Part I - A Star That Sleeps (The Green Shard)
Aurelia lay beside a pool that showed the galaxy as a lantern shows dust—arms slow, patient, turning. She had learned, by now, that this was not the Warp as psykers chart it, nor that other road she only half‑sensed when people whispered of hidden paths, nor anything taught in the Scholastia's grim books. It was an interval she had made without meaning to—a quiet between names where thought could touch without gouging, where time put down its spear. From here, she could look into the Warp if she wished and step past it when she chose.
She mostly watched. Malcador's cautions lived kindly in her; curiosity had teeth, and she kept them filed.
Across the pool of the Milky Way, a thin seam lingered like a scar becoming. No. The princess thought. It's an open wound now .
Beneath the everyday music of a trillion minds, another sound bled through: hunger shaped like light, pain with no taste of daemon or man. Older. Colder. A physics that smelled of hard vacuum and inside the sun.
She leaned closer and found a dead world at the bowl's rim—glass plain, broken obelisks, vaults gnawed by machines that do not tire. In a crater stood a prison folded into itself: a tesseract labyrinth, small enough for a palm, strong enough to cage a piece of a star. It seems a green that was not fire leaked.
Aurelia, of course, didn't know that it was a tesseract labyrinth, or what it was at all, for her mind. It looked like a place of suffering, and whatever was inside it was screaming.
"This is not a soul," she murmured. The answer that came back was not language at all—form and appetite, the memory of being whole.
She reached as one plucks a leaf from a pond—careful not to bruise the water—and lifted the box into her not‑Warp, not‑road, not‑name place. There it went, still, surprised to find no purchase. Canoptek senses far below ticked, failed to triangulate, and marked a line, and error and place none of their maps contained nor could locate. A mistake.
Up close, the thing spoke in pressures behind the eyes. Necrontyr craft had cut it down long ago and taught it to be less than itself; necrodermis sheathing made a prison of living metal. What the galaxy would call a C'tan shard slept badly inside its angles and was failing at sleep.
"Who are you?" she asked. The answer nudged the shape of a name along her tongue like a shard of light.
"Og'dríada," she tried aloud, and the pressure softened—as if felt seen.
"I can hide you," she said, because that was the only honest offer. "But you must not teach me your hunger. If you try to fill me with it, I will take you back."
The labyrinth trembled like a thought deciding. Green unknotted to quiet. She breathed, and with a gesture gentle as setting a bookmark, she opened the prison enough to let the smallest spark step free—no daemon, no soul, only star‑thing pared down to silence. It did not understand her. It did not need to. It understood refuge.
"Sleep," she told it. "Sleep here."
The spark drifted like a seed and took a place among the constellations that lived in her hair—one new point of green, steady and small. In her otherwhere, the rules were kind: the shard's hunger could find no edge to bite, no star to drink, no mind to unmake. Denied all leverage, it folded upon itself and slept. Its presence pressed no weight upon her halo and made no demand upon her will. It was only there, like a firefly deciding to be still.
On the low table nearby—where pools sometimes become mirrors—a new dish appeared of its own accord, no larger than a teacup. Within it, a green light shone as if seen through a thousand doors, all closed. Not gone. Not loose. Merely resting.
Far away, on the dead world's deepest level, Canoptek scarabs resumed their patrol with one datum altered and no cause recorded: containment stable; signature lost to non‑mapped manifold . A cryptek would argue with the glyphs for a century and never find the edge she'd used.
Closer to home, a Sister‑Superior on Terra paused mid‑rounds as the null of her own aura deepened and then smoothed; whatever had tried to reach them found nothing to touch. In the Observatoria Palatina, a parallax that should not have been shifted by a hair‑width was settled. An astropathic choir felt no pain, only the sense of a page being gently flattened under a careful hand.
She smiled at the unknown—the way it had agreed to be quiet when asked kindly—and rose. There was a lesson with Malcador in the next hour and ink that never waited. The pool of the galaxy dimmed to its usual lantern's dust. A small green point burned in her hair like a secret many ages old, sleeping in the one place the warp could not pierce.
