Hello, everyone! I am so glad to hear that you are all enjoying this work; it truly fills me with pride. This project has taken a lot of time, and while I love reading and writting, learning is also really important to me. I am excited to share one more chapter to wrap things up here for now, and then I will dive back into my other projects, which I know many of you are looking forward to. I appreciate your patience while I finish this!
I also want to mention that I am following the updates from Warhammer regarding the fall of Cadia. There have been quite a few unexpected changes over the years, especially with the latest edition and new books. To keep everything in line with the new timeline, I am following the events from "The Watchers of the Throne" by Chris Wraight. Honestly, I do not know of many Warhammer 40K fans who can fully keep up with the constantly changing timeline!
Lastly, I want to clarify that I used AI-generated images just to enhance the story, and I truly encourage everyone to support real artists. Thank you all for your support!
Check my Tumblr for news and future updates! And how can you support me directly? All of your donations help me continue writing!
( paulythide . tumblr . com)
Chapter I - The Golden Tower Vigil (M41)
The galaxy howled—billions of worlds grinding themselves to powder, the air thick with prayers, the ground drunk on blood. In M41, the long night had teeth and etiquette both. Old powers rotted behind new banners; new monsters wore old names. The battlefield did not end. It only changed music, switching from drum to dirge to the static scream of failing vox, and back again.
The Imperium of Man endured as a great, wounded animal. Zealotry ossified what war did not consume. Administrations calcified; dogma replaced design; the borders of a once‑glorious dream collapsed, planet by planet, system by system, into a map of amputations. Governors swore impossible oaths with empty granaries. Cathedra rose where shipyards should have. Saint‑days multiplied while transit lanes thinned. Every triumph arrived late and overcost; every loss was paid immediately and in the oldest coin.
On Terra, the Master of Mankind did not rise. The Golden Throne devoured lives to keep its failing light. He reigned without breath—a god by decree, by fear, by relief. The Imperial Cult had forgotten its earliest interdiction and written a thousand hymns to justify the forgetting. Across a million shrines, oaths were ink and ash. He had wanted humanity to stand without chains. By then, even hope wore manacles and called that safety. The Administratum filed the paperwork of despair in sextuplicate.
There was, within that sanctioned idolatry, one permitted exception.
By edict of the Adeptus Ministorum, and from necessity as much as reverence, the faithful could bend knee not only to the Emperor's memory but to the Heir he named: Her Imperial Highness, Aurelia Aeternitas Primus—Anathema Solara, Scion of Terra, Princess of the Imperium of Man. His daughter. His chosen successor. The only royalty the Imperium acknowledged without flinching. Above the Primarchs in right of command; beneath no one save the Throne itself. Even the Ten Thousand extended their watch to her person, as the Letters Patent demanded. Titles trailed her like comets. None of them quite held.
They remembered her for the miracles that left fingerprints.
In the bright years before the galaxy broke itself, she bent lost arts toward mercy. Engines that drank silence instead of souls. Lattices that healed what should not have been saved. Bridges across voids that the Mechanicum had only learned to fear. She built kindly, and then, foreseeing theft, she burned her notes or buried them where even a god would get lost. The Heresy tried to murder what it could not imitate and plunder what it could not fathom. The Martian priesthood—less creed than conscience in those rare hours—kept a handful of her schemata alive, and swore by cog and seal to make more… one century at a time. A red‑robed Magos in some closed vault still lit a single votive to a blueprint that refused to die.
What remained had kept the Imperium stitched together with a thread too fine to see. That, and the idea of her.
It was not only the works that made her holy to them. It was the memory of a young woman who met a monster without a sword and called him by the name he had before he learned his hunger. Horus struck her for that kindness. It was the most Imperial thing imaginable that a purity like hers should be punished and preserved in the same heartbeat. The story was told in whispers that never agreed on detail, but always on the ache.
She lived, the Ecclesiarch insisted. Not as the Emperor lived—if lived was the right word for a mind stapled to engines—but in a sleep that did not forget them. They called the place of her keeping the Golden Tower. Doctrine arranged itself around the silence: the Emperor as rule, the Princess as hope. Hope was rationed like bread. It was still never enough. Pilgrims who would never come within a continent of Terra still turned, without knowing why, toward the east when they prayed.
Shield‑Captain Valerian kept pace with the Palace in its old, deliberate waltz: routes shifted by formula, posts changed without words, auramite glided through incense haze. The Ten Thousand did not hurry. They simply arrived. In the chancels of the Sanctum Imperialis, incense hung like a second ceiling while the choir‑engines recited the hour.
He was not heading toward the Throne. Others stood that vigil. His file turned east, toward a precinct that felt—within all that cyclopean iron and mathematics—almost insolent with life.
The Golden Tower did not look like the rest of the Palace. It refused to learn despair.
