Part I - The Long Watch
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."
"Lord 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.
Part II - 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.