Chapter 1 - The Memories
Harry sprinted ahead of Dudley into a tunnel under a road, wand out, ready for the incoming dementors if they thought themselves crafty enough to try to cut them off. Feet leaving the ground, the teen leaped over some downed trashcans and a large ice patch that the monsters' aura had created. It had to have been them because ice didn't form in early July.
Even with his boxing training, Dudley was a slow teen. He never did use too much footwork in his sport, just weathered the punches until he could get a hard punch in. So when he was met with a dash for his life, his speed and agility was found lacking. He could barely place a foot in front of the other. The chill inside his mind did not help matters.
Already, his vision was tunneling from the invisible monsters' mere presence. So when the heavyset boy reached the trash cans and ice patch, he didn't even attempt to leap, he was just too out of it to notice.
Harry turned when he heard the crash of his cousin going down from the ice patch. "Shit," he growled as he spun around, right into the hand of the chasing dementor. The creature threw him against the wall and lifted the thin teen with ease.
A pain deep within erupted inside his form at the floating creature took a deep breath, covered eyes staring into his own. All he could manage was a pained gasp as the feeling of his soul fighting to remain where it belonged.
A sound picked up in his mind, over the sound of his own gasping. It was as if a fabric was slowly tearing. Each little strained snapping, sending out a ping, a vibration into the whole. Every vibration brought new levels of agony to the poor survivor.
Harry made a desperate bid to make the pain stop no matter what it would cost in. From his slacking grip, the wand came up and was placed to the creature's skull. Before it could do anything more to his soul, Harry sneered out, "Expecto Patronum!" He forgot one crucial part though.
He wasn't feeling any happiness, nor conjuring up the feelings from the hidden depths of his minds. All he could make out was pain, so that was what fueled the spell. The pain of a tearing soul.
A red light burst forth from the tip of the holly wand, engulfing the head of the creature, mixing with the tether that was latched onto the boy's spirit. The light wasn't large, nor even that bright. Completely unlike any Patronus spell he had ever cast, but he didn't care.
The spell filtered down the throat of the monster, cutting the tether. The two of them paused, Harry in relief that his soul was slowly moving back to where it was suppose to be, and the dementor because it just swallowed something that it had never heard of before. Then, the pain started.
A screech of pure, sickeningly awful agony filtered out of the black lips of the dementor as it dropped the teen to the ground. Harry's legs buckled as he watched the thing scream, holding its stomach tightly. Cracks began to form from the gut of the monster, a slight bulge struggling against the arms from within.
By some sort of instinct, Harry drew his wand back to a salute in front of his face. The screech of the monster was music to the teen's ears as the cracks spread out and the bulge grew larger. Harry's face twisted into a manic smirk as he flung his arm out wide and to the left.
The bulge followed the wand and slammed into the right side of the monster and a quick center and pull brought it back to the front. The hard impact forced the cracks to thicken until red light began to filter through the arms of the floating monster. A thrust of his wand out took the light away from the front, dimming them greatly.
"Die," Harry sneered as he pulled his wand back to a salute.
The monster listened to the command from its victim. The stomach bloated with cracks before the dementor gave a strange croaking sound that brought a grim smile to the boy's face just before it burst into black dust, dropping a black, ragged cloak about six feet long and a silver bracelet.
Floating in the drifting dust was the red spell. A pulsing orb tinted with black that swirled around in itself. It gave off the feeling of darkness and suffering to the teen that was staring at it. His gaze was broken when the sound of choking to his side brought his attention back to Dudley.
Hovering over the boy, oblivious to its sibling's death, was the second dementor. Harry took a step forward and another, bringing his wand to bare in front of his chest, pointed at the ceiling. Harry knew, if the guidance was anything to go by, it would not do to just point at a thing with the spell active. The orb silently followed and came to a rest just above the tip, light coating the stone walls around them with a sinister glow.
Carefully pointed at the dementor trying to kill his cousin, the red orb jetted away, and tackled to monster into a wall. The wand didn't waver as Harry advanced, the orb pressing harder and harder into the dementor. It gave off a screech as smoke began to rise from its skin. Invasive thoughts came to mind which had Harry slowly draw his wand up, the orb burning a furrow through the body of the demon.
The smoke turned black as it hit the next layer of flesh. The orb didn't stop until it came to a rest on the creature's face, burning it and melting the lips shut. It could only moan inside its closed mouth as the orb made a line branching off the furrow along over the eyes. The orb returned to its place and it repeated the action which blinded its second eye, leaving a burning symbol.
Before Harry could finish it off from the revenge he had inflicted on it for what the other one had done to him, it shifted its head to the side, ripping the cheek off along with half its face, but it managed to get away.