A garden sprawled beside it, in defiance of the millennium. Vines climbed carved colonnades. Fountains remembered summer. Grass bowed when the wind asked nicely. The Princess had coaxed all this from dead stone, years before the Great Crusade had a name. Rogal Dorn had thrown walls around it that protected without imprisoning. Ferrus Manus had given his workshops a geometry that made the light behave. Perturabo—before his hatred curdled into a profession—had added arches that held like oaths. The place remembered who had loved it. That was part of its strength. Roses older than regiments opened with the precision of parade drill. Even the light felt brief. Beneath the pergolas, the household servants—old lines sworn to the Tower rather than to any noble—had chosen, generation by generation, to tend it with a zeal of their own. Under trellis and glass, they maintained a quiet lattice of orchards, herb‑beds, and vegetable plots; a living network the Princess herself had decreed would be harvested for the hungry and sent wherever need bit deepest—across the Palace hives and the refugee hospices of Terra. The Custodes and the Silent Sisterhood were not excluded from that mercy; on rare off‑shifts, a bowl of figs, a heel of honeyed bread, a sun‑warm tomato halved with a field‑knife—small pieces of heaven brushed their mouths and reminded them that life, stubbornly, still tasted of the sun.
At the mouth of the descent, Valerian met the Captain‑General.
"Lord Valoris," he said, halting to salute.
Trajann Valoris returned the gesture and, for a breath, let his shoulders admit honesty. "At ease, Shield‑Captain. I needed the garden." His voice was a grindstone worn smooth by use. "Forgive the intrusion."
"Forgiveness is for offences," Valerian said. "Rest is policy." He meant it. That precinct made hard men softer without diminishing them. The Sisters of Silence posted there took longer steps and came off shift with fewer eyes like cracked glass. Even the Terran air tasted fractionally less old.
"Walk with me," Trajann said.
They took the stairs, spiralling down past reliefs of campaigns that had never made it into catechism, victories without saints attached. The stone smelled of clean cold. Their footfalls learned courtesy.
The chamber was a bruise of light and shadow: coils, caskets, altar‑tables of steel, the patient murmur of heart‑mirrors and cogitator hymnals. Cables as thick as a man's thigh vanished into the rock. In the centre, a stasis cradle lay like a sarcophagus, arguing with the future. Protective films and a shimmer of green occluded the glass. Something breathed beyond it, not machine and not quite mortal, and the instruments learned her rhythm and refused to forget it.
Four Custodians stood in the inner ring—motionless in the way statues envy—and a Sister‑Superior ghosted the perimeter, her null‑aura smoothing the room flat—no daemonic tang; no warp itch. Just the heavy stillness of duty kept. A tech‑adept advanced, bowed in angles, checked three sigils, whispered a scrap of prayers‑to‑pattern, and withdrew without daring to turn his back.
Valerian and the Captain‑General stood in the sound of their own lungs.
"She makes the machines honest," Trajann said at last. "I have watched dials lie to flatter men. They do not lie to her."
Valerian inclined his head. "She taught the Palace other habits. The guard shifts breathe easier here. The novice Sisters sleep without waking to fight shadows. Servitors miss a beat to listen when she laughs." He paused. "When she laughed."
"Did you ever resent the quiet?" Trajann asked.
"I resented nothing that kept men upright," Valerian said. "But I would hazard the cost if asked."
Trajann's jaw worked. "I hear her sometimes," he said, very quietly, as if admitting weakness to the room. "Not words. A pressure that feels like a hand on the shoulder and the idea of keeping walking. I tell no one."
"You just told me," Valerian said.
"You are no one," Trajann answered, and the corner of his mouth remembered how to move. It was as close to comfort as the Ten Thousand permitted themselves on shift.
Valerian's gaze stayed on the cradle. "You were not the only one. Those who had held the Golden Tower watch had heard a child in the garden at night. Laughter in the hedges. Footfalls where none could be. The Null‑maidens tested, and tested again. No warp signatures. Nothing with hooks. Only… presence." He flexed the fingers of his free hand once, as if blood needed reminding. "We were not credulous men. We were also not fools."
Trajann breathed out, slowly. "I have stood before the Throne and felt the Emperor's will roll through me like weather. This is not that. This is a hearth someone banked carefully, and the room forgets to be cold."
"You speak like a remembrancer."
"Do not make a habit of it." The Captain‑General's helm tilted, considering the bed of cables and the one, faint pulse they guarded. "Tell me the truth, Valerian. Could you stand this place without… wanting?"
The Shield‑Captain weighed the word and did not reject it. "It is heavy. The Throne nails you to purpose until your bones ring. Here, the weight is… personal. A shield you chose to pick up, not one fused to your arm. With the Emperor, service was our making—we were wrought for His will, function without preference, certainty hammered into shape. With the Princess, we swore as men, not mechanisms. We named ourselves her spear and her shield, and that choosing cut deeper than any order. To the Throne, endurance was obedience; to her, endurance was devotion. Duty does not break your heart. Vows do. That is why it ached more to stand this watch." He let the truth land. "Some nights, I prayed."
