Part I - Doubts and Relief
Within the Basilica Liminalis, the galaxy was a cartographer's dream rendered in liquid starlight. Here, in the quiet architecture of her own making, Aurelia could observe the grand, terrible dance of the cosmos without the maddening static of the Warp clawing at the edges of her perception. It was a sanctuary, a threshold between what was and what could be, and the only place she permitted herself the full, unvarnished weight of her own humanity.
And today, that weight was one of profound, simmering anger.
A cold, quiet rage settled in her, an emotion as ancient and familiar as the ache of memory. Her gaze drifted across the shimmering pool that mirrored the Imperium, and she saw not a glorious star—spanning empire, but an ossified corpse propped on a throne of gold and lies. Ignorance had become a virtue, zealotry a creed. Stagnation was mistaken for stability, and the grand, secular truth her father had envisioned was now a hollow effigy, worshipped by the very fanatics he would have once ground to dust beneath his heel. The irony was a blade twisting in her heart.
A humourless whisper escaped her lips, the sound swallowed by the cathedral-like silence. "Lorgar would have wept with joy to see this."
With a flick of her wrist, a gesture of casual, cosmic power, she nudged the trajectory of a Hive Fleet tendril. A single thought, a minor adjustment to the celestial map, and a doomed world was granted a few more precious years to muster its defences or flee into the dark. It was a small mercy in an ocean of cruelty, a gesture that felt both necessary and utterly insignificant.
Here, alone, she allowed the carefully constructed dams of her composure to break. Frustration, sharp and bitter, rose in her throat. Scepticism gnawed at the foundations of her hope. Despair, a cold and heavy cloak, settled upon her shoulders. She let the tears come, not as a storm, but as a quiet, steady rain, for in this sanctum, her humanity was not a weakness to be hidden but a treasure to be guarded. It was a reminder of what she fought for, of the soul she refused to let the galaxy grind into oblivion.
Aurelia let herself feel it all: the disgust, the grief, the doubt that sometimes came like a tide and left salt on the stone. She breathed until the muscles in her jaw released. She named the feelings to herself and did not apologise for any of them. To keep her humanity, she had to use it.
After a long moment, the tempest within her subsided. She drew a deep, shuddering breath, the air of the Basilica clean and cool, and straightened her back. The catharsis was complete. Now, duty called.
Her focus sharpened, and the pools before her shifted, bringing into stark relief the greatest and most immediate threat. "Leviathan," she breathed, the name a curse on her tongue.
Her gaze fell upon the largest of the encroaching shadows, a wound in the fabric of the void that bled inexorably toward the Segmentum Solar. Leviathan moved not as a fleet, but as a stain spreading across the celestial map, a living glacier of chitin and teeth pulled onward by an insatiable, singular will. Guilliman, bless his pragmatic heart, had ordered the defences of the Segmentum Pacificus and Tempestus bolstered, a wall of steel and faith against the coming tide. But she knew, as he did, that it would not be enough. Against the Great Devourer, nothing was ever truly enough.
Her own power was the Imperium's greatest shield. The psychic luminescence of her very being was anathema to the Immaterium, a radiant bulwark that kept the tides of Chaos from drowning the Throneworld. The Hive Mind, a creature born not of the Warp's corrupting influence, would still find that light a searing, unbearable fire. The closer it drew to Terra, the more its synaptic web would fray and burn.
Yet, that very light was also a beacon. A terrible, irresistible lure. Like moths to a celestial flame, the Tyranids were drawn to her, their mindless hunger given a singular, shining purpose. She was a lighthouse guiding a tidal wave of monsters directly to the shores she was sworn to protect. The Hive Mind could, and would, hurl endless waves of bio-horrors into the fire of her presence, sacrificing billions to quench the light and feast on the ashes.
She had tried to explain the true scale of the threat to Roboute, tried to make him understand that the fleets they fought were merely the grasping fingers of a monstrous entity whose body blotted out the stars between galaxies. She had tempered the truth, unwilling to break his spirit with the full, crushing weight of their predicament. But he had understood enough.
"They are endless," she sighed, the words a wisp of sound in the vastness. "Truly endless. We need more than guns to win this war."
As her gaze swept over the galactic map, her eyes were drawn to three smaller, isolated pools, each shimmering with a malevolent, captive light. Within them, the C'tan shards stirred, their thoughts reaching her not as words, but as a cascade of pure mathematics, the grammar of gravity, and the cold, irrefutable axioms of annihilation.
Time is a resource you can no longer afford, they seemed to whisper, their collective consciousness a pressure against her mind. A plague cannot be cured by merely delaying the inevitable.
The pressure against her mind sharpened, resolving into three distinct, terrible threads of thought. Unfold the stars, Og'dríada suggested, its thoughts a cascade of crystalline geometries and the cold logic of physics. Use our knowledge. Create a chain of gravitational lenses. Let the weight of suns become your blade and excise the infection from the void.
