Part I
One night, beneath the high glass of a palace gallery, Aurelia watched the constellations drift across Terra's sky. Her halo—circling fire that did not burn—kept its patient orbit above her brow, as unassuming as breath.
"Why is Terra lonely?" she asked. "Father wears a crown—a golden laurel. Why does Terra have none?"
Malcador followed her gaze. The old stars had the tired look of lamps that had done their duty. He said little at first; he was careful with answers that might become roads. "Perhaps Terra is lonely," he said at last. "Perhaps that is why we build."
Aurelia took one more look at the night, at the dark between the lights. "Then she should be lonely no more."
When slept, she went inward—to the seam where she simply was—she did not step into the Immaterium as others know it. She walked a quiet, lucid interval between dimensions: not warp, not matter, not webway, but something that touched them all and beyond. She had always thought this was the Warp Malcador warned of, yet it did not wear his hellscape. It stretched like a black lake under starlight, dotted with pools whose surfaces sang, each song a different sound and light of its own. Aurelia soon learned this was different, a place only for her. And she played inside this vast endless space.
Aurelia leaned over a pool and saw what she called stars . They were not stars. They were whole things, slow harmonies of light—rooms within rooms, stacked skies, deep folds where distance forgot itself and time did not matter. Some felt like echoes, some like first mornings, some like paths that never end. She did not know their names; to her, some were stars and others only moving reflections. Names would not have helped. When her fingers skimmed their surface, ripples remembered, and each pool answered in a chord she somehow understood. When she cupped a little of that brightness and found her hands briefly empty, a new star arrived because she wished it so, and then she let that star drift back to the rest.
She was not forcing. She was asking. And the interval where she walked, she enjoyed saying yes.
Daemons and other neverborn could not find her here. They recoiled from her light or slid past as if her presence were glass without friction. Hunger had nothing to hook. Intent had nowhere to cling. This was a place of her own making—built without conscious craft, shaped to her measure—and what was not her could not abide within it, could not even name what it failed to grasp. The thing she was—a constant the warp could not price—bent the rules around her without bargain or blood; within that gentleness the wide pools agreed to be, and universes—whatever lay beyond the word—simply existed because she wished them to.
Even though she still didn't know what those pools contained. Perhaps that was a good thing. She was still a child, with he powers of creation and obliteration on her hands.
Sometimes she sat on the lip of nothing and listened. The pools hummed like choirs tuning before a symphony. Between the notes, there was a silence so honest it felt like kindness. In that kindness, ideas behaved.
She found the pool that held the Milky Way and bent until Terra's thin blue shone within its circle. Around it, the dark yawned like a pause between notes. A thought formed, simple and bright: Give Terra a crown.
She reached not with hands but with willingness. In the long dark well beyond Mars and Luna—past the dust and comets where the system thins and the sunlight grows polite—she guided lonely systems that wandered close to the edge of her notice. She did not drag them. She did not pluck them. She invited. What should have been impossible became simple because she asked kindly and held the shape of harmony in her mind.
Pieces gathered: a cold dwarf sun with two stilled worlds like beads on a wire; the broken remainder of a shepherd star—planets worn to pearls and scattered moons like seeds; a thin yellow sun that wanted company; a quiet red with a ring of ice; a lopsided clutch of rocks and one blue‑white gem that had forgotten a parent star; and, last, an empty orbit she thought would be beautiful if it had a light.
"Here," she said in the place that had no air. She thought of warmth in winter and put a small sun there—no more than a lantern to mark the path. The orbit accepted it as if it had been waiting. Numbers made themselves; the dance found its steps. Things that were dead agreed to be different. Things could agree to glow gently, and allowed other things to grow.
She kept the pattern in mind until it could keep itself. Where gravities argued, she taught them patience. Where paths crossed with too much pride, she suggested courtesy. She did not command. She arranged.
Six systems settled at a respectful distance in the deep black beyond Sol's dust—far from the traffic of Luna and Mars, far from the lanes ships would take when there were fleets enough to need lanes. They arranged themselves into a broad wreath, a laurel of faint lights about the system's distant rim. Each held its place not by force but by consent to a pattern she kept in mind until it could keep itself.
She watched the wreath close—green in idea, gold in meaning—and smiled. Terra would not be lonely now. Nor would Mars. Between them and the new lights, quiet corridors stretched like threads waiting to be woven.