Trajann looked at him sidelong. "To whom?"
"I did not give it a name," Valerian said. "I stated an intention, in the quiet, and then I did my work."
"Pragmatism masquerading as piety," Trajann murmured.
"Or the other way around."
A soft chimed interval pulsed through the room; the stasis field modulated by a fraction not measurable in ordinary speech. The tech‑adept froze, listening. Readouts steadied to an older rhythm and held. The Sister‑Superior's eyes narrowed, then calmed. The dragonfly upstairs changed its circuit by two wingbeats. For a blink—no longer—they all saw something within the cradle move: a fold of hair stirring, the faint suggestion of a hand testing the water, a shadow where no shadow should have been. Then the hum settled, and the glass remembered to be blind. No one spoke. The adept thumb‑tapped a rune and logged harmonic fluctuation; the Sister wrote no warp. The Custodians set their weight as if nothing had happened. They tried to ignore it, because ignoring was simpler than believing.
"What did you make of it?" Trajann asked, still very still.
Valerian did not look away. "That machines kept their appointments with truth here."
They stood longer than was necessary and exactly as long as the moment asked. The Sister‑Superior passed once more; her presence pared the air down to clean lines. Somewhere above, a fountain kept the memory of noon. Men made of gold learned, again, how to be very still without turning to stone.
"At dawn I will take a turn along the hedges," Trajann said. "The garden reminds me that the point of walls is not walls."
Valerian allowed himself a fraction of warmth. "Lord Dorn would be offended that you learned his lesson anywhere other than a battlement."
"Dorn would survive." The Captain‑General touched two fingers to the faintest edge of the cradle's frame—a soldier's salute to a sleeping sovereign—and stepped back. "Hold this watch, Shield‑Captain."
"We stand," Valerian said, and the words settled on the floor.
Trajann did not immediately leave. He stood with head bent as if listening to some far corridor of the Palace, and then spoke without ceremony:
"'I will remain,'" he said, quoting an old oath, "'until the last door is shut and the last man is home.'"
Valerian answered in the same cadence, the response as old as his panoply. "And if no doors remain and no men come home, I will be the wall."
Only then did Trajann climb toward the smell of leaves and the obstinate green. Valerian remained. The monitors breathed. The Ten Thousand kept their uncompromising peace with time. Hope, rationed carefully, did the rest.
He did not look away as the stasis field purred and the light stayed. He would not admit it aloud, even to himself, but he waited for a voice that might never arrive. Men fashioned for certainty were not spared the talent for longing. On the edge of hearing, he imagined the slightest sound—bare feet on a garden path, a laugh that did not disturb the air, a child teaching machines to be honest by example.
He let the feeling be, unlabelled. Then he set it where the Custodes kept all things that must not interfere, and continued the work—guarding a cradle that anchored a civilisation, listening for a kindness that taught machines not to lie, and keeping an eye on the door, so that when hope knocked, somebody would be there to open it.
Interlude I: Omens and Battle‑Visions Across the Galaxy
On the trench‑lines of nameless moons, Guardsmen who had never seen a meadow dreamed of wet grass and woke with mud that did not cling. In manufactoria, liar‑needles told the truth and held there, ashamed of their long practice of flattery. In shrine‑hives, at the fifty‑third minute of the third hour, knives found their sheaths without argument, and brawls unravelled like bad knots. Astropathic choirs reported a third note under the Astronomican—benign, persistent, uncommanding—as if a hearth had been discovered in a cold house.
Navigators spoke, carefully, of short islands of calm in stormed routes—stepping‑stones across rage where ships passed dry‑shod. The Ordo Hereticus investigated and filed nothing actionable. The Null‑maidens kept saying the same two words: no warp.
On a dying ridge above a xenos breach, a Sergeant of the Imperial Fists bled out through a chest rent that should have ended his counting. He heard a woman's whisper where only vox‑static had lived: Stand, son of Dorn. Breath returned like a law remembered; the wound closed as if embarrassed by its own impertinence. He rose, fired, and later, when the Apothecary asked how, he said only, "Orders."
In the Second Tyrannic War, when Hive Fleet Kraken split and flowered like knives, two doomed brotherhoods felt the world tilt in their favour for thirteen precious minutes. The Scythes of the Emperor, fleeing the murder of Sotha, saw a corridor open in a graveyard of collapsed stars; their navigators swore the void thinned to mercy and then thickened behind them like a door politely shut. Far rimward, fragments of Kraken that had netted the Lamenters faltered as if listening; gravity wells the chart had named and forgotten drank living rivers of chitin by the shoal. A string of singularities stitched itself like black embroidery across the Tyranid advance, and Kraken went to meet its reflection and was lessened by it. Civilians not worth a footnote in most ledgers escaped through those minutes and made it to worlds that still had mornings. Task forces regrouped instead of dying beautifully. The survivors called it luck in the official ledger. In their chapels, candles were lit to a young sovereign of light who had guided an enemy toward its own hunger and held it there long enough for the sons of the Emperor to leave.
