440.948.M30 – Eremus Gate System
We left Krynaros behind us with a sense of unfinished business. That system is a wound: twin dead suns gnawing at each other, a hulk full of half-rotted nightmares, a perfect garden world waiting in silence, and somewhere beyond all of it an ancient machine counting souls.
If the Dragon wills it, we will return. For now, duty pulls us back to the mouth of the Expanse.
The journey to Eremus Gate is short by the standards of the void. Iskandra guides the flotilla as if the route had always been there, not carved open by blood and accident. I ride in the command throne of the Ashen Promise, still not entirely reconciled to the fact that I, a newly minted lieutenant, command several warships and thousands of souls. But all is as the Dragon wills it.
When we translate in, the system feels almost familiar. The star burns as it did before. The debris shoals around the old ork positions drift, but do not change. And around the second world, the world the colonists have taken to calling Patron with a mixture of defiance and irony, there is life.
The colony on Eremus II holds.
It does not flourish—no sane man would expect that yet—but it endures. From orbit, the settled zone is a smear of geometry against a hostile planet: hardened landing fields, blocky hab-stacks, curtain walls, and bastions. The jungle and swamp press against the perimeter like a living tide. Weather systems form and break apart without warning; storms crawl across the surface like hunting beasts.
According to the reports, the flora and fauna test the defenses almost daily. Nothing organized, nothing truly sapient, but enough that the men never lower their guard. The older Auxilia regiments garrison the site, backed by servitors and a handful of tanks. They have not ceded an inch of ground since we left them there, which is as it should be.
Patron was never meant to be a paradise. It is a forward bastion, a depot at the gateway to the Cindral Expanse. If the Mechanicum can halt—or reverse—the decline of whatever ancient terraforming engines were once employed here, it may one day become more than that. For now, it is a bulwark hammered into the teeth of a hostile world, and I find that fitting.
There are new astropathic packets waiting for us.
The Black Comet has been busy. Drex’s blunt reports come through distorted by the strain on the choir, but enough survives to piece together a picture of the Ashveil Reach in our absence.
On Khymeron’s Wake, the Ashen tech-clan (no relation to our own vessels; I find the shared name mildly irritating) has expressed a willingness to “cooperate” with the Imperium—on their own terms, naturally. They promise access to manufactoria and local supply networks if their control of the world is recognized and reinforced. They understand leverage, these tech-lords. Whether their interpretation of the Machine God aligns with Mars is another question entirely.
On Vargan’s Eye, things have gone poorly. Drex describes a succession crisis that has degenerated into civil war, with multiple factions claiming legitimate rule. He has withdrawn, intending to return after “the losers have been buried,” as he so delicately puts it.
The Comet’s last confirmed position is at Varnth’s Lantern, negotiating with two groups: the Sirens of Dust and the Ghost Convoy. The signals degrade badly at that point—static, psychic feedback, the usual filth of deep-range astropathic work—but some phrases repeat: “trade rights,” “void-routes,” “provisional oaths.”
If even half of these worlds can be brought to heel, the Ashveil Reach will be more than a haunted corridor. It will become a chain of bastions and arsenals stretching toward Krypteria itself. Terra and Mars will be pleased. I can already imagine the flood of dispatches and commendations our efforts will inspire—if we live long enough to see them.
While we sift reports and assess the system, the Immaterium shivers.
A ship comes through at the far edge of Eremus Gate, its signature crisp and clear against the background static. A Daughter-class strike cruiser, its machine-spirit singing a pattern I recognize at once.
The Ashen Dragon.
She answers our challenge in the recognition codes of the 11th Legion—our Legion—and her heraldry is that of the Granite Guard alone. No mixed complement, no borrowed sons or daughters of other Primarchs. A pure vessel of the Dragon.
She closes with stately precision, translating from high anchor to a holding orbit that mirrors our own. Her hull is unscarred. Her banners hang proud. And yet there is a weight to her presence, a sense of inevitability, as if she has been on her way to us since the first day we set foot in the Reach.
