I. Lorgar — A Chapel Without Altars
The room had once been consecrated—stone apse, broken rail, sunlight falling like patient dust. Not a child anymore, Aurelia set no candles. She brought chairs and books and the stubborn warmth of bread. When Lorgar entered, habit made his shoulders bow. There was reverence in him even when there was nothing to revere; he carried liturgy the way other men carry ribs.
"Will you sit?" she asked, indicating the pew. "Let us deconsecrate by conversation."
His eyes were heavy with a hundred hymns. In his hands, scripture had always been a weapon or a wound. "Some rooms ask to be knelt in," he said.
"Then let us teach this one to stand in." She opened a book not of litany but of history. "If a species is a cathedral, what sermon remains when statues step down to work?"
"A speech," he said, almost smiling. "A sermon without a god is merely a speech."
"Only if the listeners expect incense," she said. "What if they expect work ? Discipline without an idol can still be devotion. Aim it at humanity and see what lights."
They read. They ate bread without blessing it. She asked which virtue he trusted when no one watched. He answered: obedience. She asked what obedience becomes without love. He did not answer quickly. The silence learned to be honest.
"Stay with me," she said at last, voice simple as the crust between them. "No praying. No kneeling. Just a brother and a sister in peace—reading, thinking, believing in nothing we do not make with our own hands and hours."
Lorgar's fingers closed over the book's spine as if testing a new grip. "To be only Lorgar," he murmured, half to himself.
"To be only Lorgar," she echoed, and set a page between them—not as scripture but as a story they could share.
He left with the ache of envy under his ribs and the odd comfort of being accepted without an altar. Outside, a Remembrancer thought she saw the Primarch of the XVII wipe dust from a pew as one might touch a relic. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he only taught his hands a smaller prayer.
II. Magnus — Doors You Choose Not to Open
They met under vaults where stasis kept libraries young. Sigils dreamed in the margins; inks remembered heat. Magnus's eye brightened at every locked case; his hands were careful, his curiosity not.
"Wisdom is a key," he said, resting fingers near a warded clasp.
"Keys are honest tools," Aurelia agreed. "But too many doors open and a house stops being a home."
"You could open them all," he said quietly. His voice thinned, almost reverent. "You could be the house, the doors, and the keys—perhaps the road that leads to it as well. Do you know what you are?"
She did not look away. "I am your sister," she said, and the truth of it steadied her. "I do not yet know what else I am—but for now, that is enough. For you, and for me."
Magnus's eye softened. "Forgive me," he said, voice low and warm. "Awe made me clumsy. Sister… I would not press you into a name."
"I could," she said after a few seconds. "I could drink the sea and call it knowledge, and never thirst again—and never taste water either. If I chose to be all‑seeing, I would be less than I am. I'd miss the sound of this page, your breath when you hesitate, the way ink remembers heat. If I became everything, I would lose your teachings as teachings—a student without a teacher, wisdom without hands. I would rather keep a little not‑knowing so I can learn from you, ask you questions, and give the hours a way to be with you. So I keep the doors small and stay here—now."
He watched her as a scholar watches the one pupil who outpaces the lesson—brightest not for knowing everything, but for knowing when not to know. Pride rose first, clean and honest; a thin thread of envy followed and did not bite, wrapped quickly in respect. In his own fashion, as much as a man married to knowledge can love anything, he loved her: fiercely, thoughtfully, from a gentleness that meant no harm.
He sensed in her an everything she did not name—perhaps did not fully know—and the wisdom to refuse drowning in its tide. Magnus bowed his head, not in surrender but in acknowledgement. He reached to close the warded clasp he had almost opened and left a fresh quill by her ledger—his way of promising to teach again tomorrow. He would not always keep his own restraint. He would remember that someone had.
III. Leman Russ — The Little Jarl of Truces
Behind a mess hall, the Wolves drilled until the air steamed. Breath came in white banners; oaths turned to mist and vanished. Aurelia watched, counted wrong on purpose, and a hundred Astartes learned that mercy could be disguised as mathematics. Russ's eyes narrowed at the soft‑stepped count—kindness, to him, looked like a thin place in the hide, a softness storms tear first. She met his look without flinching. "Kindness is not weakness," she said, calm as snow. "It is bravery that refuses to turn cruel. Strength can wear gentleness and still be strength; peace is what courage looks like when it has nothing left to prove."
Russ barked a laugh, then stalked over. "Kindness is not a tactic," he said, testing her, eyes crinkled like ice breaking.
"It is," she said. "A pack runs farther when you let lungs be lungs."