On Uhulis Sector, a White Scars veteran lost to pain on a field of mines tasted snow on his tongue and stood laughing; his ruined leg no longer burned. On Bellerophon Reach, a Raven Guard saw, three seconds in advance, the fraction of shadow that would become a sniper's scope and moved his head as if obeying choreography. On Kadath, an Iron Hands Captain found his augmetics refused an order to overheat; a cooler voice overrode him: Not this time.
Sometimes the help was a figure and not a voice. Along the terrible roads of the Immaterium, voidships reported a woman of sun‑white radiance walking the skin of their Gellar fields as if the warp were only weather to her. Auspex returned silhouettes of halos where instruments should have logged nothing; machine‑spirits flagged benign adjacency and then, obediently, forgot. Pilots swore their hands steadied when she matched their stride through storms; Navigators traced her after‑image along safe currents they had no name for. A being of white‑gold radiance had been seen on helldecks and fortress ramparts, wings or no wings depending on who could bear the memory; she stepped through blast‑doors that did not open and left no scorch where light should have seared. Wounds closed in her wake as if reminded how skin worked. The prudent named her a hallucination of stress. The brave named her Highness and saluted empty air.
The galaxy's enemies noticed in their own ways. In the screaming dark, the Shadow in the Warp thinned by inches around beleaguered worlds, just long enough for astropaths to finish a sentence. Eldar farseers, peering from bone‑domes, confessed to the same metaphor without conferring: a hearth found in a house long abandoned. Ork sounders marked dips in green crackle before human lines that should have broken did not.
Elsewhere—where pilgrimage did not go—Primarchs who had bartered their names for eternity paused as something gentle reached them despite all their treaties with hate. The voice that found them did not accuse. It asked questions the way light asks a room to be seen.
On the Planet of the Sorcerers, Magnus lifted his eye from a lattice of futures and felt a page in a burned book turn itself. Do you remember books? The thought asked, and Ahriman, kneeling, heard nothing at all.
In the perfumed galleries where sound had edges, Fulgrim passed a mirror that declined to flatter him; for a breath, it showed a human face illuminated from within. He shattered it before the music could name him, and the shards sang a single note as they fell.
In the unending night he had always mistaken for justice, Konrad Curze heard a voice that did not argue with him: You were right about fear. Wrong about mercy. The lightning wept along his tattoos like rain remembered.
On the brass‑red deserts of his damnation, Angron's Nails fell silent for one heartbeat. The absence of pain enraged him more than pain ever had.
Amid blueprints and bitterness, Perturabo lost his count—once, only once—when someone said rest with the authority of gravity. He began again, but the number that mattered would not be found.
At his desk of scriptures, Lorgar wrote a word his hand had not chosen—enough—and watched the ink refuse to dry. He stared until the page blurred and closed the book.
In places where most maps ended in rumour, Omegon, who was Alpharius and was not, was both dead and alive, and answering to the same name, as always, yet he answered an unheard question, in perfect unison and far apart: "I remain. And I will continue."
Addenda circulated in whispers. A Lamenters Chaplain who had been pinned beneath a fallen spire recalled being lifted clear by hands no heavier than air and told, simply, Not yet.A Scythes helmsman, eyes bled dry by bad jumps, saw through another Navigator's sight for one faultless minute and laid a course no cogitator had predicted. A Black Templar's Sword‑Brother woke from a blast‑shock with a girl's voice in his vox, saying his catechism back to him out of order until his lungs remembered how to work. A Salamander's Apothecary watched burned flesh unchar and knit with the calm of a hearth being banked for the night. A Raven Guard in a ruined manufactory followed a pale figure down a stair that did not exist when surveyed; at the bottom waited twenty civilians and a door that opened onto breathable air.
These were testimonies and errors, rumours and logs, saint‑tales and redacted cyphers. They were also a pattern. Those who stood in the Golden Tower watch did not need convincing. They already knew something was happening across the galaxy. Good or bad, it was something different.
Par II - Basilica Liminalis — Aurelia's Exile
Time behaved differently in the Basilica Liminalis. It bent—courteously—toward what Aurelia asked of it; never racing, never stalling, only keeping pace with her need. She had exiled herself there after Terra, into a geometry she had made with careful, hurting hands. She wept; she cursed; she pitied and condemned herself in the same breath. She called herself a coward, a saint, a fool—each name fitting for a while, none of them earning permanence.