She gave each station a small courtesy. The cold dwarf got companions that warmed by degrees. The broken shepherd received a tidier scattering, its pearls gathered into gentle strands. The thin yellow sun found a twin to talk to across a safe gap. The quiet red wore its ice like a collar that would not chafe. The lopsided clutch learned a slow waltz, so no stone needs bruising another. And the lantern sun—small and content—sat where an absence had been, happy to be useful.
On Terra, instruments old and careful woke to strangeness. A parallax where there had been none. A whisper of gravity in equations that had long ago settled. The Observatoria Palatina reported a hair‑width drift in star charts that had not moved since their engraving. A Sister‑Superior paused mid‑rounds and felt the null of her own aura deepen, then smooth; whatever had tried to reach them found nothing to touch. In a choir vault, the astropaths felt no pain, only a pressure like a hand smoothing a wrinkled page. A Navigator child on Luna blinked and shut her third eye without fear, having seen only the harmless outline of a crown.
Malcador stood on a balcony and let cold air bite his face. New lights where there had been none—six of them, faint as vows. He did not ask how . He would ask what now .
"Terra has a laurel," Aurelia said quietly beside him. "She will not be lonely."
Malcador considered the edges of that kindness. He thought of routes and threats and the long arithmetic of empire. He thought, too, of a child who asked nicely and the universe that said yes. "Then we will learn its uses," he said, "and its dangers. And we will keep it from becoming a shrine."
By dawn, cartographers would argue about nomenclature. The Officio Cartographica proposed provisional designations, the Mechanicum submitted binharic strings, then crossed them out—wary of creed. A memo drafted itself and waited for signatures:
Directive: On the Wreath Beyond Sol
Refer to the six distant systems as the Laurel for the purpose of navigation only.
No cultic appellations. No devotions. No hymns. Chart with care. Speak with care. Do not pray.
Malcador prepared a simpler entry in his private ledger: Six guardian lights, far, faint, consenting. A wreath for a lonely world. He did not call them a weapon. He did not call them a miracle.
Aurelia pressed her palms to the glass and watched the last of the night drain from the sky. "Thank you," she said—to Terra, to the interval, to no one in particular.
The Palace breathed out. Above, a laurel the colour of patience began its slow, invisible work.
By week's end, a remembrancer painted the sky from the Palace gardens and captured, by accident, a seventh fleck of light that had not been there the year before. She titled the canvas Sol in Company . A Custodian bought it and hung it where only sentries rested.
In the shipyards, an architect traced longer arcs on a drafting slate and did not know why the curves pleased him. On Mars, a Magos added a line to a canticle— laurel‑wide, laurel‑wise —and erased it before anyone could memorise the rhyme. In the Scholastia Psykana, a teacher told a class: "This is not precedent. It is context," and then wondered whom he was quoting.
Far out, in the thin dark where light takes its time, a dusting of comets revised their minds and decided to miss what they once intended to meet. Courtesy was contagious when taught well, an Oath Unsaid.
That night, Aurelia ate bread she had helped persuade the ovens to remember warm. She balanced crumbs in a circle on her plate, frowned, and then left two gaps so the ring could breathe. Malcador noticed and said nothing. Not all lessons are spoken.
"Will Terra thank me?" she asked.
"She already did," he said. "You heard it."
Aurelia considered this, then nodded once, solemn as only the playful can be. Her halo turned on its patient axle. Somewhere beyond the heliopause, six small systems kept faith with a pattern a child had offered them, and the dark between stars felt—if only slightly—less like a pause and more like a promise.
Part II
I. The First Brother
It had been years since Aurelia last saw her father; for her, it felt like a handful of afternoons. Time wore different boots around the Princess. When the first of her brothers came to the Palace, he filled the doorway as if the room had been built to his measure.
Horus Lupercal was very tall—near to the Emperor's height—and carried the ease of one used to being the calm in a storm. Gold winked from the trim of Luna‑forged plate; a wolf‑tooth charm ticked once against the gorget and fell still. Kindness sat easily on him, as did command. Surprise, too, when his gaze took in the small figure with the quiet halo.
"You are small, my princess," Horus said, amused without mockery.
Aurelia lifted her chin as if to offer battle, then smiled. "If you carry me, I will be as tall as you."
