Chapter 1: Unholy Arrival in the Medicae Tent
The air in the triage tent wasn’t breathable. It was a thick, rancid soup of blood, promethium, burnt meat, and the sour tang of fear-sweat. Red emergency lights flickered, throwing frantic shadows against the canvas walls painted with rust-colored stains and old shell casings. Every few seconds, the world outside would flash white and the ground would shudder, the thunder of the artillery bombardment a constant, teeth-rattling bass note beneath the groans of the dying.
Medicae Aron Seyn didn’t hear any of it anymore. The symphony of suffering was just background noise. His augmetic left eye whirred softly as he assessed a shrapnel wound in a Guardsman’s thigh, his blood-slick fingers moving with a tired, mechanical precision. “Suture,” he grunted, not looking up.
The slab next to him, empty a heartbeat before, was suddenly and violently occupied.
There was no flash of light, no warp-tainted smoke. One moment, empty space. The next, a naked body slammed onto the metal table, already slick with other people’s gore and chemical coolant. The sound was a wet, meaty crack followed by an ear-splitting, raw-throated scream.
Seyn jerked back, his real eye wide, his augmetic one cycling through focus settings with a frantic whir-click, whir-click. The scream cut off into a choked gasp.
The figure on the slab was writhing, slick with blood not its own. Lean muscle corded under dusky skin as it fought against the simple leather restraints a corpsman had reflexively slapped across its chest and thighs. Small, firm breasts rose and fell with panicked heaves. The face was androgynous, sharp-featured, twisted in terror and pain, a tangle of dark hair plastered to a sweaty forehead.
And the skin… Seyn’s augmetic eye zoomed in, scanning. No battle grime. No old scars. No injector-nodes or gang-tattoos. Just unblemished, whole flesh. It was the cleanest thing in the entire damned tent.
“What in the Throne’s holy name…” Seyn muttered.
A weapon clattered to the deck beside the slab, fallen from the newcomer’s grip. It was a pike-staff, taller than a man, wrought from a strange, non-reflective metal. Along its length, jagged crystals were set, like frozen, purple-black thorns. They were dark.
Then they weren’t.
As another artillery shell screamed down and landed close enough to make the tent poles vibrate, the crystals pulsed. A deep, bruise-purple light swelled within them, throbbing in perfect, sinister time with the bombardment outside. Flash-BOOM… pulse. Flash-BOOM… pulse.
Eerie, liquid shadows danced across the restrained form on the slab, elongating the stark lines of the ribs, pooling in the hollow of the throat.
“Daemon,” hissed one of the waiting Guardsmen, a kid with a bandaged hand, his face pale under the grime. He made the sign of the aquila. “Spawned right out of the warp!”
“Shut it, Rolk,” snapped the older trooper next to him, but his eyes were fixed on the pulsing crystals, his knuckles white around his lasrifle. “Medicae? What’s the order?”
Seyn ignored them. His training overrode his superstition. A body was a body. He reached for a diagnostic scanner, his movements slow, deliberate. The thing on the slab–the person–had stopped struggling. Her–his?–their eyes were open, wild, darting around the hellish tent, taking in the blood, the missing limbs, the moaning shapes on cots. The terror in them was profoundly, humanly real.
“Easy,” Seyn said, his voice a flat, professional calm he didn’t feel. He pressed the scanner against the smooth skin of the chest. Vital signs scrolled across his augmetic lens: elevated, but strong. No internal bleeding. No trace of the usual warp-taint biomarkers. “Can you speak? What’s your name?”
The lips moved. A whisper, raw from screaming, barely audible over the din. “Rut’Aba.”
“Rut’Aba,” Seyn repeated. “I’m Medicae Seyn. You’re injured. You’re safe.” The lie came automatically. Nobody here was safe. “What is that?” He nodded toward the pulsing staff.
Rut’Aba’s head lolled to the side, eyes focusing on the weapon. A new kind of fear, sharper, more immediate, flashed across their face. “Don’t… don’t touch it.”
Flash-BOOM… PULSE.
