The ceremony was over, but the echoes lingered.
The Arcadia's great hall had emptied, yet its silence carried the voices of thousands. Francis Harlock stood alone for a time, staring at the sealed Writ of Trade beneath the banners of his people. His hand rested on the hilt of the power saber, his crimson eye dim in the candlelight. For a moment, he was only a man — not a Rogue Trader, not a symbol. Just Francis, son of Arcadia.
Then he left the hall.
The ship breathed around him. Bulkheads groaned like tired lungs, deckplates hummed beneath his boots, the faint tang of ozone lingered in the air. He walked the corridors not as captain inspecting his vessel, but as one of its own — moving among the families who had gathered in huddled groups, their whispers heavy with fear and hope.
A child ran past him, laughing, chasing another down a corridor patched with weld-lines and scars from battles past. Their laughter was brittle, as if defying despair itself. Harlock smiled faintly, though it did not reach his eye.
He stopped where the wounded lay in rows. Makeshift cots stretched along the shrine deck, lit by pale lumen-strips. Veterans of the Mechanicus boarding were bandaged, some missing limbs, others too broken to rise. A woman — her arm gone at the elbow — tried to lift her child onto her lap, and Harlock knelt to help her.
"Captain," she whispered.
"Francis," he corrected gently. "Titles don't heal wounds."
Her eyes filled, but she nodded. The child stared at Harlock's patch, then at the faint crimson glow beneath it. He did not flinch.
Harlock rose and moved on.
In the mess decks, he found men and women bent over steaming bowls of thin stew. Some looked up and offered weary nods, others muttered in doubt. He caught fragments of words — "chains," "leash," "freedom." Some feared what the Writ meant. Others feared what it demanded of them.
He did not silence them. He listened, then walked on.
At the lower decks, he paused before the names etched into steel plates — a wall of the fallen. New names had been added after the battle against the Mechanicus. He traced one with his gloved hand, the letters rough beneath his touch. He closed his eye.
His people had survived, but survival was not living. Survival was waiting for the next wound, the next loss, the next grief.
He understood then: the Writ could not save them by itself. It was only paper, only ink. The true weight was on him — and on the ship that bore them all.
As he walked the long corridors back to the bridge, crew stepped aside, bowing their heads. Some whispered blessings, others only watched in silence. To each, Harlock gave a nod, a glance, a word. Not as a myth, not yet. As a man who refused to abandon them.
When he reached the helm, he set his hand on the wheel. The Arcadia hummed beneath his palm, the faintest tremor running through the steel. The ship was alive — wounded, weary, but alive.
"So long as we breathe," Harlock murmured, not to the ship, not to his people, but to himself, "Arcadia endures."