He laughed—a bright, human sound that made even the Custodians at the arch glance without meaning to—and set her on his shoulder as if that had been the proper place all along. Later, she would decide his smile was a beautiful star; she wished, in the uncomplicated way children make vows, never to see it fall.
They walked the galleries like that—the Lupercal listening more than he spoke. She asked about Cthonia. His gaze flicked to the middle distance, to tunnels that had taught hard words to boys who wanted to see the next sunrise.
"It was a hungry world," he said at last, choosing his steps as he chose his words. "Stone and ash. Many hands, not enough bread. We learned to be useful, or we learned to be gone."
Aurelia heard the absent nouns—the gangs, the cuts, the rites that were knives by other names—and did not press. She asked instead for the version that could be told in daylight. Horus obliged. He made a map of narrow streets with his voice. He told of crews that watched each other's backs and of debts paid in loyalty rather than blood, and of a day he had decided to become someone other boys could follow out of the dark.
"And then what happened?" she asked, eyes alight.
"Then I won the fight," he said, chuckling, "and I came here, to you."
"Will you tell me more stories?"
"As many as you like." He meant it. However full his docket ran—assemblies with his inner council, orders from expeditionary fleets—time was found, a chair was pulled up, and the Princess heard another story. In return, she showed him small tricks the Palace had learned for her: a corridor that returned echoes kindly, a fountain that kept a cup warm in winter, a garden that bowed when she entered and rose when Horus did.
Once, at her insistence, he taught her a Cthonian word that meant we share the danger and the bread. She repeated it until the syllables sat right, then made a vow in that borrowed tongue that he would never have to stand alone. He ruffled her hair with a gauntleted hand and pretended something in his eye needed clearing.
He watched, fond and wary both. There was steel in his regard where duty lived; there was warmth where the child sat on his shoulder and pointed at stars painted on a ceiling that had seen too many oaths. In the ledger of the future, he wrote a private line he never spoke aloud: Keep her far from war.
The princess's energy ran out and found herself sleeping on Horus's arms, and he could only smile.
A Custodian—old, gold, and patient—once asked if the Lupercal required for the princess to be taken to her chambers. "No," Horus said, eyes on the small hands braced against his chest "Let her rest here, for a bit. It reminds me of what we fight to return to." The Custodian inclined his head by half a degree; for him, that was sentiment.
II. The Phoenician's Eye
The next brother was not a storm's calm; he was the gleam that made people tidy their collars. Fulgrim of Chemos—the Phoenician—arrived like a blade that had recently been polished. Beauty clung to him the way gravity clings to worlds. His armour wore the Palatine Aquila like a thesis. He had the look of marble deciding to move.
He set up an easel in a high room where the light behaved, and asked, very softly, if the Princess would sit. She did, and found she could keep so very still when stillness was asked well.
He painted in patient layers. A narrow brush caught the exact curl where shadow recognises cheekbone; a wider one recovered the mute sheen of the halo that gave no heat. He ground Chemosian mineral into his pigments until whites learned to glow and blacks learned the habit of depth. He studied her eyes for a long time.
"Why so long?" Aurelia asked without moving her mouth.
"They change," he murmured. "Not in colour—in intention. It is like painting a sky that thinks."
She asked about Chemos then. He hummed—a note that sounded like he was filing an edge while he spoke. "There is little to recommend it to a child. Mines and foundries. Dust. A ledger that always read 'insufficient' until we taught it a different sum."
"Did you work in the mines?" she asked, tilting her head before she remembered not to.
"Still," he said, gesturing her back into place. A minute went by. He did not look at her when he answered, as if the truth preferred to be spoken to the canvas. "Yes. We all did."
"Father said you rose," she said. "Ranks upon ranks."
That drew out the smile that made his brothers call him arrogant. "Of course I rose," he said, warmth and steel braided in the words. "If a thing can be done well, why should it be done poorly? If I must pull a cart, let it be the straightest cart on the road. If I must lead, let the column learn to love the right angle."
She chuckled. "Dorn called you a peacock."
Fulgrim laughed—genuinely, this once—and shook his head. "Beloved Rogal cannot be bothered to understand sentiment dressed in purple. We agree to disagree."
"What should he understand?" she asked. The brush paused over a bead of light.
"That striving is not vanity," he said. "Vanity is wanting eyes. Striving is wanting the truth. People can be better than they are. Not because I say so—because it is within them like breath."
"For you, perfection is the work of living," she said.