This time, the crystals glowed brighter, longer. The purple light didn’t fade. It held, casting the immediate area in a sickly, necrotic glow. The shadows on the canvas walls twisted, didn’t just lengthen, but convolved.
The whispers among the Guardsmen grew louder. “It’s a beacon,” the older one said, raising his rifle, not quite aiming it at the slab. “Calling them in. It’s gonna bring the whole damn heretical barrage down on our heads!”
Seyn looked from the terrified, pristine youth on the slab, to the weapon humming with otherworldly energy, to the frightened soldiers ready to fire. His mind, usually a catalog of traumas and treatments, raced. This wasn’t daemonic possession. The readings were clean. This was something else. Something unknown.
The ground shook with a closer impact. Dirt rained from the tent roof. One of the flickering red lights died, plunging half the space into deeper gloom, accentuated by that unwavering purple pulse.
Rut’Aba strained against the restraints, their voice cracking with a desperate urgency that cut through the ambient misery. “You have to let me up. Now.”
“Why?” Seyn asked, his hand hovering near his own sidearm.
Before Rut’Aba could answer, the world outside changed. The sporadic thunder of artillery coalesced into a continuous, roaring wave of sound. The barrage wasn’t random anymore. It was focused.
It was heading directly for them.
And the crystals on the staff flared like a matched set of drowning stars, screaming a silent warning into the furious night.
And the crystals on the staff flared like a matched set of drowning stars, screaming a silent warning into the furious night.
The roar outside wasn’t distant thunder anymore. It was the sky tearing itself apart directly overhead. A sound like a freight train screaming on ruined tracks.
“Incoming!” someone bellowed, the word swallowed by the crescendo.
Seyn froze, the scanner falling from his hand. His augmetic eye calculated trajectories, impact probabilities—ninety-eight percent. He looked at the kid, Rolk, at the older trooper raising his rifle toward the slab, at the screaming man with a gut wound no one would ever close.This was it. This was the end of the line.
Rut’Aba moved.
It wasn’t a struggle against the leather straps. It was a fluid, impossible contraction. One shoulder lifted, the arm somehow sliding free without seeming to loosen the restraint. Then a twist of the hip, a sickening pop of a thumb dislocating and resetting, and the other hand was out. They rolled off the slick slab, hitting the blood-wet decking on bare feet, a panther’s grace in a naked, androgynous form.
The older Guardsman swung his rifle, finger tightening on the trigger. “Witch!”
Rut’Aba was already past him. A pale flash in the murk, they snatched the pulsing pike-staff from the ground. The moment their hands closed around the haft, the world seemed to focus. The screaming, the shaking, the chaos—it all funneled into them, into the weapon.
They didn’t run for the tent flap. They stepped into the center of the space, head tilted back, eyes wide and unseeing, reflecting the violent flash of the sky through canvas.
“Get down!” Seyn roared, throwing himself over the patient on the adjacent slab.
The first shell hit.
But not on them.
It hit twenty meters out, a blinding flash and a concussion that knocked the wind from every lung and collapsed a section of the tent wall. Splintered poles and shredded canvas rained down. Through the new, gaping hole, the world was fire and whistling death.
Rut’Aba began to move.
It wasn’t fighting. It was a dance. A terrible, precise, and utterly silent dance.
They planted their feet in the muck and ichor, and the pike-staff became a blur of dark metal and streaking purple light. Seyn, peering from his makeshift cover, saw Rut’Aba’s muscles cord, not with the strain of swinging a weight, but with the minute, perfect adjustments of a surgeon’s hand.
A second shell shrieked down, directly for the hole in the roof.
Rut’Aba’s arms moved. A single, lateral cut. A line of purple light hung in the air for a nanosecond.
The shell, a melon-sized chunk of deliverance from the sky, split cleanly in two as it crossed the threshold of the tent. The severed halves hissed past on either side of Rut’Aba, impacting the dirt behind them with two dull, impotent thuds. No explosion. Just fractured metal.
Silence, for one heartbeat. Even the bombardment seemed to hold its breath.
Then a third, and a fourth, in quick succession.
