I walked for three days without sleeping.
The body didn't need rest. It didn't need food, water, or hope. It just needed direction, and I was too broken to give it one. So it chose for me: forward, always forward, through the burning hive city the orks had cracked open like an egg.
Behind me the girl followed, thirty paces back, sometimes fifty, never closer. She never spoke again after the flowers. I never looked back long enough to learn her name.
The girl's name was Ash. I learned it on the second night when she whispered it to the dark, thinking I couldn't hear.
Ash.
It fit.
The city had been called Klyros Prime once. Now it was a corpse three hundred kilometers long, spires snapped like ribs, streets full of smoke and funeral bells that wouldn't stop ringing because no one was left alive to cut the power.
I walked down what used to be a grand processional. Statues of the Emperor lined both sides, heads blown off, arms raised in permanent blessing over the dead. Their stone eyes stared at me like they knew what I was wearing.
Everywhere I stepped, the white flowers grew.
They pushed up through ferrocrete, through molten plasteel, through the chests of corpses still warm. Petals the color of clean bone, stems thin as lies. They opened only when my shadow passed over them, then closed again when I moved on.
I tried crushing one under my heel on the first day. The stem bled something that looked like starlight. The flower was back an hour later, taller.
Chaoseater hated them. Every time the petals brushed the blade it hissed like hot iron in water. The chorus inside the steel screamed louder, as if the flowers were the only thing in the galaxy they were afraid of.
I hated them too.
Because they were gentle.
And nothing gentle had any right to exist here.
On the third night I reached the central cathedral.
It was still standing, somehow. A mountain of black marble and gold, doors thirty stories high hanging off their hinges. Inside, candle stubs still burned. Thousands of them. The survivors must have lit them before the orks came.
I stepped over the threshold.
The silence hit me like a fist.
No screaming. No guns. No chorus for one blessed heartbeat.
Just candles and the smell of cold incense.
Ash slipped past me and walked straight to the altar. She knelt, tiny hands pressed together, and started praying in a voice too small for the space.
I stayed by the door. The Rider wanted to keep moving. The sword tugged at my arm like a dog on a leash.
I didn't move.
High above the altar, the Emperor's statue looked down. Intact. Unbroken. Ten times life-size, face carved into that familiar mask of distant sorrow.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I did something the real War would never have done.
I took one step into the nave, then another, until I stood directly beneath the statue's gaze.
And I spoke.
Not with the Rider's voice. With mine. Elias Kane. Thirty-four. Dead of miso asphyxiation.
"Hey," I said to the stone god-emperor. "I think your mail got misdelivered."
Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered.
Ash kept praying, eyes closed, lips moving soundlessly.
I looked at the sword in my hand. The edge was still wet.
"I'm not him," I told the Emperor. "I'm just the idiot who tripped into his corpse. So if you've got a return-to-sender policy, now would be great."
A candle guttered out.
Ash finished her prayer. She stood, turned, and walked back to me. She had to crane her neck all the way up to meet my eyes.
"Are you going to kill me?" she asked. Calm. Like she was asking if it might rain.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
The Rider stirred, impatient.
I forced the words out before it could stop me.
"No."
She studied my face for a long time, or what little of it showed beneath the hood.
Then she reached out and put her filthy, ash-streaked hand into my gauntlet.
Her fingers barely spanned two of mine.
The moment we touched, every candle in the cathedral went out at once.
In the sudden dark I felt the flowers bloom beneath my boots again, hundreds of them, soft and soundless.
Ash squeezed once.
"They're warm," she whispered.
I looked down. The petals were glowing faintly luminescent, painting her small face bone-white.
Something cracked inside my chest. Not the Rider. Not the chorus.
Me.
I knelt, armor groaning, until our eyes were level.
"What's your name?" I asked. My real voice, small and cracked.
"Ash," she said.
"Ash," I repeated. It tasted like the first honest thing I'd said since dying.
Overhead, thunder rolled. Not weather. Drop-pods again. Imperial this time. I could hear the vox-chatter on the wind, frantic, hunting the "Red Daemon" that had slaughtered an entire Waaagh! single-handed.
They were coming for me.
I looked at the little girl holding my hand like it was the most natural thing in the universe.
And for the first time since I stole a god's corpse, I made a choice that was only mine.
I stood, lifting her with me. She weighed nothing.
"We're leaving," I said.
She nodded against my chest plate.
I stepped back into the night.
Behind us, the cathedral's candles relit themselves one by one, as if the building had decided to keep vigil a little longer.
Ahead, the sky was full of fire again.
I started walking toward it, Ash cradled in the crook of one arm, Chaoseater dragging behind me like an anchor.
The flowers followed.
They always would.