She decided it had been her fault. Not the Heresy entire—no single soul owned that apocalypse—but her part in it: the refusal to be more when more had been required; the innocence that had called itself restraint; the terror of losing a self she loved if she used the power that terrified her. Those choices—so painfully human she winced to remember them—had pulled down constellations of consequence. In her rage and the long winter of her depression, the Basilica's quiet had cracked, and chains of possibilities had cascaded—waterfalls of seed‑universes and fledgling galaxies pushed to ruin by gestures made with shaking hands. She had counted the drowned lights, learned their names, and then set herself to restitution. For a long time that could not be measured, she repaired what she had harmed and brought back what she had sent from the ledger, one patient act at a time: re‑threading stellar currents, re‑seating worlds in the beds where they belonged, untying cause from cruelty when it would hold, and, where it would not, planting mercies in the spaces grief had left—until the Basilica stopped sounding like a wound.
Pain and grief became hers in a way that felt honest. She kept them. That was how she knew she still wanted to be human, even if she now knew better than any human ever had what the price could be. The Basilica did not resemble a palace so much as an argument won gently. Cloisters folded into cloisters, perspectives corrected themselves without being asked, and light learned the habit of arriving where it was needed. Pools lay along the nave like dark mirrors laid end to end; each pool held a sky that did not always agree with the others. Statues did not posture; they listened. Chimes rang only when she exhaled.
She rested. She lay beside a long, dark pool where galaxies drifted like pollen, and she watched the Great Crusade again, minute by minute, hour by hour, decision by decision—hers, and others'. She saw how Chaos never arrived as thunder first. It seeped as suggestion: doubt, injury nursed past use, pride rehearsed until it learned words without meaning them. The seeds had been planted early, watered by small slights and unattended aches, and when the storm finally came, they were only doing what seeds did.
"Horus was right," she said at last, voice nearly lost to the water. "My blind hope was a problem by itself. I was naïve."
"Then what were you, if not naïve?" she asked herself, and the pool answered with a ripple that looked like a shrug. She nearly laughed. Nearly.
She traced the Milky Way across the surface with one finger. Sectors and systems burned under her reflection. She did not stop them. She refused the lie of omnipotence. She learned to watch without pretending she could own everything she saw.
For a few thousand years—long enough for minor creeds to be born and die without her noticing—she wandered: other galaxies, other possible universes, anywhere the ache did not know her name. Escape worked until it didn't. Foreverhad teeth. It waited by the door.
So she studied instead. Thought became meditation; meditation became change. She refused to use time as an accelerant—no shortcuts, no cheats. She used it as a sense. The Basilica slowed to her breath until even the wind learned her discipline. Chaos still lived in her mind and her heart, but the noise learned to stand at attention. Out of that order came resolve.
She chose not to unmake her scars. She named them and learned their uses. "I will not be naïve," she told the dark, "but I will not abandon hope." In a civilisation that had called war its first language, she meant to be the rebuttal, written in a hand that did not shake.
She embraced her power as one picks up a sharp tool: slowly, deliberately, with respect for what it could undo. She refused omniscience. She refused the cheap certainty Tzeentch offered those who were tired of listening.
"A page when needed," she told herself, "never the whole book." She would not pull people by their strings. She would not make souls into diagrams. If an hour demanded it and no other mercy remained, she would look farther than was decent—and she would let the Changer of Ways know what omniscience looked like when it had a conscience.
"Can you see me yet?" she asked the empty air, smiling without heat. "No. You never did."
He could not see her. He never had. She had been made of something older than change; his ledgers did not have a column for her. Numbers that tried to hold her came apart like wet ash.
She considered the others by name and office. Khorne—a noise as old as teeth. He was not unique; he was merely loud. He could not rouse her to murder or thrill her with his arithmetic of slaughter.
"Find another drum," she said, not unkindly.
Nurgle—patient, sentimental, grotesque. Decay did not scandalise her; it belonged to life. She had been present before death existed as a concept and would be present after its usefulness ended.
"Everything that rots returns to soil," she murmured. "Soil is not a failure."
Slaanesh—an orphan of appetites pretending to be a god. She recognised love, joy, beauty; she refused the addiction to their masks.
"You could have been delight," she said to a statue that had once been a mirror. "But you settled for hunger."
She did not pretend independence from origin. She was her father's work—the Emperor's will made into a daughter—and in that she resembled the Dark Gods more than she liked: beings distilled from an idea and then imprisoned by it. That was why she set limits. She left roadblocks for herself. She made rules and obeyed them. In their weakness, the Chaos Powers called her limits luck. In their strength, they might have called it wisdom.
She did not underestimate them. They were very powerful and very practised. They were also roles. She did not hate them—not really. She understood them, and in seeing them as precisely what they were, she gained a steadier hand over them. Could they be killed? Possibly, she thought. But another mask would come to wear the same hunger. That seemed, at best, a tireless waste. Besides, the other option was to kill all sapient beings. That was not an option.
"Killing you is not the work," she said into the Basilica's quiet. "Changing the weather that feeds you is."
Her finger drifted over a star and paused. "Never become more. Do not drown in it," She drew the faintest line through the pool. In real space, a tendril of Hive Fleet movement strayed—pure coincidence, if anyone asked—and fed itself into a swollen sun. A world earned hours: enough to run or to breathe, because coincidence had manners for once.