He stopped painting then, and in the hush the Palace made for rare moments, he allowed himself a small, unguarded smile—neither smug nor staged. "Perfection is not a throne to sit on," he said. "It is the road itself. If there is any meaning, it is in taking the next right step."
"Can everyone do that?" she asked. "Can I?"
"Only if you work," he said, and the corner of his mouth remembered arrogance just enough to be charming.
"I am proud of you," she said after a while—of Chemos turned from famine to industry; of statues that made stone confess its grace; of a legion that learned to wear excellence like a uniform.
The brush hung in the air. For the breadth of a heartbeat, the Phoenician hid behind the canvas. When he looked around it, his voice had resumed its polish. "Do not move," he said, the way a man says thank you when thanks would be too bare.
She apologised. He pretended not to hear, and painted the apology where the light gathers at the corner of an eye.
He spoke again, quieter. "A brother of iron taught me to make metal remember its first fire," he said, not naming Ferrus but tasting the friendship in the admission. "You will meet him. He will see you clearly. He always sees clearly—even when it hurts."
"Does perfection hurt?" she asked.
"It costs," he said. "That is not the same." And he set a final stroke that turned pigment into presence.
When the sitting ended, he packed his brushes with ritual neatness. "Another tomorrow," he said.
"Until the line admits it is right," she echoed, and he inclined his head as if saluted by an equal.
III. The Knight in the Garden
Lion El'Jonson came to Terra with the hush of a drawn blade. He bowed correctly to the Letters Patent, to Malcador, to the Ten Thousand—yet the bow never reached his eyes. Noble, dutiful, and every inch the knight the Order of Caliban had forged, he walked the Palace like a man indoors only by necessity. Silence suited him. So did distance.
Aurelia tried distance at first, out of courtesy. Then she tried nearness, out of patience. The Lion answered both with the same measured respect: chivalric, exact—and guarded as a keep at midnight. Rank did not dazzle him; it only reminded him to mind the forms. She saw the mistrust plain in him, not the sneer of contempt but the cold habit of survival—a man who planned for the worst because the worst had been reliable company.
"Walk with me," she asked, when duty did not pull him away. She did not push. They took the paths of her gardens, where the air remembered rain and the fountains remembered warmth. He named trees in the old Calibanite tongue—the thorn‑oak, the moon‑yew—then fell quiet, as if guilty of saying too much.
Under leaves, he relaxed by degrees that only a patient eye could tally. He watched the careful beauty she had taught to hedges and water, and some knot within him loosened at the evidence of an order without cruelty. When a Sister of Silence ghosted past, her null‑aura brushing the borders of perception, he inclined his head with a soldier's acknowledgement; distrust he reserved for lies, not for disciplines honestly worn.
Once, at a fork in the path, she chose the shaded way and he the sunlit; both stopped at the same instant and stepped to meet in the middle without a word. Precision recognised precision.
Aurelia spoke softly of grass and light; the Lion answered, when he answered, with hunts and maps. Caliban had not fit around him even when he had mastered it. The beasts that haunted its forests taught him how to fight and how to think; the Order taught him how to lead men who did not always wish to be led. He had known victory more often than not and belonging almost never.
"Not even among your own?" she asked.
"Especially among my own," he said, after a pause long enough to count the veins in a leaf. "A leader stands a pace aside. It is the cost of seeing where the next step must fall."
"You do not need to fit here," she said at last. "You are my brother. That is enough."
His glance weighed the sentiment for traps and found none. A breath later, he offered one of his own.
"I should remember," he said, voice level as a file across steel, "not to plan the hunt you deserve if ever you betrayed the Imperium."
She stopped, startled—and then laughter took her like the sun takes frost. At last, she had found the seam of his humour: dry as Caliban dust and twice as stubborn. "I will remove you from my dead list, then," she said gravely, "and a dozen private schemes."
His eyes widened the smallest measure; the corner of his mouth considered movement and then declined. "As you wish," he said. It sounded like a report on enemy dispositions. She liked him for trying.
They sat a moment on a low wall. He described a forest path that looked safe and was not; she described a corridor that had learned to give back echoes kindly. He listened with the care of a hunter learning a new terrain.
They made a compact. "Keep an eye on me, if you must," she told him. "But walk when I ask, when duty allows. You may bring your suspicions; I will bring the path."
"I cannot promise as often as you will ask," he said. The Great Crusade ate hours and worlds with the same appetite. "But I can step out of the hunt long enough to remember why we hunt."