Captain Giorgious comes aboard with a full honor guard. With him walks Keeper Andropolous—alive, breathing, looking exactly as he did when I saw his corpse aboard the dead Ashen Daughter at Droskael. His presence is a quiet affront to logic.
Andropolous bears a cylinder of silver and bone. Within it: my commissioning papers.
The same orders I found clenched in dead fingers on a ghost ship lost “an infinite time” in the warp.
The universe has a poor sense of humor.
We convene in the strategium of the Ashen Promise: Giorgious in full panoply, Andropolous robed and hooded, their helots and mine standing at the edges like statues.
The Keeper presents the cylinder with formal words of appointment, as if this is the first time these orders have ever been uttered. They name me Second Lieutenant Tyndarios of the 11th Legion Astartes, a commissioned officer of the Granite Guard, empowered to hold command in the Dragon's name.
It is everything I have worked toward since I first took the gene-seed, and yet it feels strangely redundant. I have already been this, and this second copy makes scant difference to me.
We speak at length.
I lay out the history of our incursion into the Expanse: Eremus Gate, the ork rok, the deranged Mechanicum cruiser, the Ghouls of Droskael, the demiurg of Cthonis, the silver ships, the Patron and its damnable Equation. I describe the derelict Ashen Daughter we found adrift, filled with the corpses of our own brothers and those of the 2nd Legion, and the orders gripped in Andropolous’ dead hands. I recount, in careful terms, the… incident… with the warp, our brief sojourn in Port Helikos before we should have arrived there, and the paradox that followed.
When I am done, there is a long silence.
Then Andropolous explains in measured terms what I already suspected:
The Ashen Dragon is the ship I first saw in the Immaterium—the ship the 11th Legion dispatched in response to my astropathic summons from Port Helikos. The dead Ashen Daughter, the misnamed echo with its impossible mixed complement, was a temporal aberration, born of our intrusion into our own past. A reflection. A shadow. Real enough to kill and die, but not of the prime line of events.
In the records of the Legion, there has never been a Granite Guard vessel named Ashen Daughter.
Our Ashen Promise, the Black Comet, the men who bled their way into the Expanse—we remain of the true timeline. The Dragon is the natural continuation of that line: the reinforcements we called for, arriving when and how they were always meant to.
The Daughter, he says quietly, “belongs to the Reach now.” She and those who crew her are too entangled in the temporal distortions here to ever safely leave. Severin Klay’s warnings about paradox and instability find their echo in the Keeper’s conclusions.
I feel a dull pang at that. The Ashen Daughter has become a good ship under our hands, and her crew—those who are not fanatics, heretics, or madmen—have earned some measure of my regard. To hear that the wider Imperium will never know they existed is… unpleasant.
But such sentiment does not change what must be done.
After all this, Giorgious informs me of the most unexpected decision of all.
Despite his own seniority, despite the three hundred line Astartes and fifty specialists he has brought—the full might of a dedicated strike cruiser—I am to remain in overall command of the expeditionary flotilla.
He says it without rancor. The orders, he explains, are explicit and come from high up. Names are not given, but only a handful of individuals in the Legion hold the authority to make such an appointment.
Someone—somewhere—within the 11th Legion has taken an interest in me. They have seen my dispatches, weighed my actions, and decided that a junior officer whose first command began by accident and paradox will continue to bear that mantle.
In another Legion, this might be seen as an indulgence.
In ours, it is a test.
The Granite Guard does not give such trust lightly. If they choose to place a lieutenant at the head of a flotilla and send him into the dark, it is not because they think him ready, but because they wish to see whether he breaks—or rises.
I accept the confirmation of my rank with due formality.
I accept continued command of the flotilla with less ceremony but equal resolve.
Later, alone in my quarters, I think of the timelines we have crossed and the ships that have died to bring me to this moment.
The Expanse is still ahead of us. The Patron still counts. Krypteria still waits, curled at the heart of its invisible web.
We have more Astartes now. More guns. More ships.
We are still, by any sane measure, vastly outmatched by an ancient mind that eats worlds and drinks souls.
But the Dragon did not forge us to be cautious or sane. He created us to conquer and endure.
Draco Vult.
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