"They are endless," she sighed. "Like Orks, only less funny." She could have done that all day for a century, and it would not have mattered enough.
Once, she had turned a tendril towards a black hole, where they couldn't eat what cannot be eaten. Another time, she held a door, during the scattering savageries of the Second Tyrannic War, fragments of Kraken fanned to envelop the doomed and the faithful alike. She did not cleave the swarm. She did not pretend that she could. But for thirteen minutes along two different fronts, she let gravity speak a dialect the Tyranids did not prefer.
"Only minutes," she told the pool. "And still, enough."
Near one black‑star shoal, a corridor opened for a battered flotilla that would be remembered—if at all—only for having carried refugees who later became farmers. Rimward, the Lamenters unknotted from a trap no tactician should have escaped. Far spinward, the Scythes of the Emperor—bloody from Sotha—found a way between singularities that should not have aligned. Pieces of Kraken went where hunger always goes when it is not watched: into bigger mouths. The galaxy called it a chance. Chapels called it gratitude.
She accepted neither praise nor blame. She had turned a page. The book went on. But dealing with the Tyranids was an endless and fruitless endeavour. There were better employments for mercy than wrestling swarms.
She turned her study to deeper history. The War in Heaven unfolded below her like liturgy: Old Ones improvising genius and their collapse, Necrontyr making a bargain they thought they understood, the C'tan learning hunger and wearing it with pride into their demise. She watched slavery become science, revolt become ritual, victory become a prison with very clean lines. And a war that scarred the Warp forever. It taught her what not to be.
"You were heard, my dear Og'dríada," she said, and the Basilica accepted the name without complaint. She had taken that shard from its cage and set it in its own pool, where it shone as a small green star and muttered in very elegant glow and shapes. Two others had joined him: Vesh‑Kael, a fragment she had found almost unmade in the deep void, and Hsiagn'la, who could only scream at first and did not know why. She kept each in a separate basin. In the Basilica, even gods learned good fencing.
They wanted, immediately, to consume one another. She did not permit it. She remembered the old Necron myths that called the Outsider by a dozen names—the Stranger, the Great Hunger—and in one desert dialect Tsara'noga. She would not breed that story here.
"Thank you," she told them, bowing her head as if to equals. "For your memories. For your first‑hand recollections. For hearing me complain across millennia."
The shards replied according to their natures: one in crisp angles that made her see new colours, one in soft dicta about what it had once been, one in ragged, painful light. They were calm in her keeping, and safe from the lords who would have caged them again in tesseract labyrinths.
"Shall I ask you for counsel?" she wondered aloud. The pools brightened, dimmed, flared. "No," she decided. "Advice from hunger is still hunger." And yet she listened—to their pasts, not their appetites.
She knew the Necrons woke and that they were as grave a threat as any. She could not stop that awakening. She could, however, take some of the toys away and make the board less certain while she thought. She saw a page; it lay on a path that led somewhere decent. She chose it.
She sat again by the pool, and the Basilica adjusted its clocks to match her pulse. She thought of Valerian without summoning his name: a man in gold learning to prefer devotion to duty. She thought of a garden on Terra that had refused to learn despair.
"Hope is a practice," she said. "Not a mood."
Aurelia rose. "I still hoped," she said at last. "I had matured. I had learned. But I was still myself. That was the first victory."
The pool went on reflecting what it chose. She looked once more at Terra, at a tower where machines told the truth, and then she turned toward the door she had built for returning. The hinge did not squeak. The dark beyond carried, very faintly, the smell of leaves.
Part III — When the Beacon Went Blind (Cadia)
Cadia did not merely fall; it was taken apart and used as a hinge. The last blackstone pylons flared and failed, and the Eye of Terror unrolled into a continent of night the cartographers named the Cicatrix Maledictum. The old scars—the War in Heaven's memory, the birth‑cry of Slaanesh—opened like a mouth and kept speaking. Warp weather became climate; storms learned to sit. Half an empire woke on the far side of a locked door and discovered that even prayer needed navigation.
From the Basilica Liminalis, Aurelia watched it as pressure rather than light. The pool before her showed the galaxy not in stars but in burdens. Currents tore sideways. Choirs went hoarse. Vox‑ghosts carried prayers that ended mid‑amen, their echoes returning as if embarrassed to arrive alone.
"The beacon will gutter," she said, and then it did. The Astronomican failed. Bells in the Basilica rang flat in sympathy and would not be persuaded otherwise until she laid a palm to the water.
"Father."
She tasted the word the way soldiers taste iron. The Golden Throne throbbed at a distance like an organ with a cracked stop. She did not find a sovereign mind waiting for rescue. Aurelia leaned into the pool and found facets: the General grinding plans through pain; the Builder stacking cause upon cause; the Judge refusing to close the ledger; and the Father, a warmth flickering like a hearth bullied by wind. They lay scattered along old circuits and in the beam of the dying light, each stubbornly refusing to quit its appointed task. She allowed herself a small smile; only he would be so relentless in the keeping of his will.