All that was left was the pulsing ball and Harry's moaning cousin on the cold ground, eyes clenched shut as he tried to fend off the absent demon. As the teen turned to help the boy, his mind blanked out, and his vision filled with white light.
"On your right, Lieutenant!" A booming shout sounded out. Harry turned to the direction and raised her lasgun. The trigger depressed and the Boyz that had tried to get a drop on her fell with holes in their heads and chest.
The gun swiveled to the side, back to finding off the wave of orks that thought they keep the trenches from the Imperial Guard, gunning down the stragglers that the Ultramarines hadn't already butchered. Her eyes widen as she watched the beauty of the battle unfold in front of her. Titus grabbing the power axe off his belt and embedding it into the Nog's foot before headbutting the greenskin so hard that the head exploded in a mess of gore.
Her rifle beeped empty as she came to herself, having just fired the last shot absently into the head of a charging ork, taking its head off at the shoulders. Harry slapped her rifle and growled. "Fuck! Of all the times!" The overcharge switch was held down until the gun beeped and she wound back before hurling the gun end over end at one of the greenskin groups.
In a blazing inferno, the energy weapon went up in flames, engulfing the surrounding bastards with it. "Sorry, Daniels," Harry whispered as she took the rifle from the man's dead hands. "I need this more than you do now."
The teen gasped and blinked rapidly to find himself finishing a step towards his cousin. 'What the hell?' Harry asked himself as he crouched next to the downed boy. 'No time to think now, have to get fatty back home.'
Not knowing what came over himself, Harry reached down and grabbed Dudley by his shirt, and used all his strength to haul the large boy up. "Lay off the damn sweets, Dudley," Harry growled as he threw an arm around his shoulder, letting the near comatose boy lean on him, thankful that he had enough sense about him to keep himself standing.
Harry was about to start on getting back to his cousin's house, but he made a stop midway through the tunnel as something tangled with his legs. It was the cloak that the dementor had dropped. An urge to take it along with the pretty bracelet welled up inside Harry as he looked at it. 'Well... to the victory goes the spoils...' The teen snatched up the cloak and put it in his overly large side pocket of his cargo pants after folding it. The bracelet went onto his right wrist.
The moment the bracelet settled, all the chill remaining from the dementors' presence slid off his mind like water, leaving him feeling much warmer.
The next hour was spent dragging the obese teen through the dark streets of Surrey. People would watch them pass, but do nothing to help the criminal boy and the bully, just whispered to each other in their wake.
Harry found himself grumbling to himself as he was forced to carry the bully. "Not like I have the damn energy to do this! Fuckers don't even feed me any protein!" The profanity was new on his lips, but it felt right for a reason. Something that didn't feel right was how there was a lack of weight at his waist and within his arms. Dudley was plenty heavy, but there was something missing. The only clue he received was the sound of a monster roaring in short barks with an ear ringing quality to it.
The first issue Harry had upon arriving at the house was getting the door open. "Fucking. Piece. Of. Shit!" the black-haired teen grumbled as he forced the door open and maneuvered Dudley's fat body ahead of him. A feat that was worthy of its own feast with the amount of effort it took for the small man.
Dudley didn't make anything easier due to his lack of response and dead weight. Cursing echoed the small hallway as Harry forced his cousin to walk and they reached the living room after a minute. Petunia gave a worried cry as she saw the two teens struggling into the room. "There! You're home!" Harry said immediately with rage tinting his voice, slipping out from under the boy's weight. "I'm done!"
Apparently the large boy had been pressing more weight on Harry than the smaller teen knew, so when he spun out from under the heavyset cousin, said cousin slid to the ground in a boneless heap. "Drama queen," Harry mumbled as he walked past a jiggling Vernon as he ran for the first time that year.
Still sore from the soul tearing that the dementor inflicted on him, Harry leaned against the counter as he took out a glass, filling it at the tap. 'What was that weird hallucination... vision... thing? I know I've never been in a fight like that and were those guns? What was with those giant people?' He questioned his mind as he sipped the water.
Usually he was only allowed a glass a day, but Harry saw fit that killing a daemon, an affront to the god Emperor himself, was worthy enough for a second glass. "Where there is victory, rejoice," he mumbled between taking a sip.
A strange thought came to mind as he looked at the clear water. 'Red Wine would be so much better to celebrate with.' Having never drank wine of any kind, harry found it weird that he could easily recall the taste of a fine red wine along with the aroma it gave off.