They sparred without touching. She never swung; she knew when to stop. He heard an authority that asked for nothing in return. When Russ's voice lifted—a winter‑bark that made recruits straighten—the Custodes along the yard's edge went very still, hands settling to spear‑shafts. In the Imperium, the line ran simple: the Emperor, then His daughter; to raise a voice at her was to brush against Him. Aurelia's calm held. She poured mjød for the sergeants and called it a cool‑down ; Russ pretended not to approve and drank anyway, and the Ten Thousand eased by half a breath. One Huscarl let his gaze meet the Wolf‑King's—no challenge, only the iron of order. Russ dipped his chin the breadth of a blade. The Huscarl returned to his watch.
Russ let the silence hang a beat longer and flashed a wolfish grin toward the gold line. "Easy, gilded ones—will you spear a man for being loud?" he drawled. The Custodes did not reply; they never needed to. Grips tightened a fraction on hafts, shield rims settled to stone, and their stance became the shape of displeasure. That was answer enough; Russ huffed—half laugh, half respect—and turned back to the drill.
At dusk, he called her little jarl of truces and pretended not to be pleased with the title he had coined. Later, when a drillmaster shortened a punishment by exactly her miscount, Russ pretended not to notice he was learning. That evening, as the yard cooled, he found her by the water‑steps.
"Do not let them make a weakness of your kindness," he said, voice low. "The wide world will take and take."
She touched his cheek with two fingers. "I need not bear wolf fangs," she answered. "I have yours."
Russ's laugh was warm and rough; he bent to kiss her brow. "Then be as you are, little pup," he said—affection without apology—and the night kept the vow.
IV. Mortarion — Air You Can Finally Breathe
At dawn, the orchard held a new honesty. The Sisters' nulls were distant; the wards low and wide. Mortarion stood in the clean light like a man waiting to be judged. He had learned to distrust power that touches minds; Barbarus had taught him to breathe other men's poison.
"Breathe," Aurelia said. "Only that."
He did, and the air did not take anything from him. Not strength, not anger, not will. Whatever unseen craft had prepared the morning, it only returned what poison had kept. "If power can make miasma fade," she asked, "must we hate the hand that wields it?"
He did not answer. But later, on a wall walk, a Custodian watched the Lord of the Death Guard unfasten a rebreather seal and close his eyes as if remembering the word clean. He refastened it with a click that sounded almost like gratitude.
Mortarion broke the quiet first. He found, to his irritation and relief, that in her company the air in his chest settled; around her, the itch of old poisons retreated. This stretch of wall had become the place he could breathe and speak plainly. "You are the heir," he said. "A psyker who says she is not. How am I to trust you will not become what I was born to kill? Kindness blinds. Empires that mean well still crush what lives beneath them."
Aurelia did not flinch. "If that day ever comes," she said, "I want you present. Show me the hurt my rule makes. Name it so I cannot look away—and act as you must."
The rebreather hung from his fingers for a long breath. "I will hold you to that," he said at last.
"Good," she answered. "So will I."
The Custodian, still as the merlons, wrote none of it in any book, but remembered the click when Mortarion resealed his mask: not gratitude now, something sterner—consent.
V. Vulkan — The Kindness of Makers
The forge annexe sweated and sang. Flames breathed; anvils remembered thunder. Aurelia ruined a brass hinge ten times; on the eleventh, the metal buckled, and so did her composure. Frustration flushed her cheeks, tears brightened her lashes, and she murmured an apology to her brother for being unfit for his craft. Vulkan only shook his head, all patience. He touched his brow to hers, then kissed her forehead with the unhurried love of an elder brother. "Again," he said, guiding her hands. He showed her how to ruin it safely, then how not to ruin it at all—heat even, pressure honest, breath steady until the temper's colours walked true.
"If a thing keeps a door true," he said, "it is more beautiful than any carving that fails."
"Then I am not a tool," she said, smiling.
"No," he said, as if that settled an argument never spoken. "But you may choose to be useful." He guided her wrist until the temper colours walked the line from straw to peacock and stopped shy of brittleness. He left her a tempering schedule written like a blessing, and a small scar on his thumb from catching her work before it fell. He refused to heal it. "Makers keep their lessons."
She looked at the hinge cooling in its cradle and let out a breath. "I wish I were as talented as you," she admitted softly. "And as strong as you are when war looks back."
Vulkan's smile was the warmth of a forge without flames. "You are strong," he said. "Your kindness is a sword; your compassion, a shield. Do not forget to use them—especially for those who have never known such love."
Her smile brightened, unguarded. "Will you be there if I fall?"
"I will be there before you fall," he answered, touching her brow again. "To catch you."
VI. Ferrus Manus — When Perfection Isn't Pretty
A bench of patterns: good parts, bad parts, and a few that were both. Ferrus weighed them with the same mercy he gave ore. Living metal shone on his forearms; the light off his hands looked like thought. He chased tolerances like prayers—edges trued to a hair, faces stoned until they forgot their casting. She, for her part, kept reaching past good toward more —not to gild, but to find the lesson that waits at the thin line where failure teaches.