"Good," she said, and took his hand. They finished the circuit without a word, and he did not let go.
Later, a Custodian observed—only to his own memory—that the Primarch of the I Legion never once stepped on the white line Aurelia had painted into the flagstones to teach young gardeners where not to scuff. The observation pleased him. Precision understood precision. On another day, a courier from the Hexagrammaton delivered sealed orders; the Lion read them without breaking stride, folded them away, and still made time to walk the long way round so the Princess could finish telling a story about a tree that preferred the sound of water.
When duty finally called him outward, he left a phrase behind, placed like a marker stone: "If I do not come, assume I am hunting where the light is sparse." She nodded as if this were the most ordinary of courtesies.
IV. The Avenging Son at Work
Roboute Guilliman arrived like a plan written in the air. He was strict in purpose but generous in method; the order he carried was never bruised by design. The Palace learned its cadence quickly: consultation, draft, amend; examine logistics until they confess their weakness; leave behind a system that will run without supervision and then supervise it anyway.
Aurelia, expecting stone, found a man. He gave the Princess both space and attention, measuring her not against an ideal but against her need.
She sat beside him once and did not speak. Paper moved; ink dried; a scribe's hand cramped and was replaced. When the quiet had become companionable, she asked about his world.
"Macragge," he said, and something in his face softened. "Mountains that teach patience. Towns that prefer straight streets. A people not easily fooled." Names followed, worn smooth by love and time. "Konor," his father's duty was his inheritance. "Tarasha Euten," his mother—wisdom as discipline, kindness as rule.
The Princess listened with bright eyes. She had grown inside a miracle of stone and oath, and outside it in a place that was not a place at all. Macragge, spoken simply, was a revelation: bread that rose because time and heat agreed, winters that only asked for wood and forethought, a civil war ended by planning and the refusal to hate efficiently.
"Why do you work so much?" she asked at last, not unkindly.
"Because work is how care behaves in public," he said. "And because poor logistics have killed more dreams than enemies have."
He told her of a charter city that learned to keep records the same way it kept its promises; of a levy that replaced debt with duty; of a road cut straighter, not for the glory of the stone‑cutters but so that grain might arrive before the weak grew weaker. He spoke without boast; the numbers were their own argument.
"If I help," she said, "will your quill be less heavy?"
"You do not need to," he answered. "I am able."
"Malcador teaches me," she said, "to carry weights I would rather never carry. If the day comes, I want to know how."
He looked at her then with the same careful appraisal he gave a treaty: test the structure, trust the intent. "If that day comes," he said, "I hope to be there to help you carry it. As you are offering to help me carry this."
They worked. Her small hand laid out correspondence in stacks that made intuitive sense; his large one signed with an economy that respected every stroke. Between notes, he told her how a supply train can be a kindness if it arrives on time and how a census can be a mercy if it is honest. He made room at the edge of the desk for her ledger. She copied figures with the same care she used when arranging stars.
In the margin of one report, she wrote, make corridors echo kindly. He did not comment on the oddity; he only underlined the line that mattered and moved on. Later, he would ask the palace engineers why the acoustics had improved, and they would say nothing had changed, and he would let the answer be what it was.
When a courier brought drafts from the Administratum, he slid one across to her. "Spot the failure," he said. She read, frowned, and tapped a line where a thousand men were presumed to march as if none would fall ill. He nodded once. "Good. Correct numbers are a kind of mercy."
Aurelia had been wary of interrupting him. She discovered instead a brother who rationed himself the way he rationed ink: precisely, leaving enough over for kindness. He was careful because he knew little of her—Princess, Heir to Our Work, not primarch, not ordinary—but caution was not distance. He remembered to look up when she spoke. He remembered to ask, after an hour, "Are you bored?" as if boredom were an avoidable cruelty.
She asked whether everyone could be brought to their best.
"Not brought," he said. "Built. Supported. Expected to rise, and helped when they fall."
"And me?"
"You will be as you choose and as we prepare you to be," he said. "Both are true, and that is not a contradiction."
She smiled. "I would like to make your quill lighter again tomorrow."
"Then tomorrow I will keep a place clear," he said. It sounded like an edict and felt like a promise.
He surprised her once by asking for a story that did not come from a ledger. She told him about a night on a balcony when Terra learned to wear a laurel of faint lights. He said nothing for a long time, then, softly: "Next time, write down how you did it." She promised and did not.
