From the outside, the city resembled something conjured from a dream—or perhaps a deception too flawless to be trusted. Wide, clean streets of shimmering alloy coiled through blocks of green terraces and polished towers, their frames glowing faintly beneath an engineered sky. No pollution. No decay. No laborers with hollow eyes or soot-black lungs. To the Sisters of Battle and Black Dragons, it felt less like a city and more like a relic from the mythic past.
Seraphina led the group forward, her face hard behind her helm's retracted visor. Clarent followed in silence, flanked by two other Sisters and a pair of Astartes in jet-black armor. Bone-spurred pauldrons and serrated gauntlets gleamed in the light. Around them, the city pulsed—not with noise or chaos, but with strange vitality. Children dashed across smooth pavement barefoot. Teenagers sprinted up vertical playground walls. Adults laughed and moved in sync, seemingly without exhaustion.
They passed into a sprawling park—no fences, just seamless zones. One field held a football match. The Sisters paused. A player leapt high, caught the ball, then was tackled mid-air. Instead of crumpling, he flipped upright, landed with ease, and laughed as he hurled the ball forward.
Seraphina frowned. "He should be broken."
"He's not even limping," Garran muttered, vox-grille rasping.
"No augmetics," Clarent noted. "And yet… look at them."
Children dashed across obstacle courses like trained acrobats. Others weaved between towering flora—agile, fluid, fearless. Not a hint of military rigidity. Just grace. Natural, impossible grace.
Further west, they entered the transit dome where the pilgrims had been escorted earlier. Suspended above the main plaza, a sleek hourglass-shaped structure hovered—a museum etched with multilingual script: The Museum of Old History.
Inside, the pilgrims stared in awe. A hologram filled the central hall: Earth. Not Holy Terra, but a world with blue oceans and green continents. Time played in fast-forward—tectonics, Pangaea, ancient beasts, empires lost and reborn. The projection halted at 2025.
A local guide stood by. "We've reconstructed what we could. Much is speculation, salvaged data, preserved fragments. Records prior to this era are… incomplete."
The pilgrims murmured respectfully. To them, Terra's early history was a mystery anyway—lost to censorship, fire, and ignorance. Even most Imperials had no idea their world was once like this.
But the Imperials in armor exchanged glances.
"Is this true?" Garran asked at last.
"We've never seen Terra," Clarent answered. "We can't say."
"They could be lying," he said.
"Or they're telling what they believe is truth," Seraphina added.
In a quiet alcove, the Astropath sat alone, eyes veiled. His mind was not at rest. He had seen the girl again—but this time, her aura was less unique. He noticed others like her: a man resting on a bench radiating unnatural calm, another sweeping the stairs with a soul that pulsed steady, controlled, artificial. Not human. Not Warp-tainted either. Something… different. But what?
"Too perfect," he murmured. "But not hollow."
Elsewhere, Virek-99, the Mechanicus envoy, ran his systems over the tech in silence. The museum interfaces responded flawlessly, though there were no prayers, no cog motifs, no litanies.
"Machine Spirits are compliant," he reported. "Unorthodox coding, but no corruption. Functional. Secure."
Garran retracted his helm. Sweat lined his brow. "Then what is this world?"
The Astropath finally spoke. "Perhaps... this is a colony. One lost before the Age of Strife. Hidden from the Warp. Forgotten by time. The Imperium has found such worlds before—worlds that created their own language, their own systems. It's possible."
Seraphina glanced out the museum's wide window toward the peaceful sky. "And if that's true… how long have they survived like this?"
Then, the lights flickered. The announcement came.
<
The museum fell silent. No shrieking. No confusion. Only stillness.
<
Civilians moved instantly. Parents gathered children. Market booths sealed shut. Traffic rerouted. Not a foot wrong. Not a cry of fear.
"They've done this before," Clarent whispered.
"They're trained," Garran said. "But not as soldiers. As survivors."
High above, sleek interceptors streaked past the sky-roof. Anti-gravity systems lit in pulses. Orbital shielding shimmered in the heavens like aurora.
"They knew something like this would come," Seraphina muttered. "They prepared."
Across the museum, the 3D Earth projection still hung in mid-air—frozen in time. Blue. Green. Whole.
And from orbit, war approached.
End of Chapter Forty-Two