Pain was a constant companion in the days that followed the battle. The Inquisitor was dead, but his strike had left Harlock half-blind, the right side of his face a ruin of charred flesh and blood.
For the first time, Francis Harlock stepped back from the helm. His crew begged him to rest, and for once, he obeyed.
The ship drifted deep into a nebula, cloaked in its own black mist. Repairs were made, wounds were tended. But for Harlock, no balm could restore what had been lost.
The ship's chirurgeons worked in silence. Their tools were old, their supplies meager, but the Harlock vaults carried relics — fragments of tech long hoarded, half-understood. Among them was a replacement eye: a cybernetic orb of brass and glass, its inner core glowing faintly with machine-light.
Harlock sat upon the table, face pale, cloak draped across his shoulders even here. He gave no sound as the drill bit into bone, as wires sank into nerves. The surgeons whispered prayers to the Omnissiah, invoking the Machine Spirit as they worked.
At last, the orb clicked into place. A faint light pulsed behind the brass iris, glowing unnaturally bright in the dim chamber.
The captain raised a hand, touched the fresh scar, and pulled down a black leather patch across the implant.
"It will do," he muttered.
But the Arcadia was not finished.
As he rose from the table, the air grew heavy. A shroud of black mist poured from the walls, slow and silent. It coiled around him, thick and cold, yet not suffocating. The crew staggered back in fear, but Harlock stood still, one hand on his cutlass, the other brushing the patch.
The mist seeped into the seams of the cybernetic eye. The glow behind the patch flared brighter — not mechanical, not of the Mechanicum, but something deeper. Something alien. Something alive.
Harlock staggered, clutching his face as visions tore through him: stars shattering, void-wraiths howling, great engines of fate grinding against the wheel of his ship. He saw the Arcadia not as a vessel of steel, but as a beast of shadow and sorrow, bound to him, feeding him, guiding him.
Then the visions were gone. The mist withdrew.
Harlock breathed hard, pulling the patch tighter over the eye. His voice was quiet, but steady.
"No one speaks of this."
The crew nodded in fearful silence. They did not need to be told twice.
From that day, Harlock's sight was changed. The cybernetic eye beneath the patch was not as other augmetics. At times, it seemed to see through mist and shadow, to pierce lies, to glimpse movement before it came. At other times, it burned with an unnatural glow, visible even through the leather.
The crew whispered that the captain had given an eye to the void, and the void had given him one in return.
Harlock himself said nothing. He simply returned to the helm, his hands steady on the wheel, his one true eye cold as ice, and the other hidden in darkness.
The skull prow grinned wider that day, as though the ship itself knew what it had done.
And the galaxy would learn soon enough: Francis Harlock no longer looked at the stars as other men did.