She did not know the word C'tan, nor even the Webway—only that, besides the Warp, there was some other road others whispered about, and that this place was something else again. She did not need the names; sleep was kinder.
Part II - Regent by Writ, Student by Habit
When the fleets burned outward and the Great Crusade found its stride, the Emperor set His house in order. By special writ, He placed Aurelia beside Malcador—coadjutor to the Regent—in the dull, enormous art of keeping an empire breathing. Her days were filled with councils and ledgers: the Administratum's endless tallies, the Council of Terra's dry combats, the grave logic of the Imperial Tithe. Worlds became columns; hope became supply.
Malcador was a guide, right hand, and patient metronome. "Behind every victory," he said, "someone balanced numbers against graves." She learned. Numbers liked her; they moved when she moved. Yet patterns revealed absence as much as order, and one absence sang loudest.
News came late, or not at all. Astropathic choirs strained until voices broke; soul‑bound seers bled from eyes and hands as messages burned through them, many ending their songs blind and shaking. Navigators wrestled the tides with their warp‑eye pinned to the Astronomican, guiding hulls by pain—migraine and nausea, years shaved off with every translation—carrying rumours faster than truth. Message‑tallies still died at the edge of Segmentum lines. The Officio Astra Telepathica did what it could—relay‑forts, choir rotations, null wards and cauteries, pain made into practice—but the Imperium's breath still caught in its throat.
"Communication," she said at last, "is a battle of its own." Malcador looked over the rims of his age and did not disagree.
That night, she went inward. She returned to the quiet notch she had cut into the world as a child without knowing— a pocket rubbed smooth by play and thought. It had been only a refuge; now she tested what it could bear and what it would refuse. When she asked gently, edges appeared; when she changed her mind, they moved. It sat beside the roads others name—the Warp, and that other path only half‑whispered—yet answered to a softer law that felt like hers.
She gave it a name to fit its work: the Basilica Liminalis—a threshold kept for making, where ideas kneel to be measured and time waits outside the door. With the name fixed, the hall steadied and became a little more itself.
The Basilica offered her the temptation of a library without walls. She set rules before she opened a single page:
No Abominable Intelligence.
No minds of iron; no engines that think in men's place.
No weapons by design. Tools for survival may bite when needed, but bite last.
Only what is asked for. A chapter, not the book. A page, not a century.
Only for a time can we answer for. The past is deep; the present must breathe.
"More is always there," she told herself. "I will not drown." She thought of Magnus and loved him more for how the sea had called to him; she loved herself enough to leave the shore unbroken.
She asked the Basilica to remember a particular season of mankind—the locked rooms of the so‑called Dark Age of Technology, without the hubris that broke it. The walls around her became gentle archives: lives and ledgers, workbenches and workshop air, soft flecks of memory drifting like dust in late sun. She asked for communication first—ways to speak across the black without tearing singers apart.
The Basilica answered as if pleased. Patterns coalesced: relay protocols that treated choirs like lungs, not flares; null‑baffled choir sancta that bled feedback into stone instead of soul; phase‑hedged cyphers that refused corruption without requiring a daemon to hold the door; cogitator routes that spread pain thin and spared lives.
She read slowly. A page; a pause. A breath; a blessing. Each leaf turned with a sound like patience. In a single inhalation, she could have known a century. She did not. She learned enough to build, not enough to boast.
"More," whispered the easy part of her mind. "Just a little more. Keep them alive—Astartes, fleet crews, void‑born, the countless unnamed. Ships. Armours. Perhaps—"
She closed the book. "Another time," she told herself, voice steady by decision alone. Fear came then—not of what she had seen, but of how sweet it felt to see, and how swiftly righteousness puts on the mask of hunger. She set the fear where it could be watched and felt human in the watching.
From the constellations braided through her hair, a small green point brightened—as if a sleeping firefly turned in its dream. The shard she had sheltering there— Og'dríada, though she did not know the word C'tan —offered notice, not hunger: a tremor in the Basilica's air that suggested it, too, remembered how signals could cross voids without screaming.
