say? When an eldar breaks into your office and tells you to keep going as you are going to deal a blow against the parasites?
Ari… That would have been her fate had I not been as I am…
Finally, she stepped down.
She approached the edge of my desk again. Returned the blade without a word, setting it before me with gentle care.
Then, she looked up into my eyes one last time.
"We came to see," she said. "That is all. But know this, Empress-child: your story is being watched by many players."
I didn't respond. My fingers wrapped slowly around the blade's hilt.
And in a blink, she was gone.
The air stilled.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
"What in the living fuck…" I muttered.