Between their visits, the Palace kept its own counsel. The Lion's footfalls moved like a patrol through leaf‑shadow, each step a hypothesis tested; Guilliman's presence thinned the clutter of rooms, leaving behind a clean hum of purpose. The Custodes adjusted nothing and adjusted everything; the Silent Sisterhood found the spaces between these great selves and made those spaces hospitable.
Aurelia learned her brothers differently. One was a watch kept for love; the other a ledger balanced for mercy. Both, in their ways, made the world less lonely. She took their hands when she could—one gauntleted in doubt, one gloved in purpose—and walked the gardens they did not know how much they needed.
On a rain‑clean morning, she found the Lion practising forms with a blade that caught no light. His cuts measured the air; his guards measured himself. She watched until he finished and then offered a cup of tea that had remembered warmth. He drank without comment, which was his version of thanks. That afternoon, she watched Guilliman turn a pile of contradictions into a policy that even its enemies would obey; when he finished, she left a single crumb of sweetbread on the corner of his desk like a seal. He did not eat it; he preserved it to remind himself that work had borders.
In Malcador's book, where no ink dried: The Lion—paranoia as prudence; social grace approximated by will; he learns by watching and by walking. The Lord of Ultramar—order as charity; remembers to be kind; his logistics are ethics in motion. The girl plants peace in hard soil; sometimes it grows, sometimes it waits for rain. He closed the book gently, mindful that some balances must be kept by hand.
V. The Angel in the Orchard
Sanguinius came like dawn through stained glass—light made patient. Wings folded close, he bent to the formalities with an ease that made ceremony feel like courtesy rather than weight. There was no strain in his kindness; it was how he moved through rooms. Men who had forgotten how to breathe remembered.
Aurelia led him to her gardens. What had begun as cloisters of bloom had grown into orchards and water‑steps, kitchen beds and trellised shade. She spoke of strawberries—a word Malcador had read from poems older than most nations—and of fruits Terra might have forgotten. She had asked for seeds in the quiet place between names, and when she returned, her hands were full. Now vines climbed willing walls, espaliered pears learned obedience without misery, and small, hopeful plots made the air smell like a future.
The Angel of Baal walked there with the reverence he gave to chapels before battle. He did not ask how the grapes learned the trick of sweetness, or how the apple trees had found old memories in young wood. The Princess reached, and an apple came away as if the tree had been waiting to give it. She pressed it into his hand.
"For you, dear brother," she said. "Something to take when duty pulls you far."
He tasted and smiled—human, uncomplicated. For a heartbeat, the visions that crowded him stood back and let the present have the floor. Behind him, a single warrior of the Sanguinary Guard in auric plate waited at a respectful distance; even his gilded wings seemed to lower in approval.
He told her, in a tone that made dust sound beautiful, of Baal's red salt flats and the metal‑bright sky of its moons, of people who had learned generosity because anything else wasted time. She answered with the language of soil and water, of how patience could be taught to fountains and discipline to ivy. Their vocabularies met in the middle and shook hands.
Sanguinius did not mind her mischief. He matched it with an older brother's grace: careful where the Custodes stood, bold where laughter would not bruise a vow. They counted koi in a rill like two conspirators; they paced the water‑stairs until her halo lit the spray; they sat under vines and spoke of nothing with the intensity usually saved for strategy.
Remembrancers drifted at the edges of those afternoons like moths near lamps. The Angel let them sketch; he had a talent for making art an ally. Aurelia plucked a strawberry, new to Terra again, and placed it on a slate as if adding a small red comet to a map. The painter's hand remembered joy.
She teased him gently about Dorn. "He would ring a garden in stone until even the sun needs a gate," she said.
"He means well," Sanguinius answered, amused. "He builds because he loves. Tact is a tool he keeps for special occasions."
"I will always trust his walls," she said, "but life needs light and space to wander. Too much wall and you forget how to grow."
He looked at the green and thought: She is telling me something about herself. Peace here; war everywhere else. Soil and patience in a palace that had learned the grammar of oaths. He reached and steadied a trellis that did not need steadying and left his hand there for a moment longer than required.
"Does foresight hurt you?" she asked at last. "When you decide, does it feel like weight?"
"It is a tool," he said after a measured silence. "Like a knife. Useful, honest—and capable of killing the hand that holds it."