"I will listen," she said, "only to what I asked: ways to speak and keep the speaking kind."
The shard answered in angles and intervals rather than words: hints of lattice‑paths that carried meaning as pressure instead of light; equations that made distance behave; out-of-phase mirrors that passed the handprint of a thought without the heat of a soul. Anyone else would have bled on the edges of such shapes, of such technology, of such secret power. She did not. She made sense because she asked for sense.
"Only what I asked," she reminded both of them. "Not history. Not hunger." The green dimmed to assent, and the Basilica resumed its habit of kindness.
She came back to the worktables and drew like a woman who had seen a better map and chosen only the roads her people had feet for.
1 - Choir‑Forts (Astra Relays): Deep fortress‑bunkers for astropaths in space. Built with null‑baffling and pariah inlays so warp backwash drains into stone, not into singers.
-Use: rotate choirs like shifts, not sacrifices; link to fleet/sector hubs.
-Power for the Imperium: messages that once cost dozens of lives now travel with predictable, low loss—orders and distress calls arrive in time to matter.
2 - Segmentum Lattice: A network plan tying the five Segmenta (Solar, Pacificus, Tempestus, Obscurus, Ultima) into redundant routes.
-Use: if a relay falls to storm or war, packets auto‑route the long way round.
-Power: keeps crusade groups synchronized and stops worlds being cut off for months—the first seedbed of secession and heresy.
3 - Chorus‑Spires (Iteritas Antennae): Standard‑pattern receiver masts any forgeworld or hive can mass‑produce (ferrocrete base, sanctified copper crown, ferrite‑null lattice).
-Use: catch astropathic packets from orbital vox‑buoys/Choir‑Forts and rebroadcast them by vox/pict across a system.
-Power: governors, Munitorum clerks, and Astartes get clean updates in days rather than months—even on backwater worlds.
4 - Cipher Rites: Teachable liturgies that wrap astropathic messages in phase‑hedged number‑prayers.
-Use: codifies sendings so daemons can't find purchase; verification hashes survive transit.
-Power: cleaner traffic, fewer corrupted orders, and fewer choir deaths from Perils of the Warp.
5 - Navigator Addenda: Astronomican‑linked addenda for the Navis Nobilite: aligns Choir‑Forts to broadcast low‑band beacon‑harmonics keyed to the Astronomican's phase, stitching "waystone" constellations Navigators can read without overdriving the warp‑eye.
-Use: charts and drills teach helms to ride these lanes—repeatable, humane routes that cut migraines, hemorrhage risk, and translation drift.
-Power: safer translations on long arcs; fewer lost in storm space; fleets keep schedule while the Astronomican and regional Choir‑Forts act together like a lighthouse chain. Choir-Forts use the* light* of the Astronomican to create repetitive paths.
6 - Aurelian Null‑Materials (Astropath & Beacon Suite): Factory‑honest substances that make warp backwash less effective and keep messages clean.
-Use: line choir vaults, thrones, antennae pedestals, and bulkheads; issued to the Officio Astra Telepathica and key yards.
-Power: faster packet lock, fewer Perils, longer careers for choirs.
7 - Aegis‑Null (Adamant Nullis): dense meta‑ceramic doped with pariah salts; fitted along throne rails and vault ribs.
-Effect: strips daemonic overtones from sendings, shortening acquisition time and preventing spike‑back.
8 - Lux‑Ward Glass (Vitrum Luxward): transparent hexagrammic laminate for view‑ports and instrument faces.
-Effect: converts psychic overpressure to harmless light, improving clarity and reducing choir hemorrhage.
9 - Shipborne Warp‑Aids (Aurelian Patterns): Devices fitted to voidships to smooth translation and ease crews.
-Power: calmer seas in the immaterium; fewer losses in storm space.
10 - Gellar‑Cantor Coupler: bridges a ship's Gellar coil to Astronomican‑keyed beacon harmonics from nearby Choir‑Forts.
-Effect: synchronizes field "song" with safe lanes, cutting turbulence and Navigator strain.