Vesh-Kael's counsel was a softer, more insidious poison, a memory of a time when entire galaxies were erased like breath on glass. The hunger feeds on life. Deny it sustenance. I can show you how to sing a silence into being, a wave of entropy that unmakes the concept of biomass. Where nothing grows, the plague will starve.
Hsiagn'la's voice was not a voice at all, but a scream of pure, incandescent rage that tore at the edges of her sanity. BURN THEM! BURN IT ALL! Give me leave to drink a sun, and I will vomit its fire across a thousand systems! Let their chitin blacken and their flesh turn to ash!
"I suppose that is true," she conceded, her voice low. The light in the pools pulsed, a triumphant, hungry gleam. They offered her solutions, a final, terrible set of weapons forged from the death of stars and the unmaking of physical law.
Aurelia's expression became a mask of cold calculation. She absorbed the terrible beauty of their suggestions, the elegant finality of star-fire and entropy. She could see the weapons in her mind's eye, could feel the schematics taking shape. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the core, that she could build them. But she also saw the cost—galaxies silenced, stars extinguished, a cure that was indistinguishable from the plague.
"The price is too high," she stated, her voice a quiet edict that nonetheless echoed with absolute authority. "To unleash such power is to risk unravelling the very fabric I am trying to mend." She committed the terrible knowledge to a sealed vault in her memory, a final contingency she prayed she would never need. "I will not let them devour this galaxy, but I will not burn it to ash to save it."
Her gaze was fixed on the encroaching swarm. "They are a pest. A cosmic infestation. And I shall treat them as such."
The shards pulsed again, a chiding, insistent light. They believed her weak, sentimental. Aurelia, who could snuff out galaxies with a thought, knew she was anything but. She simply understood that some victories were not worth the price. And that, there could always be a better choice. Hopefully.
With a final, dismissive glance, Aurelia approached their pools. Waving a hand, she conjured a cluster of nascent, blazing stars, tossing them into the shimmering depths. The shards flared with greedy delight, devouring the stellar energy like hungry fish snatching crumbs. A faint, amused snort escaped her. It was, she supposed, a rather unique form of pet ownership.
"Feeding my galactic fish," she said, and the Basilica let the joke pass without rebuke.
Straightening, she turned her back on the map of a galaxy at war. There was much to do, plans to set in motion. The time for quiet contemplation was over. It was time to return to the material world.
Part II – The Handmaidens of Fire
Aurelia's eyes fluttered open, revealing the boundless cosmos within their depths, now shielded from the opulent, gold-leafed ceiling of her bedchamber. For a few cherished moments, she indulged her body in the soft embrace of her bed, luxuriating in the rare sensation of peace. A soft sigh escaped her lips, carrying the remnants of a tranquil slumber, before she finally found the will to rise. Her sprawling, silk white robes, draped artfully across her form, reflected the quiet elegance of the room. Her hair, a cascade of midnight interwoven with celestial motes, was, she knew, gloriously dishevelled, a chaotic nebula captured around her head. With a graceful, languid motion, Aurelia drew back the silken curtains that afforded her bed a measure of privacy. Instantly, in the far corners of the vast chamber, two Silent Sisters and two Adeptus Custodes stood as immovable as statues, their vigil unwavering.
"I am awake," she murmured, her voice a low, melodic thrum. At her pronouncement, the Custodes stirred, sending a coded vox-message across the Golden Tower's immense, complex security apparatus. Within moments, the signal would reach every guard, every Hestia Sister, every Magos, declaring that the Princess-Regent was awake and prepared for another demanding day.
Aurelia felt no disturbance from the constant presence of her guardians. It was, after all, a state of existence she had known since the first beat of her nascent heart. From the moment she was forged, through her curious childhood, and throughout the grim centuries of stasis, their silent, golden watch had been her constant companion, as ubiquitous and unnoticed as the very air she breathed.
She ran a delicate hand through her impossibly messy hair and sighed, a profound, weary exhalation. "A bath. I require a bath."
One of the Silent Sisters, a tall, silent figure, signed a rapid Thoughtmark. Hestias are inbound, Your Highness. Aurelia stifled a yawn and nodded, acknowledging the silent communication.
The Order of the Hestias, a sisterhood her father and Malcador had personally established in the glorious dawn of the Great Crusade, had once been the quiet caretakers of her personal domain, her chosen attendants, maids, and artisans. Malcador, ever the pragmatist, had meticulously drafted their charters, binding them to the Golden Tower's service and to her alone. They were primarily women, though a select few men served as master chefs, horticulturists for her legendary gardens, and keepers of lost Terran arts, maintaining the intricate machinery and aesthetics of her private world. Their duty was to keep her personal chambers in pristine order, a reflection of the harmonious creation she embodied.
It was, therefore, with a profound sense of disbelief and disquiet that Aurelia had awoken to discover the Hestia Order transformed beyond recognition. What remained of her cherished attendants was a mere phantom of its former self, remade in an image almost alien to her memory. This new incarnation of the Hestias, she learned, had been reconstituted by the Adepta Sororitas, leveraging fragmented details from Malcador's millennia-old ledgers. They were no longer mere attendants; they were Battle-Sisters, zealots of the highest order, sworn to her service, yet fundamentally altered by the pervasive faith of the 41st Millennium.