"You are everywhere but together," she murmured. "Stand closer."
She had waited for this opening. Not a miracle window—only a page. Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and the Changer of Ways feasted on a sundered galaxy, joy‑blind at the Great Game's new chapter, mistaking nuance for silence. She knew that if she stepped openly into the Warp, they would notice—and to face the Four in their own dominion was a ruinous idea. So she kept to the edges and moved as a burglar in a cathedral storm, taking only what had always belonged to him.
"Not cured," she told the dark. "Contour."
She braided the garden pulse of Terra into the Throne's rhythm by remote art, lent a Null‑maidens' clean absence as counterweight, and let the oaths of men in gold act as splints. She bled the worst spikes of agony into the choir's lattice—not to harm astropaths, but to smooth the jagged places into the song they already sang. The beacon steadied for bursts: seconds that felt like minutes, minutes that felt like breath, perhaps days went by. Around Sol, ships that should have misjumped did not. Instruments forgot how to lie.
"You're not you, but there's still enough of you."
A voice answered—hurt, distant, more weather than speech.
"Be still," she said. "I cannot make you whole. I can make you hurt less and still be you."
Fragments drew nearer. Heat returned to embers; none of them pretended to be a blaze. The Basilica's bells learned their notes again.
She searched along the Astronomican's old beam and in the palace machinery that had learned to carry him. She found stubbornness before she found a name—the habit of purpose that had outlived memory. His mind lay broken and sorted by function, each fragment working without permission to stop.
"I will not drag you together," she said. "You will walk closer because you decide to."
She stitched what could be stitched and left what must be earned. She aligned pulses, set counterweights, and unsharpened some of the Throne's cruelties into tolerable edges. She would not force him. She would not turn a will she loved into a diagram.
"Purpose," she said. "Begin with that. Painless where it can be spared."
An answer came in pieces: a tableau, a notation, a remembered corridor in a palace that no longer existed. A single word arrived late and shy—sorrow—and then, astonishingly, forgive.
"I already did," she said with tenderness and sorrow of her own. "A long time ago."
If there had been weight in that place, it would have lifted. The fragments did not become a man. They became quieter together.
She refused to call it a victory. It was a decent outcome. A page turned in the right direction.
Aurelia touched and withdrew from there. She kept the interventions small enough that no god felt mocked and no daemon felt invited. The page method held. Her mission was completed. The Emperor was more than he used to be, not like he was, never that, but enough.
"How long will blindness last?" she asked the pool. It refused prophecy and offered topology instead. She accepted the refusal.
"Then I will check home," she said. "If there is rot, it begins at the roots." She turned her sight toward Terra and tasted the faint, familiar tang of Chaos hiding in human breath.
The Sanctum appeared to her as an orchestra that had forgotten its conductor but remembered the piece. Custodes stood like notes that refused to slip. A Null‑adept's quiet carved air into angles. On the Tower, instruments went honest and stayed that way out of respect. In the Senatorum, men argued by candlelight and pretended darkness was a choice. She smiled once, without kindness, and braided garden‑pulse to Throne‑rhythm again, holding a breath that would have rattled itself apart.
"Walk it off, old man," she said into the pool, not unkindly. She said it to make herself braver.
"One page at a time," she told herself, and the Basilica adjusted its clocks to her pulse. "If mercy had a gait, it would be this."
Chaos would try more; Aurelia could feel the board being set for cruelties with longer teeth. The page she had been reading turned itself and pointed—quietly—at the next line. It was time to go back. Then, Aurelia closed it. No more. For now.
"Enough whispers," she said to the Basilica. "A sign, then the rest."
She did not stride the Warp; that would have drawn every hungry eye. She took the path she had laid for herself long ago—thin as a hair, clean as a prayer—skirting where the Four were joy‑blind with their new Game. She kept herself page‑small and crossed.
She aimed for flesh: for the body in its cradle beneath Terra, for the patient machine that had learned to wait. She did not wake. She arrived.
In the Sanctum, a single monitor caught a pattern and pretended not to. In the Golden Tower, the stasis hum aligned to a human cadence for one heartbeat and let it pass. Vigil flames leaned, obedient as spears. A Sister signed no warp and then, after a long pause, presence. A Custodian found his gauntlet warm when he faced the east and said nothing.
"Only a sign," she whispered. "The rest soon."
The Basilica dimmed its bells as if to listen to another room. Aurelia set her hand to the unseen hinge between exile and return and felt it move without sound. She would show the living what the living needed: not a miracle, not yet—only proof that hope still breathed.
Author's note: Stuff!
