433.947.M30 – Droskael, Ashveil Reach
The Ashen Promise is bound for Droskael.
Three days in the Immaterium, Iskandra said. Nine or ten real. She called it an easy passage—quiet currents, clear vectors, a stable stream. “A good lane for conversation,” she had smiled, “if you can stomach the view.”
The shutters of the navigation chamber were open when I arrived. She stood before the great astralabe, its rings spinning like molten gold, light from the warp filtering through its lenses in slow, breathing pulses. The ship was hers for the voyage—helm, course, and calculation all slaved to her will. For those three days, she was the Ashen Promise.
I was her shadow, sealed within my armor, locked to the deck beside her throne. No visual feed, no external sound but the measured thrum of my own hearts. My duty was to protect her, though from what, in the heart of the warp, I could not say.
Iskandra did not speak for a long time. Navigators rarely do when the shutters are open; they listen, not with ears but with the soul. Eventually, she said, “It is calm. You could almost forget what lies outside.”
She drank her wine, elegant even in her isolation. Her tenders had withdrawn—she needed no attendants for a short passage—and the air smelled faintly of spice and ozone. She seemed almost... happy.
I do not know what possessed me to speak then. Boredom, perhaps, or pride. “If the warp is calm,” I asked, “what would happen if I were to see it for myself?”
She laughed—softly, incredulously. “You would go mad. Or die. But not quickly.”
But I had already looked once, through another’s eyes. I had already seen the warp and survived it, and now I desired to see it again. I told her so.
She warned me it was unwise. But she did not forbid me.
I turned on my feed.
And I saw.
It is impossible to describe the warp in terms of reason, and I am no poet. It is not light, nor darkness, nor any color born of sun or fire. It is motion given shape. Rivers of flame that are not flame, oceans without surface, constellations that twist as you watch. A place that thinks, and in its thinking dreams of monsters.
But there was pattern too. Beneath the chaos, something moved—vast and coiling, a serpent of black light winding through the current, its scales made of numbers, equations, symbols burning with unrelenting precision. It pulsed like the heartbeat of the cosmos.
And then, for a moment, it turned its gaze upon me. Then it was gone.
Iskandra was staring at me in silence.
“You shouldn’t be able to see that,” she said.
Before I could answer, the currents died.
The ship drifted. The warp became a void without movement or sound. We were becalmed.
To leave the warp here would mean nothing; we would emerge into empty space, lost and without reference. We waited.
Then the astropaths called. A message had been received. Not from the Legion, not from any Imperial relay, but from something else. It was addressed to me, marked for “Client,” and signed simply: Patron.
The message was not transmitted as sound or thought, but as presence—like a shadow falling across the mind. It spoke in perfect Gothic, yet without voice.
“You are not welcome here. Your presence is disruptive. Your passage distorts the equation. Turn back, or be erased.”
It was not a threat. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the calm certainty of a machine.
I told Iskandra what it said. She only nodded, pale beneath her crown. “We keep going,” she murmured. “We have come too far for ghosts in the data to turn us aside.”
We pressed on, though there was nowhere to go.
She joked, perhaps to hide her unease, that I should take the helm. I answered that I would be honored. She showed me how to hold the currents, how to follow the eddies of unreality that guide a ship through madness.
And then, as my calloused hand brushed the navigator's cradle, the warp moved.
The calm shattered. Currents roared to life, dragging the ship forward. The serpent was back, endless coils roiling, whipping the warp into a frenzy. The Ashen Promise was flung along its back like a leaf in a hurricane.
Iskandra cried out directions; I obeyed. We rode the storm together, blind, half-mad, exhilarated.
I glimpsed another ship caught in the currents, a ship of the 11th, I believe. A light cruiser of the Daughter class. Named the Ashen and something I didn't catch.
And then, suddenly, silence.
We had arrived.
When the external feeds returned, I saw Port Helikos. Intact. Alive. Ships at anchor. Transports loading for the front. The fleet banners flying as they had before we departed.
Iskandra’s hands trembled on the controls. The date flickered across the console: 239.947.M30.
We had returned to the place—and the time—of our departure.
For a long moment neither of us spoke. Then she said, very softly, “We must go. Now. No contact, no signal, no broadcast. If anyone realizes what we’ve done—what we’ve become—we are finished.”
I asked how such a thing could be. She whispered that Navigators have legends of this: ships that slip across their own timeline, that meet themselves and vanish. To violate the arrow of time is to invite damnation.
We turned the Ashen Promise about. She told the bridge that we had emerged in error, that a corrective jump was required. They believed her.
Before we jumped again, I sent a message. Not to the bridge, not to Iskandra, but to the Legion. A sealed dispatch. If time itself could be bent, then perhaps the message would find its way to those who must know.
As we prepared for the jump, a signal reached us from the void.
It was our own ship.
The Ashen Promise, hailing itself.
Sergeant Calvien’s voice came across the vox, taut and formal. “Unidentified Imperial vessel, you are within the approach vector of Port Helikos. Identify yourself, or be fired upon.”
His tone wavered on the last word, as if something within him knew.
We did not reply. Iskandra engaged the drive, and the warp swallowed us once more.
When we emerged, the coordinates matched Droskael. The voyage was smooth, uneventful, almost serene.
And yet the air of the ship felt… wrong. No, not wrong. Different.
When I returned to my quarters, Jocasta was waiting. She greeted me as always, but something in her eyes made me pause. A flicker of confusion. Of recognition that wasn’t there before.
Then I saw them—Astartes of the Third Legion walking the corridors, laughing, speaking, alive.
Men who had died weeks ago.
Brother Erastes found me later. He greeted me as an old friend, though we had scarcely spoken before. He thanked me for my counsel, for helping to reconcile him with Calvien. “We’ve made peace,” he said. “He gave me this.”
He held out a pendant: a golden eye, wrought in the shape of Horus’s sigil. “But it’s too much for me to bear. Too heavy, too strange. You have the steadiness of stone, brother. Keep it for me, will you?”
I took it from him.
When he had gone, I opened my chest and drew out the other Eye—the one Calvien himself had given me, after he killed Erastes and the rest of his brothers.
They are the same object. The same scratches, the same weight, the same faint pulse of warmth in the palm.
Two relics, one history. Both true.
The warp does not lie. It simply tells too many truths at once.
I do not know what is real anymore. Only that I stand here, breathing, the Eye of Horus cold against my skin.
The serpent stirs, no longer solely in my dreams, but ever there, at the edge of my vision.
I will endure.
Draco Vult.
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