The vessel came down like a blade.
Its shadow swallowed the hive's spires, and the chant of its engines rose louder than prayer. The people of Veythra Prime knelt as one, foreheads pressed to the stone, murmuring words for mercy.
Archimedes stood, scars raw, the bone-keepsake bound against his chest. He watched as the ramp split open, spilling fog and hissing steam. Out came the priests.
They were robed in crimson, their limbs wrought from brass and iron, their faces shrouded in masks of optics and vox-grilles. Mechadendrites writhed from their backs, each tipped with blades, scalpels, syringes. They walked with the certainty of machines, their footsteps beating like a metronome of inevitability.
Binharic bursts crackled through the air, mechanical syllables that made the Furnace itself seem to stutter.
A Magos at their head lifted a scepter bristling with lenses and auspex coils. Its vox-voice rasped across the causeway:
> "We seek those whose flesh holds memory.
We seek vessels of endurance.
The Omnissiah hungers."
The crowd pressed lower. Archimedes did not.
The Magos' optics fixed on him. Scar tissue flared under the Furnace's light, a script carved into his skin. Slowly, the machine-priest approached, mechadendrites curling around him. One ended in a needle, another in a scalpel, a third in a delicate claw that traced the air inches from his burns.
Archimedes did not flinch.
"Endured," the vox rasped. "Preserved. You carried others."
The mechadendrite pressed the flat of a scalpel to Archimedes' shoulder, parting scar tissue with clinical precision. He hissed, but did not recoil.
"What do you see?" the Magos asked, metallic tones devoid of warmth.
Archimedes swallowed. "A burn. Deep. Healed not clean — flesh fused to muscle. He lived. I lived. It remembers."
The Magos tilted its mask. "Memory. In tissue."
Another mechadendrite lowered, offering him a strip of withered flesh cut from a corpse. The crowd gasped. To handle the dead was taboo. To defile them was heresy.
Archimedes took it without hesitation. He turned it in his scarred hands, studying the puckered lines. "Fractures beneath," he murmured. "Not fire. Blunt force. The wound closed in pain. He lived with it, long enough to scar."
Silence fell. Only the hiss of steam and the Furnace's heat filled the air.
The Magos' optics whirred, focusing. Then, with something like reverence, it withdrew the strip of flesh and leaned close.
> "Flesh is archive. Bone is scripture. You will serve."
Skitarii stepped forward and seized Archimedes' arms. The crowd wailed, his father's voice rising among them. For a heartbeat their eyes met — sorrow, pride, fear burning in equal measure.
Then Archimedes was borne into the iron ship, the chanting of the Mechanicus filling his ears. He was tested, measured, judged — and found a vessel worthy not of Helios, but of something greater.
For the first time, Archimedes feared that the stories written in his flesh might not be his to keep.