Rut’Aba pivoted, the pike describing an arc of impossible geometry. A deft, upward flick—one shell sheared lengthwise, its innards spilling out in a harmless shower of sparks and shrapnel that pattered against the canvas. A reverse spin, a downward chop—the fourth shell was cleaved diagonally, its two pieces caroming off each other to bury themselves, inert, in the mud floor.
The deafening roar ceased.Not faded.Ceased.
The sudden quiet was a physical shock. It rang in Seyn’s ears louder than the shells had. Only the crackle of distant fires and the low moan of the wounded remained.
Rut’Aba stood in the center of the ruin, chest heaving, steam rising from their skin in the chill air. They lowered the pike-staff.The crystals were dark. Not dormant.Dead. The deep purple light was utterly gone, leaving behind inert, black glass thorned into the metal. They never pulsed again.
Seyn pushed himself up, his joints protesting. The older Guardsman’s rifle was pointed at the ground, his mouth agape. Rolk was just staring, the aquila-sign half-finished on his chest.
Rut’Aba looked at the weapon in their hands as if they’d never seen it before. Then their legs buckled. They dropped to their knees in the muck, the pike clattering beside them, one hand braced against the dirt. They vomited clear fluid, their whole body trembling with adrenaline backlash.
Seyn walked over, his boots crunching on hot shell fragments. He looked at the four neatly bisected pieces of artillery ordnance, still sizzling, embedded in his triage station. He looked at the naked, shivering being who had just performed a miracle of violence to save them.
He crouched, ignoring the stink and the heat. He picked up a field blanket, stiff with someone else’s dried blood, and draped it around Rut’Aba’s shoulders.
“So,” Seyn said, his voice rough. He gestured with his chin toward the dead crystals on the staff. “Was that the ‘don’t touch it’ part?”
Rut’Aba spat into the mud, a final, shaky heave. They looked up at Seyn, their eyes glassy with shock and exertion. “No,” they rasped, voice shredded. “That was the ‘it’s empty now’ part.” They gestured weakly at the dark crystals. “Battery’s dead.”
A disbelieving laugh barked out of the older Guardsman. It sounded a little unhinged. “Battery? You just… you just swatted bloody shells out of the air with a glorified torch, and you’re talking about batteries?”
“Shut up, Goran,” Seyn said, but his own mind was racing, his medicae training wrestling with the evidence of his eyes. He focused on the patient. Always the patient. “Are you injured? Anything feel broken?”
Rut’Aba shook their head, pulling the grimy blanket tighter. They were shivering violently now, the adrenaline dump crashing through their system. “Dislocated my thumb. It’s back in. Just… empty. Drained.”
“Right.” Seyn stood, his knees popping. He turned to the gawking soldiers. “Goran, Rolk—stop gawping like fresh meat. We’ve got live wounded and a collapsed tent section. Get that beam lifted off Corporal Venz. Now.”
The authority in his voice snapped them back into a familiar, comfortable terror. Orders. They scrambled.
Seyn offered a hand to Rut’Aba. After a moment’s hesitation, a hand—slim, strong, and currently filthy—slid into his. He pulled them to their feet. They swayed, unsteady.
“Come on,” Seyn said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He steered them toward the relative shelter of his makeshift surgical station, away from the gaping hole in the tent. He grabbed a less-soiled smock from a crate. “Put this on. Can’t have you… distracting the wounded.”
A ghost of something—amusement?—flickered in Rut’Aba’s exhausted eyes. They shrugged into the oversized smock, cinching it tight. It covered them to mid-thigh.
Seyn busied himself checking vitals on the other patients, his augmetic eye whirring as he scanned. His hands moved automatically, applying pressure to a seeping bandage, checking a pupil response. But his focus was split. Every sense was tuned to the figure now sitting quietly on an upturned ammo crate, staring at their own hands.
The weird quiet lingered. The bombardment had shifted, rumbling now toward the distant western trenches. In the lull, the normal sounds of the triage tent—moans, beeping monitors, the snap of gloves—felt obscenely loud.