They were a segment of the militant wing of the Adepta Sororitas, now dedicated to her. For them, Aurelia's radiance, her very being, was a divine entity, second only to the God-Emperor Himself. She learned, with a sickening sense of inevitability, that the Ecclesiarchy had actively cultivated her image as a divine figure. The title God-Emperorof Mankind, which for her was profoundly disturbing, was spoken with zealous reverence. What truly sickened her was the pervasive, twisted narrative that depicted her as the first true martyr, confronting Horus with only her pure light and heart, a willing sacrifice to grant her father the righteous fury needed to end the Arch-Traitor. And due to her birthright, her status as the Heir and the "True-born" daughter of the Emperor—whatever dark, theological implications that title now carried—she was worshipped as a quasi-divine being in her own right. The Divine Holy Highness, or the Holy Princess, was how she was called by the people of the Imperium.
It filled her with revulsion and adding to that. The historical distortion was grotesque, an insult to the memory of her anguished purpose. She had not faced Horus as a martyr, a bait for divine vengeance. Aurelia had gone to him as a distraught younger sister, pleading, weeping, desperately trying to pull her beloved brother back from the abyss of madness. There was nothing holy, nothing heroic, nothing remotely sacred in that act. It was a pure, heartbreaking family.
Yet, that was what they believed.
And from that belief, that distorted yet fervent faith, rose the Order of the Holy Hestias of the Divine Princess Light—The name alone was a mouthful of suffocating piety. A truly unwieldy appellation, mercifully abbreviated to the Order of the Hestias. These were battle-sisters whose zeal against chaos and daemons was so incandescent, so absolute, that even the grim Adeptus Custodes found themselves unsettled.
Aurelia recalled the apologetic and hesitant conversation she'd had with Trajann and Guilliman. They had acknowledged the troubling zealousness of the new Hestias, but also stressed the desperate need for incorruptible, utterly loyal, and combat-capable personnel. For all their fanaticism, they were what the Imperium needed, a potent shield against the encroaching darkness. And, despite their zeal, they rigidly adhered to the ancient domestic and attendant duties outlined in Malcador's original ledger.
Their fervour, amplified by her sudden return, was immense. For these Battle-Sisters, to be the Princess's personal retinue—her domestic help, her attendants, her personal guard—was the apex of their holy vocation. They saw it as heaven's own call, demanding their presence in the service of their divine Highness. Thus, an army of faith now swelled the Golden Tower's ranks: 5,000 battle sisters resided within its hallowed walls, with another 2,000 more garrisoned on their dedicated Battleship in orbit above Terra and 500 more in the Luna base that was being rebuild. All were ready to serve her. To pray to her. To be her loyal maids. To die for her. It made Aurelia shiver, a blend of anxiety and awe at the depth of their belief.
She reflected upon her self-imposed small exile in the Basilica Liminalis when she heard about what happened to her Hestias Order, recalling the long, arduous journey through the stages of anger, grief, madness, bargaining, and eventual, weary acceptance. Her father's words echoed in her mind: You cannot unteach ten millennia in a season. The Imperial Truth died quickly. Do not look to resurrect it by fiat. Teach by being seen. Aurelia knew her father spoke the truth. The Imperial Truth he had so painstakingly championed had withered within a single lifetime after his enthronement. They must try another way.
Aurelia sighed. She resolved to grant them an opportunity, a chance to gently steer their zealous devotion, perhaps, if they saw her not as an untouchable icon, but as a woman striving for the Imperium's survival, their rigid faith might, slowly, find a new, more humane path.
Hopefully. Maybe.
Aurelia stood as a group of five Hestia Sisters entered her chamber, their white hair meticulously styled, their peculiar robes hinting at both battle armour and monastic humility. Though permitted to use the Golden Tower as a command centre, they chose to retain their battle plate beneath their vestments. They knelt instantly, their voices ringing with fervent devotion. "Your Highness, we are under your command. Your will, our sacred scripture."
Patience. I must be patient, Aurelia reminded herself, drawing a hand across her face for a moment.
"I wish to take a bath. And please prepare my gown for today's duties," Aurelia instructed, her voice calm, as she walked towards her lavish, spacious bathroom. The Custodes outside maintained their respectful vigil, while the Hestias and a Sister of Silence entered to assist.
"It shall be done, Your Highness."
Aurelia inhaled deeply, becoming aware of the ambient warmth created by the steam as she commenced the process of unfastening her robes. She reminded herself to exercise patience. It is essential to remain patient. Moreover, I possess a peculiar affinity for them; they exhibit loyalty, kindness, and their fervent convictions are understandable. I am confident that I will influence their perspectives over time. Additionally, they can serve as valuable companions during times of need.
Aurelia thought allowing herself to simply accept what they were.