"Ornament lies," he grunted, holding up a gilded failure.
"Beauty can teach when it serves truth," she countered, and produced a piece that was ugly and perfect.
He laughed—a bright crack of sound seldom heard—and asked to keep it. "To be reminded that sometimes ugly is exactly right." He did not smile often. He did now. Then he fixed her with a foreman's straight look. "Tell me, Princess: what jewel does an heir truly need—to prove worth, and to make you smile?"
"None," she said. "Only my brother's arms. That is enough to make me happy."
Ferrus's mouth softened. He set to work anyway: from cable and adamant links, from a shaving of living metal that answered his hands, he made her a necklace—spare and beautiful by function—and set it at her neck. She, not to be outdone in making, pressed into his palm a small stone she had formed in the quiet beyond: pretty fragments folded together until they kept her warmth. Ferrus slipped it into the hidden pocket at his gorget and carried it with him thereafter, even in the end.
VII. Perturabo — Windows That Don't Get You Killed
Plans covered the terrace. Figures coiled like springs; pencil lines made arguments sharper than blades. Perturabo kept himself a degree apart—as if closeness were a siege ladder left against his walls. Feeling lingered in him like furnace heat: anger banked, pride deep‑rooted, a hard egotism that refused to rust. Yet some strand in him wished to be seen by her—seen as more than what he had become, or what his father had made of him.
"Windows are liabilities," Perturabo said without looking up.
"Unless they're calibrated traps that also let light in," Aurelia answered, sketching a bench inside a killing field.
He regarded the drawing until irritation softened into interest. "A niche that looks like hospitality and is in fact a refusal." He added a note: light preferred; murder optional. It might have been a joke. It might have been a new doctrine.
"You are more than other people make you," she said, not unkindly. "More than walls and defences, more than orders—even more than what our father has set his hand to. But that only becomes true when you wish to be more."
He did not reply. The pencil halted, then moved again with exactness that looked like fear disguised as control. The words were too close to others he had heard long ago from a sister named Calliphone, and that frightened him. He drew a counterscarp that doubled as a promenade and, not quite smiling, conceded a view.
VIII. Konrad Curze — Where Light Refuses Fear
Night had teeth that evening. Aurelia walked without guards because fear hates witnesses. Curze arrived the way nightmares do: already there. Cloak like a cut from shadow; eyes like distance.
"You are a child in a city of knives," he said. His voice made mercy sound like a mistake.
"Only if I agree to bleed," she said. "What would you have been if someone had loved you before you broke?"
He tried to make her see him as he named himself—a monster that chose necessity for the greater good. He listed the ledger of terror he called mercy and the future he swore only fear could buy. She did not move. She was not afraid—never—and she refused the lesson. "Ruling by fear is a tax the innocent pay," she said. "I will not collect it."
They stood on either side of a chasm made of belief. He could not drag her to his edge, nor could she pretend his edge was not there. That was what unsettled him: she would not despise him, would not accept him, and still would not flee.
"Rest," she said at last, sitting on the step. Her halo dimmed to a hush. After a long moment that felt like a wound choosing whether to close, Curze lowered himself beside her, then—impossibly—let his head find her lap. Nightmares circled and found no purchase. For once, there was no vision, no sentence, no scream. There was simply nothing.
For the first time in a long time, Night Haunter did not know what to do with a question—or with peace. He left the way he came—like a decision unmade. Later, in a different dark, he would remember the tone of her voice and hate it for being gentle, and fear the ease with which she had given him sleep. A roof tile, forgotten by any report, bore the imprint of his pause.
IX. Jaghatai Khan — The Roads of Freedom
Out past the last gate, hawks drew fine lines on a blue page. The Khan rode like a sentence that refused needless words. His laughter came quickly and left no wounds.
"Duty is a road," he said. "Freedom is the steppe."
"What if the road returns home by choice?" she asked, and traced a route that wandered and still arrived. "I would never tie you down," she added, voice light as reins on a good horse. "Your freedom makes me happy. Only… when the winds are kind, come home and visit me."
He laughed—fast, delighted. "Ask, and I will always return," Jaghatai said. "Always."
She smiled. "Then ride with me now—through the palace streets. Let's make the Custodes run after us."
He threw back his head and laughed loud and true. "Let us see if gold can keep up with wind." Before he left, he offered her a horse‑name in his language—a gift that means you belong where wind belongs. When she spoke it, the air took notice and made room, and the two of them were already a blur along the inner avenues while the Custodes gave dignified chase.
X. Corax — Justice That Doesn't Need an Audience
They spoke in a colonnade where whispers travel like arrows. Corax carried quietly like a tool. His shadow looked like it knew what it was doing.