Goran finished helping shift the fallen pole and wandered over, wiping his hands on his pants. He kept a careful distance from Rut’Aba, but his curiosity was a live thing. “So. You got a name, or just a… skillset?”
“Rut’Aba,” they said quietly, not looking up.
“Rut’Aba,” Goran repeated, testing the syllables. “That a… regimental thing? Some kind of Tempestus Scions deep-cover ops? Psyker-tamers?”
“It’s my name.”
“Right.” Goran leaned against a support pole, crossing his arms. He was trying for casual and missing by a mile. “And the light show? The precision lawn-care you did on that artillery?”
Rut’Aba was silent for a long moment. They finally looked up, meeting Goran’s gaze. The raw fear was gone, replaced by a deep, weary resignation. “It’s a tool. It absorbs certain kinds of… kinetic energy. Stores it. I can redirect it. Briefly. With focus.”
Seyn paused, a used bandage in his hand. “Absorbs kinetic energy. You mean… the bombardment itself?”
A single nod. “The impacts. The shockwaves. The… fury of it. It feeds the device. I just… channeled what it had just eaten back out. In a specific direction.” They flexed their hand, wincing. “Takes a lot out of you. And it has a cap. A limit. Then it’s just a stick until it… digests.”
Goran whistled low. “A stick that can cut a shell in half. Handy.” He chewed his lip. “So you’re not a… witch?”
This time, Rut’Aba’s smile was thin and humorless. “Do I look like I’m having a good time?”
Before Goran could reply, the tent flap at the far end—the one still hanging—was shoved aside. A figure in the crisp, if dusty, uniform of a Commissariat Political Officer stood silhouetted against the smoky night. The atmosphere in the tent dropped twenty degrees.
The officer’s eyes, small and sharp as flint, scanned the wreckage: the collapsed canvas, the four neatly cleaved shell halves, the blood, the wounded. They settled on Rut’Aba, small in the oversized medicae smock, and then on the strange pike-staff leaning against the crate beside them.
“Medicae Seyn.” The officer’s voice was a dry rustle, devoid of inflection. “Report.”
Seyn straightened, his mind racing. A full, truthful report would get Rut’Aba dragged away for “assessment”—a one-way trip to a blank cell and probably a bolt pistol summary. But lying to a Political Officer was a quicker route to the same end.
“Artillery barrage, sir,” Seyn said, gesturing to the damage. “Direct hit compromised the structure. Casualties… manageable. We were fortunate the strike was… unconventional. Seems the enemy shells were faulty. Duds.”
The officer took a few steps into the tent, boots clicking on a piece of shrapnel. He nudged one of the severed shell halves with his toe. The cut surface was smooth, almost polished. “Faulty. Duds.” He looked at Rut’Aba. “And this?”
“A civilian,” Seyn said, the lie coming easier now. “Caught in the crossfire. In shock. I was just about to sedate them for transport to the rear.”
“I see.” The officer walked over to the pike-staff. He didn’t touch it. He just stared at the dead, thorn-like crystals. “And this… artifact?”
“War relic,” Rut’Aba said, their voice a flat monotone. They didn’t look at the officer. “Picked it up. For luck.”
The officer’s lips pursed. He turned his flinty gaze back to Seyn. “Your dedication to preserving Imperial life is noted, Medicae. Even… anomalous life.” He let the word hang. “The front is stabilizing. A transport arrives at dawn to evacuate the remaining wounded to the orbital docks.” His eyes slid back to Rut’Aba. “All wounded. Ensure this one is on it. The Mechanicus adepts on the Righteous Vigil have a keen interest in… anomalies.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He turned and left, the tent flap falling closed behind him with a final, ominous slap.
The silence he left behind was thicker than the smell of blood.
Goran let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Frak.”
Seyn looked at Rut’Aba. The exhaustion on their face had been joined by a new, deeper understanding. The orbital docks. The Mechanicus. They weren’t being saved. They were being collected.
Rut’Aba met his eyes. “Dawn?” they asked softly.
“Dawn,” Seyn confirmed, his voice grim.