"It is a burden," she said, not as a protest but as a diagnosis.
He tilted his head. "Can you see as I do?"
She considered her garden, then him. "I could open every door at once," she said. "I could know the whole and wear it like armour—but it would hollow me. If I chose to be all‑seeing, I would be less than I am. I'd miss the weight of this apple, the sound of this water, your hand on this rail. So I keep the doors closed if not, small, and I stay here—now."
Sanguinius heard what she did not say and was quiet with it. A truth larger than any augury had been set down softly between fruit trees. He took her hand.
"The present matters more than any future," she said, and the knife that had always been in his grasp felt—if only for a breath—less eager to cut. The Guard at his back shifted his weight as if some standing order had been briefly rescinded: for this hour, stand and be untroubled.
They walked on, willing to let tomorrow find them when it had the manners to arrive. When they parted, he left behind a white flight‑feather caught in a vine. She did not move it. Some blessings should be allowed to look like accidents.
VI. The Stone Who Loves
Rogal Dorn did not so much arrive as take his place, like a cornerstone settling. Praetorian of Terra, Lord of the VII, master of redoubt and bastion, he carried duty the way other men carry bones. His loyalty to the Emperor was unbending; to the Princess, it was transitive, immediate, and—if she was honest—a little terrifying.
He stood beside her with the grave respect he would grant a sovereign on a wall walk. "The Palace requires further structuring," he said without preamble. "Lines of fire clarified. Choke points revised. Additional sally ports. And the gardens—"
"—should be protected," she finished, already tense. "But not turned into a prison."
Dorn's face did not change. "Would you consent to a wall around them?"
"No," she said at once, nearly pouting. "They are well guarded. Vines need sun. Fountains need wind."
"A small wall would protect them better."
Silence lengthened. The air acquired edges. Then he said, simply: "It is a beautiful garden. I wish to keep it protected."
She exhaled. Now she understood. This was his language for care. "Show me your designs," she said. "We will find a way."
He unrolled plans on a stone bench. They were exact to the millimetre: curtain walls, angled bastions, covered ways, ditches and glacis, caponiers and ravelins set to deny approach; the calculus of arcs and machicolations and interlocking fields of fire. She pointed, asked, and amended. He listened, amended back.
"Not walls that keep people in," she said. "Walls that keep danger out. And here—windows. Doors. Light."
"Windows are a weakness," he said, reflexively. Then, almost immediately: "Unless they are apertures that force the enemy into the geometry we prefer." A gauntlet tapped a square that became a lens and then a gallery with a view.
They worked until the plan breathed. The garden's perimeters learned to be hospitable without being naive. Sally ports became doors with honest hinges. Redoubts masked as pavilions. A hedge concealed a firing lane without forgetting it was a hedge. He added an exit that no one would ever find on a first look; she added a bench where even a wary man might sit. He marked three gates on the master map by old names the Palace already knew how to hear, minitures for the garden: a Lion's Gate for the northern approach, a Saturnine Gate for the sun‑ward edge, and a modest Eternity Door that opened only inward, for those who lived here.
"My dear Dorn," she said at last, smiling, "I will never feel trapped by your walls."
"Good," he said. "They were not drawn to hold you."
Afterwards, Dorn sent orders to the Phalanx to reposition orbital plates by fractional degrees that would mean everything later. He assigned a cadre of Huscarls to the garden paths with instructions that sounded like prayers: stand, see, do not intrude. The Imperial Palace woke to the quiet arithmetic of new strength. In the works yards, builders learned a new habit: to leave a view where a parapet might have been, and to make the parapet kinder when it could not be spared.
Sanguinius returned in the evening, an apple core in his hand and dust on his boots. He looked at the revised paths and laughed, delighted. "He has found a way to build a wall that lets the sun in," he said.
"Windows and doors," Aurelia answered. "And benches."
"Benches," he echoed, as if the word were a tactic. A moment later, he sat on one like a man testing a bridge and nodded, satisfied. "It will hold."
In Malcador's book, where no ink dried: Sanguinius—compassion weaponised as courage; foresight borne lightly when the child holds his hand. Dorn—love that builds in stone; will to protect sharpened by listening. Beneath that, smaller: The gardens have windows now. That matters more than it seems. He added one more, almost a whisper of ink: A feather in the vine; a bench by a wall. These are policies, too.