11 - Phase‑Keel Trimmers: dynamic micro‑vanes along the spine that adjust hull phase during translation.
-Effect: reduces shear and drift on entry/exit; fewer catastrophic re‑emergences.
12 - Navigator & Astropath Instruments: Personal issue to help specialists survive longer and suffer less.
-Power: humane endurance without dulling the gift.
13 - Solace‑Diadem (Navigator): a null‑filament circlet with gentle cantor nodes.
-Effect: filters spurious harmonics hitting the warp‑eye; lowers migraine and hemorrhage incidence; syncs with Solace‑Thrones when present.
14 - Psalm‑Breather (Astropath): breathing mask and chest‑band that guide cadence during send/receive.
-Effect: spreads load across body rhythms, blunting burn‑through and extending usable voice without loss of fidelity.
Aurelia filed grant writs that looked like modest reforms. The Mechanicum saw diagrams that made sense; the Telepathica saw fewer funerals, and the Navigators could breath easier, all hidden in the calculation of a forgotten age, an ancient being and her own mind gave her; the Council saw line‑items that saved crowns. No one saw the Basilica behind the ink.
"Enough for now," Malcador said one evening, finding her at a balcony with ink on her thumb and too much light in her eyes. He did not ask where she had learned what she offered. He could taste a threshold when he stood on one.
"Enough," she agreed. Her voice made enough sounded like courage.
A year later, a choir in Hydraphur sang a message to Cypra Mundi and lost only three voices where ten would have gone. On Nocturne, a relay fort's pariah stones shaved the worst off a solar storm; the message arrived ragged, alive. A Navigator child on Baal spoke of a new "softness" along a familiar route. On a lunar observatory, an old cogitator learned a new trick and politely refused to overheat when asked to do the work of two.
Back in the Basilica Liminalis, the book waited, patient as tides. She stood with her hands at her sides and did not touch it.
"I could see what I am," she whispered into the kind air. "I could walk backwards until language ran out and forward until maps grew tired." She did not. She believed in her father's silence because belief was easier than breaking it; she loved him because love was the first rule she had ever learned. And obeyed him, because she was made to obey him.
"I will ask later," she said. "For now: enough." The Basilica sounded pleased. The green star among her hair went quiet again.
Part III - Praise That Bent the Needle
She had rules. In the Basilica Liminalisshe took knowledge in pages, not volumes; tools, not creeds; never Abominable Intelligence; never the kind of weapon that makes a people forget why they are fighting. And she kept the door shut behind each lesson.
Then, across the new lattice of Chorus‑Spires and Choir‑Forts, a message found her in days, not months. Her father had seen orders arrive clean at Ullanor's marched edge and fleets move as if the galaxy had one breath. Well done, the Emperor said—two simple words, unornamented. Use those numbers in your head. Keep making Me proud. Help your brothers in battle.
The praise went through her like a finely made knife. She had named enough a virtue; now she rearranged enough so it looked like obedience. If good work brought a nod, then more work would bring another. The instinct that kept her safe began to bend toward the habit that might break her. Malcador watched the angle change and wrote in his ledger without ink: Maker's pride is love; to her it sharpens into duty. Guard the line.
Aurelia told herself she would only build what saved lives: ships that arrived, armor that turned aside the last killing blow, tools that steadied the warp around a man long enough for him to be brave. She would take only small bites . She repeated it like prayer and meant it every time—until the next blueprint asked to be finished.
So she went inward again. The hall between names steadied beneath her feet; the Basilica adjusted like a workshop when a craftswoman moves a bench. A library for her. Pages opened where she pointed—Dark Age of Technology chapters on hull forms, void harmonics, conversion matrices; small, wordless diagrams that her green sleeping star—the shard that dreamed in her hair—seemed to understand and approve with the faintness of unstated memory. She never asked it for history. She asked for the angle of a field, the phase of a seam, the way metal might learn to flow without forgetting it was armor.
She stopped after each page. She stopped—until she didn't, because there were Orks near the Ullanor Sector and her brothers were sailing toward them and the word proud kept echoing like a bell.