The interrogation chamber was little more than a steel box cold, windowless, stinking of blood, oil, and sweat. The lumen strips overhead flickered, casting the room in alternating shadows.
The prisoner was bound to a rusted steel chair, wrists cinched so tight that the metal had already cut through skin and muscle to the bone. Blood had pooled beneath his bare feet, congealing into black patches on the grated floor. He'd been sobbing for hours but the fear kept him awake.
Cassian stood directly in front of him, hands clasped behind his back. He hadn't spoken a word yet. His presence alone was suffocating, the unnatural glow of his eyes washing the room in a faint purple hue. He could feel the prisoner's mind shivering, cowering behind a barricade of lies.
Valencia broke the silence, stepping out from the shadows with his gauntleted hands slick with fresh blood. He leaned close enough for the prisoner to smell the copper stink clinging to him.
"Last chance," the Stormtrooper said flatly. "Where is the Inquisitor?"
The man's cracked lips moved, voice barely a whisper. "I—I told you… I don't know."
Valencia slammed a fist into his jaw. The crack echoed like a gunshot, knocking two teeth free. The man spat blood onto the floor, shaking violently against the restraints.
Cassian didn't flinch. "He's lying."
Valencia nodded once and stepped back. "Your turn, then."
Cassian moved closer. He knelt so his eyes were level with the prisoner's. His voice was soft, almost gentle.
"You feel that, don't you? That pounding in your chest. The sweat crawling down your spine. Your body knows something you don't."
The man trembled. "P-please… I told you everything…"
"No," Cassian said, still calm. "You told me nothing."
Then he struck not physically, but with the Warp.
The prisoner's scream was ragged and inhuman as Cassian's mind speared into his. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, turning them a sickening red. Cassian didn't give him time to recover; he plunged deeper, tearing through the man's thoughts like a butcher through flesh.
Memories poured out in a flood. The stink of burning corpses. The chanting of Chaos cultists in the dark. Sacrifices bound and gagged, throats slit one by one to fuel the ritual.
Cassian made him relive every moment, every horror. He forced the man to watch as the Inquisitor was dragged away in chains, beaten until her face was unrecognizable. He made him feel the daemonic presence in the room, the whispers promising salvation if he only obeyed.
The man's body convulsed violently, foam spilling from his mouth as blood ran from his nose and ears.
"Stop! Emperor's mercy, STOP!" he begged, voice cracking.
Cassian leaned closer, pressing his forehead against the man's sweat-slick brow. His voice was a whisper now, dripping with malice.
"Where is she?"
"Third… third sub-basement!" the man sobbed, choking on blood. "Precinct house! They cleared the floor… sealed it off! She's there, Emperor save me!"
Cassian didn't pull back. "Alive?"
"They—they're saving her… for the ritual," the man stammered. His voice dropped to a hysterical whisper. "They need her blood. Said an Inquisitor's important for there plans. Please, please I told you—"
Cassian slammed deeper into his mind, past the surface memories, into the deepest fears and hatreds buried in his soul. He dragged them out one by one the betrayal of his comrades, the ecstasy he'd felt when the first daemon answered his prayers and burned them in front of him.
The man shrieked until his voice tore. His head whipped side to side, muscles snapping and popping as he tried to break free from the invisible vice crushing his thoughts.
"No more! PLEASE!"
Cassian released him just enough for the man to draw a breath. "Who guards her?"
The prisoner's jaw trembled. "K-Kreth… Arbiter Major Kreth. But he's… he's not human anymore. They… rebuilt him. Machine and flesh. He's the Warden now. No one gets past him."
Cassian tilted his head slightly. "We'll see."
He rose slowly, wiping the blood from his face with the back of his glove. He could feel the man's mind collapsing in on itself, a dying sun about to implode.
"Wait!" the man croaked. "I… I told you… everything… you promised—"
"I promised nothing," Cassian said coldly.
He turned away, and the Warp surged one last time. The prisoner let out a final, strangled scream as every nerve in his body ignited at once. Blood geysered from his mouth and eyes, splattering the chair, the floor, the walls. When it was done, he was little more than a twitching husk, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
Valencia stepped forward and wiped his gloves clean on the corpse's torn shirt. "Messy," he said.
Cassian's expression didn't change. "He deserved worse."
"Do you believe him?" Valencia asked.
"Yes," Cassian replied. "He couldn't have lied if he wanted to. I stripped him bare. Third sub basement. Precinct house. Kreth."
Valencia grunted. "Then we've got our target."
Cassian's eyes still burned faintly as he turned and left the cell. Behind him, the blood kept dripping from the chair to the floor, one slow, steady drop at a time.
—-
The survivors were crammed shoulder to shoulder around the central holotable, each officer trying to pretend they had enough personal space to think straight.