Aeternum‑Maximus Behemoth (95‑kilometre Battleship)
Only three units of this specific class were constructed, representing the pinnacle of technological advancement conceived by the Princess. These units were a product of the integration of C'tan technological knowledge, the innovations from the Dark Age of Technology, and elements derived from Necron technology. They were designed to serve as the spearhead of the Imperium, showcasing its power and might. However, they now stand as reminders of the formidable capabilities that the Imperium once possessed. One unit was lost during the Heresy when the crew chose to destroy it rather than permit such potent power to fall into the hands of Chaos. The battleship was directed toward a lunar body, resulting in a catastrophic fracture that triggered a singularity explosion, obliterating the entire vessel. The remaining two units are maintained with great care: one is consistently stationed within the Segmentum Solar, while the other serves as a command post in the Ultima Segmentum, currently engaged in operations against the Tyranid hive fleets and Orks.
Aquila‑class Battlecruiser (Aurelian Pattern)
The battlecruiser was designed to serve as the fundamental new backbone of the Imperium's influence throughout the galaxy. It is characterized by robust construction, reliability, and superior speed, equipped with the most advanced armament and defensive systems ever created since the Dark Age of Technology. During the zenith of the Great Crusade, a total of 800 units were built. However, during the events of the Heresy, over 200 of these vessels were seized by forces aligned with Chaos, and an additional more were lost in the conflict. Currently, only 374 battlecruisers remain in operation, serving as the most formidable and revered assets of the Navis Imperialis. The original blueprints have been either lost, destroyed, or concealed by the ruling Princess. Consequently, the Adeptus Mechanicus possesses limited information, allowing them only to conduct necessary repairs and ensure the continued functionality of these critical vessels.
Stellaris‑class Battleship
The Stellaris-Class Battleship, significantly larger than the Emperor-Class Battleship and superior in destructive capabilities to the Aquila-Class Battlecruiser, was designed to serve as the new heavy-class battleship for the Imperium during a pivotal era characterized by aspirations for total control over the galaxy. It was envisioned as the counterpart to the Aeternum-Maximus Behemoth and Gloriana-Class, and served as protector ships a well the vanguard, intended to form a formidable coalition of firepower.
Nevertheless, the production of this formidable warship did not reach its anticipated numbers. Prior to the onset of the Heresy, approximately 150 vessels were commissioned, with an additional 1000 planned for future construction; however, these ambitions ultimately went unrealized. By the time the Heresy commenced, only 25 units were completed, which arrived too late to significantly influence the outcome of the conflict.
In accordance with the final directives of the Princess, these 25 completed warships were allocated to various locations. Some were assigned to loyalist Space Marine chapters, while others were dispersed throughout the Imperium, serving as a critical asset for the Navis Imperialis. Nonetheless, three of these vessels were designated as escorts for the sole Aeternum-Maximus Behemoth engaged in combat within the Ultima Segmentum. Their capabilities exceeded anything previously encountered by the Imperium or any other faction. However, the loss of any single unit would pose a severe setback for the Imperium, as there were no existing schematics for these battleships, coupled with the fact that the Adeptus Mechanicus often encountered challenges in acquiring the requisite knowledge to effect repairs.
Custodes Immortalis Laureate
The Immortal Guard, as it is referred to within the Adeptus Custodes, comprises of meticulously crafted automaton/nanoarmour-shells meticulously crafted by the Princess using technology that she has never disclosed, nor revealed its origins. A specific shard of a C'tan provided her with the foresight to create immortal soldiers. However, she made the conscious decision not to remove the souls of those Custodes who desired to serve.
During the War within the Webway, she produced approximately 179 of these automaton with souls, which valiantly engaged the ceaseless swarm of demons within the Webway. Remarkably, all of them returned, as she refrained from informing the Magos, or anyone else, that while it was accurate to assert that as long as a small segment of armour remained unscathed by conflict, it would self-repair, the underlying truth was that they were intrinsically linked to her essence. Unless she permitted them to "die," they would persist indefinitely.
They were now kept in the Solace Vaults and only called during times of great need by Adeptus Custodes. Or, when the Princess's voice called for them.
(If you want to see the pictures, check my page in Archive of Our Own, my username there is PauThide.)
Author's note.
I'm diving deep into my character and her powers within the Warhammer 40k universe, and I'm determined to make it work seamlessly. I refuse to let her be powerful just for the sake of it or rely on plot armor to conquer all her enemies (I think she has enough already). My goal is to clearly define what cosmic powers mean in this context and how a character like her would apply those abilities in a meaningful way, rather than using power frivolously.
Warhammer 40k is filled with astonishingly powerful entities—think C'tan, Enslavers, the peak Necrons, the Aeldari pantheon, the Chaos Gods, and the Hive Mind, to name just a few. I want Aurelia to fit within this cosmic power dynamic. While she may be technically more powerful than many of these beings, I believe that grounding her with her humanity creates a more compelling and balanced narrative.
Besides, I am a huge Necron fan, and I want to make this universe justice.
I'm excited about where this will lead, and I look forward to your thoughts! See you soon!