A long moment passed, filled only by the groan of a wounded man and the hiss of a lantern.
Rut’Aba stood up. They seemed steadier now, a core of resolve solidifying beneath the shock and fatigue. They picked up the pike-staff. It was just a stick now, inert, strange.
“You should rest,” Seyn said. “You’re drained.”
“I know what drained feels like,” Rut’Aba said. They looked toward the torn-open section of the tent, at the fiery line of the horizon. “And I know what charging up feels like.” They hefted the staff onto their shoulder. “I have until dawn. I don’t intend to show up to this… appointment… empty-handed.”
Seyn stared at them. “The bombardment’s moved west. It’s a killing zone out there.”
A faint, grim spark ignited in Rut’Aba’s eyes. It wasn’t hope. It was something sharper, more desperate. A calculated risk.
“Exactly,” they said, and ducked out through the torn canvas, disappearing into the smoke and the distant, thundering promise of violence.
The world beyond the canvas was a different kind of hell. The air, thick with cordite and the sweet-rot stench of decomposition, burned in Rut’Aba’s lungs. They moved through a landscape of shattered rockcrete and twisted plasteel, the ground underfoot a churned slurry of mud and darker things. The distant thunder was a direction now. A beacon.
They climbed over the remains of a barricade, the pike-staff heavy and cold on their shoulder. Its silence was a physical ache, a hollow tooth in their grip. They needed noise. They needed fury.
A flashing muzzle flare ahead, from the shell of a hab-block. The staccato crack of lasfire, the deeper boom of a heavy stubber. Imperial positions. The enemy was close.
Rut’Aba dropped into a crater, the stagnant water at the bottom soaking through the smock. They peered over the rim. A trench line, more a gash in the earth, bled fire into the night. On the other side, maybe fifty meters, darker shapes moved in the ruins of a manufactorum. Enemy movement. A concentration. A knot of kinetic energy waiting to be unraveled.
A rocket-propelled grenade screamed from the manufactorum, tracing a fiery line toward the Imperial trench. It impacted with a flash and a shower of dirt. A scream, short and wet, followed.
Good.
Rut’Aba was moving before the echo died. They scrambled from the crater, low and fast, using the shadows of shattered foundation piers as cover. The pike felt lighter. Anticipatory. The first few crystals along its shaft began to glow a faint, hungry violet as they neared the epicenter of violence.
They slid behind a collapsed conveyor belt, its mechanism spilled like metallic guts. The manufactorum was a skeleton; three walls standing, the roof gone, the interior a maze of broken machinery and pooled shadow. Within, figures barked guttural orders. A mortar team was setting up near a gaping hole in the wall, feeding a round into the tube.
Close. Messy. Perfect.
Rut’Aba took a breath, feeling the familiar, terrible focus settle over them. The world narrowed to vectors of force, trajectories of mass. They hefted the pike, not as a weapon, but as a conductor.
They stepped into the open.
“Hey!” a coarse voice yelled from the left.
Rut’Aba didn’t turn. Their eyes were on the mortar crew. One soldier was dropping the round in. The loader’s hand was on the firing lever.
They swung the pike in a low, flat arc. A beam of condensed purple light, thin as a wire, flashed from the central crystal. It didn’t burn. It severed. The mortar tube split cleanly three inches from its base. The round detonated inside the chamber.
The explosion wasn’t the massive fireball of a direct hit. It was a contained, deafening crump that expanded the fractured metal outward in a thousand shrapnel directions. It eviscerated the three figures around it.
The pike throbbed in Rut’Aba’s hands, warm now. Five crystals glowed brightly.
Las-bolts snapped past their head, sizzling the air. They pivoted, the pike becoming a blur. A horizontal sweep released a crescent of energy that sheared through a support column twenty feet away. The upper floor of the manufactorum groaned, buckled, and collapsed on a squad taking cover behind a gutted furnace. The sound was a grinding roar, swallowed by screams.
