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 is kinder.