Cassian stood toward the back, helmet tucked under his arm, watching as Captain Compel Bast leaned forward across the table, his hands planted on its pitted edge like he might throttle the map flickering there. His armor was battered, scored with shrapnel marks and deep plasma burns, but still kept polished where the Imperial Aquila sat on his chest.
"We can't keep this up," Bast said. His voice was calm, but too calm, the kind that meant he'd already buried the alternative. "Gravenhold's perimeter will collapse by nightfall if we don't act. Every breach they push, we patch it with bodies. I don't have bodies left to patch with."
Admiral Spire, standing opposite him, didn't move. He didn't have to. His presence filled the bunker more than any shouting ever could. Hands clasped behind his back, his expression carved from stone, he listened. The officers around the table avoided looking at him directly.
"Show me the situation," Spire said at last.
Bast jabbed a control rune, and the holomap flickered into sharper relief. The city blocks south of Gravenhold glowed a sickly red, the enemy presence marked like a spreading infection.
"This is what's left of the southern line," Bast said. "Cultist warbands here, here, and here. Mutated shock infantry moving through the old manufactorums. And this" he indicated the dense knot of red in the city's center, "is the Arbiter Precinct. We believe it's their command hub. And where they're holding the Inquisitor."
Murmurs rolled through the room at that.
Cassian didn't say anything. He just stared at the glowing icon of the Precinct, its walls drawn thick in blue. The captured Administratum flunky they'd interrogated had broken quickly. But if his information was true, then Inquisitor was alive, being held right there, in the heart of enemy territory.
Bast seemed to read the silence. "We've confirmed coded transmissions out of the precinct," he continued. "Nothing we can break. But the chatter matches Imperial encryption protocols. It's her. She's alive. And they're using her for something."
Spire shifted slightly. "And what exactly do you think they're using her for?"
Bast hesitated. "We don't know," he admitted. "But if the reports about a ritual are accurate—"
Spire stepped closer to the table. "Then time is not our ally," he said.
One of the Guard lieutenants, a young woman with a stitched scar across her jaw, spoke up, voice tight. "Sir, we can't just storm that precinct. We've already lost almost two thousand in the last day. Half our PDF elements have gone dark. The rest are scattered holdouts. If we concentrate forces for a push, our flanks will be torn open before we get close."
"Correct," Spire said flatly. "A direct assault is suicide."
The Mechanicus representative in the room Magos Cambrius's proxy, a spindly man more cables than flesh let out a static-laced rasp from his vox-grill. "Void shield generators cover the precinct's walls in overlapping fields. Conventional artillery will not penetrate. Orbital lance strike required."
Bast's head snapped toward him. "No," he said, sharp. "The civilian quarter is still full. You lance strike the precinct and you vaporize the corridors we're using to pull people out."
"You think the enemy will spare them?" Spire's voice cut in like a blade. "They will use those corridors as bait and slaughter pens until you're forced to watch it burn from orbit."
The room fell into a brittle silence.
Bast slammed a gauntleted fist down on the edge of the table hard enough to make the holomap stutter. "I know what's at stake!" he snarled. "Don't you dare stand there and lecture me on what I've already buried my men for, Admiral."
For the briefest moment, something flickered in Spire's eyes. Then it was gone, his face the same unreadable mask.
Cassian stepped forward, cutting through the silence. "We don't need a full lance strike," he said evenly. "Just a breach. One hole in the shield grid. Get a small team through, disable the generators from the inside, then you can burn that precinct to the ground once the shields are down."
Every head turned toward him.
Bast's pale eyes locked on Cassian's. "You volunteering?"
"Yes." Cassian didn't hesitate.
Pickos, leaning against a wall near the Stormtrooper officers, snorted. "Of course he is."
Cassian ignored her. "Small footprint, minimal noise until the shields fall. A stormtrooper detachment, myself, Faevelith, and Farron if he's cleared from the Mechanicus lines. We can move faster than a platoon and cut through before they know we're there."
The Magos proxy clicked its vox. "Possible. We can provide a breach charge capable of collapsing one section of wall once the void shielding is compromised. Precision timing essential. Failure would render the strike team trapped."
Cassian didn't blink. "Then we don't fail."
Spire leaned over the map. "Bast, you'll stage a feint along the northern approach. Pull their reserves. As soon as Cassian's team breaches the precinct and drops the shields, I'll lance strike the walls. We annihilate their command center in one blow."
Bast stared at the map for a long moment, jaw flexing. Finally, he nodded. "Fine. But I want every evac corridor open and every civilian we can move off-world before you pull the trigger."
Spire's eyes narrowed. "That delay will cost lives."
"Then I'll live with it," Bast said, voice cold.
Cassian stepped back as the holomap updated with deployment markers, the faint murmur of officers discussing artillery rotations filling the room again. But his focus was already elsewhere, his mind partitioned and running through every possible failure point in the mission.
—-
Word Count: 1820
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