"Vengeance remembers itself too loudly," she said. "Restoration doesn't need an audience."
He studied her for what she was—young, yes, and still a person who chose to be soft where others chose to harden. Kindness, in her hands, was a dagger that cut both ways, and she would rather turn the edge toward herself than let an innocent bleed.
"Tell me," Corax said after a time, voice low. "If you take the pain so others don't drown in it… Do you think that is enough?"
"I don't know," she answered, honest as the light between pillars. "But if you are hurting, I will take it from you—even if I must lift it out of you and bear it myself. I won't watch you be swallowed by pain, or hatred, or thirst for revenge."
He did not reply. Silence suited him, and it held.
"Some victories deserve to be forgotten," he said at last, almost to himself. Later, when he took apart a network of cruelty without a speech or a banner, he remembered her words—and remembered to set the blade down when the reckoning was done, especially when the wounds were his sisters'. He thought of a garden bench that asked nothing of him but that he sit for a minute and not count enemies. He sat. He did not count.
XI. Alpharius (and Someone Else) — The Riddle That Hugs Back
Two men arrived with one smile between them. One said he was Alpharius. The other also said he was Alpharius. It was, in their way, true. A hydra pin was visible, then was not.
"You want me to prove I know you," Aurelia said. "I choose to know you later and like you now."
"Unwise," said Alpharius. "Trust is a weapon when aimed poorly."
"Then I will aim it at today," she said.
She looked from one to the other. "I am the one who welcomes you as you are," she added, voice even. "You do not have to be more to me—and I will not be someone else for you." The pause that followed was not victory; it was thought. A small, identical tell flickered in the same heartbeat: both men adjusted a cuff and set a foot half a pace back, the mirror of a decision neither would name. The hydra pin flashed once and vanished. She noticed; she always would.
She smiled—almost conspiratorial. "If you ever want something from me," she said, "I prefer mischief to masks. Aim it at Roboute or Dorn, if you like. Help me choose a prank." Both men smiled—identical, reluctant, amused—and in the same heartbeat decided that sometimes mischief was a good way to practice.
They left unsettled, the rare hunters whose net did not tighten. In a crowded market, a week later, three respectable citizens separately decided against a plot for no reason they could quite name. Somewhere, a coin landed on its edge and stayed there, and a quieter knowledge remained with them: she would always know.
XII. Angron — A Quiet Minute Without the Nails
A chapel of silence, Sisters nearby. The Butcher's Nails were not silent; they never were. But Aurelia's presence made the storm stumble. The smell of oil and iron receded enough to hear heartbeats.
"If a blade can sleep," she said, "so can a man."
"I am not a man," he snarled. But he sat. For the breadth of a dozen heartbeats, the Nails dulled. His hands shook as if remembering a weight they had once set down.
"I hate what Father made of you," she said then, voice low. "If I had stood on Nuceria, I would not have left your brothers to die. I would have stood with you."
"You are the Heiress," Angron answered, harsh and uncertain. "Daughter of the Emperor. I am his son. I do not believe you."
"Then believe this," she said. "I hate what they made of you—the masters, the Nails, and our father's choice. If ever my rule asks you to be less than a man, refuse me. If I become what you were born to kill, stop me."
Something inside him flinched, and the Nails stuttered like a storm losing breath. "You make me weak," he growled.
"No," she said. "I make you see."
When he rose, rage returned, furious at the theft—and jealous that she could make it go. He left a dent in the door by accident. A Sister touched it once on her rounds, the way some touch holy things. Later, in her gardens, she planted a flower for each of his fallen brothers and wept—not only for them, but for him. Angron hated that he resented her for it, and hated worse the truth that, of all the Imperium, only she had ever wept for him.
XIII. What They Knew (and Feared)
They left those rooms changed in ways their legions could not count. None of it made for a victory tally. All of it made for leaders who remembered what the tally was for. The loyal felt hope sharpen. The soon‑to‑fall felt envy wear a human face and loved their sister for loving them anyway. Quietly, many of them agreed: if she ever took the throne, she would lead a kind of empire the maps did not yet know how to draw—an empire that measured triumph not only by worlds taken, but by hands unclenched.
In the ledger of rumour, a sentence formed and refused to disperse: She could be everything and chooses not to be. Those who feared power heard a warning. Those who feared emptiness heard a promise.
XV. Ledger (Malcador)
They come to her armed with what they know, and leave with a little more courage to know the parts of themselves they fear. This , too, is a strategy. This , too, is the work. The Angel sets burdens down for an hour; the Praetorian builds doors that open outward; the Wolf learns that breath is a tactic. The rest will call it softness until they need it. I will call it policy.
She could be everything and chooses not to be. In that refusal lives the kind of crown that empires do not expect—one that does not need to be worn to rule.