Rut’Aba walked forward, into the chaos. A soldier lunged from behind a sparking console, a serrated blade raised. Rut’Aba didn’t break stride. A slight, almost delicate upward flick of the pike’s tip. A filament of light. The soldier’s charge ended at the waist, his top half sliding off his legs with a wet sigh.
Seven crystals. The light was a constant thrum now, vibrating up their arms, filling the hollow places with a terrible, exhilarating power.
They moved through the manufactorum like a harvest. A fuel dump went up in a silent, violet eruption that simply disassembled the tanks into smoking rings of metal. A communications array twisted in on itself, the dishes curling like paper in a fire. They targeted the architecture of war: the load-bearing walls of a munitions shed, the treads of a parked personnel carrier, the command post with its flapping maps and chattering vox-caster.
It was methodical. Surgical. A deconstruction.
They emerged from the far side of the ruined complex. The enemy ranks behind them were not dead so much as… unmade. Reduced to components amidst ruin. The pike in their hand was blazing, every crystal a miniature star, so bright it cast their sharp shadow hard against the blistered ground ahead. The hollow ache was gone. Replaced by a vibrating, satiated hum that resonated in their very bones. They felt full. They felt sharp. They felt… satisfied.
They took a slow, shuddering breath, the first real breath since leaving the tent. The distant gunfire seemed muted now. The night air, still foul, felt cleaner.
A dry, deliberate clap sounded behind them.
Slow. Metallic.
Rut’Aba froze. The hum in the pike stuttered.
“An impressive display,” the voice said. It was the same dry rustle from the tent, now devoid of even false politeness. “A most efficient… clearing operation.”
Rut’Aba turned.
Commissar Vale stood ten feet away, his greatcoat perfectly still in the chaotic breeze. He wasn’t alone. Two hulking Tempestus Scions flanked him, their hellguns leveled at Rut’Aba’s chest, their faces obscured by skull-like helmets. Their weapons didn’t waver.
Vale’s gloved hands were clasped behind his back. His flinty eyes were fixed not on Rut’Aba’s face, but on the brilliantly lit pike-staff.
“The Mechanicus will be most interested in that tool,” Vale continued, taking a single step forward. “And in the… fracture patterns of the enemy assets. So neat. So unnatural.”
Rut’Aba’s grip tightened on the haft. The power was right there, buzzing, begging to be used. They could see the vectors. A swipe to the left would bisect the Scion there. A thrust would cut Vale in two before he could blink.
Vale’s smile was a thin, cold slit. “I would strongly advise against any further demonstrations. The Scions’ orders are to disable, not to kill. But a hellgun set to maximum discharge will vaporize everything from the waist up. The tool might survive. You will not. And the Adeptus Mechanicus does so prefer its specimens intact.”
He took another step. The Scions advanced in perfect sync, their boots crunching on debris.
“You are hereby detained under the authority of the Commissariat, for consorting with xenos or warp-tainted technology, and for actions contrary to the clear chain of Imperial command.” Vale’s hand emerged from behind his back, holding a set of heavy, blackened manacles. “You will relinquish the artifact and submit.”
The crystals on the pike flared, as if in protest, the light throwing the Commissar’s stern face into sharp relief. Rut’Aba looked from the manacles to the unwavering muzzles of the hellguns. The satisfying hum within them curdled into something cold and heavy.
The power was there. More than enough.
But the vectors… they all ended with them dead.
Their fingers unclenched, one by one. The pike-staff slipped from their grasp and hit the mud with a dull thud, its brilliant light immediately beginning to dim, as if disconnected from its source.
Commissar Vale nodded. The Scions moved in, their movements efficient and brutal. One wrenched Rut’Aba’s arms behind their back. The cold, heavy manacles locked around their wrists with a final, definitive click. The other Scion retrieved the pike, handling it with reverent caution, its light now fading to a faint, dormant pulse.
“Satisfaction,” Vale said, the word dripping with grim amusement as he leaned close, his breath smelling of recaf and stale authority, “is a transient state. The journey to the orbital docks will provide ample time for reflection.”
He turned on his heel. The Scions shoved Rut’Aba forward, following their master into the smoking dark.