The water was quickly drained in a large gulp as he watched the family fuss over their obese son. The fat kid had a bucket in his hands, even though he had a blank look on his face. His skin was pale as a corpse and the sweat-slicked hair did not help the image any. "Who did this to you, my boy?!" Vernon cried out in worry, holding his son's hand as he leaned over to be level with him. His legs couldn't take the weight if he crouched down.
The boy acted like he didn't hear the man for a second before his arm slowly left the bucket. His finger extended and he wordlessly pointed at Harry who was drinking his third glass of water for the day. Where Harry would have been surprised at the accusation, as it was obviously the dementors that did the boy in, he felt nothing but a quiet rage that he was able to finally hide enough not to have a dangerous outburst immediately.
Vernon straightened up with a look of absolute rage on his face and took one heavy step towards Harry. The teen at the counter quietly held up his palm in a universal sign of 'stop' before setting the glass down. Harry cleared his throat before he began his explanation, "I saved your boy from a dementor." The gasp from Petunia told him that she knew what that was. "Miserable creatures. Sucks the happiness out of you until it can get to your soul. I killed the one that got to me and maimed one to the point where it will no longer be able to function, even though it escaped."
The rage that was clear on the fat man's red face grew with every word until he took a step forward.
Harry pushed hard as the current wave of orks were weakening. Their pskers had fallen early on with the propriety that the automatic turrets had on them. They were much more dangerous than some yelling boyz squad. As the last bullet from the heavy bolter clicked empty, Harry dropped the box out of the gun and replaced it.
Just as the belt was going into the slot, an echoing explosion washed over the land, accompanied by a wave of scorching heat. Everyone's head turned to look at the explosion and they found it was the planetary defense gun that had just gone up in flames. The Space Marines obviously finding it simpler to destroy the gun then to take it over.
"Fucking shit," Harry sneered as she slammed the lid of the gun down onto the belt and racked the handle back, priming the gun to fire before she once more began to shoot at the still charging wave. Boyz didn't have many self-preservation bones in their bodies. This fact was backed up with five years of services as an imperial guard on a forge world. Before she had gone to officer school, Harry's planet had been attacked no less than by nine full WAAAGH's in her lifetime with one skirmish with daemons in her childhood. From every experience she had, Harry remembered many, many orks just running straight into a barrel of a firing gun. Today was no different.
The position she was at was defensible though, unlike the trenches of before. The cover allowed her men to duck and move in relative safety to carry out her orders. That didn't stop the green skins though. They wanted this little patch of land like a man in space wanted air. It didn't matter there were dozens of turrets, manned by human or machine, spread about everywhere. There were people to kill on this land patch, so they were going to take it.
The new box of three hundred rounds emptied much too quickly, but she was a practiced hand at reloading the gun at that point in her career, so she easily attached a new box as she multitasked. The west flank was taking heavier loses, so she had some from the south join them to replace the lost ones. While she did that, she also took the front of the gun off, unlatching the cherry red barrel so that it dropped into the dirt and took another from a box next to her.
They were on a forge world. Gun parts were simple to acquire."Barrel!" She shouted out to let the men around her know that she would need a few seconds of cover. In a few deft movements, a new cold barrel was inside the gun and the front reassembled. Loading a bullet, she fired a test shot to make sure everything was fine, then went back to killing the filthy xeno scum.
Time seemed to pass so slowly as she heard and made note of every man that died under her command and order. It weighed on her mind as she dismissed the people behind the number and sent more numbers to replenish the lost, even if they had the likely chance of following their predecessor's example.
In the five hours that followed, the lieutenant's gun did not stop firing for more than a few seconds at a time. The ground around her was littered with shells and cracked barrels from her weapon. Blood was dripping from her face as a graze to her temple allowed the fluid out of her body. The woman noted that her turret partner, that would have taken over the moment she died, was dead on the ground next to her, cold already.
The mountains of corpses in her sector only grew as greenskins climbed over their bloody fallen. The cresting of the pile made shooting them almost too easy, but the real danger were the cunning ones, that cut through the bodies, making a tunnel so that they can make potshots between limbs in the pile. Harry's eyes were constantly moving, making short sweeps of the pile if one ever shifted, even if it was her imagination.
The fiftieth box dropped from her gun, finishing off the crate she had next to her. "Out! Resupply needed!" Harry shouted out as she brought up her lasgun to pick off the targets from her sector. The resupply boys will be by soon at her call.
"Incoming space marine, west side," a report came through her headset. Grabbing a partner from another station next to her, Harry threw him at her sector and he easily took to killing the orks there as he had been doing next to his buddy.
Harry jogged to where Titus was spotted, she found the lumbering giant firing his bolter at any orks that he saw as he strolled into the outpost. "Lieutenant Mira! Where are my men?"
Harry replied, "They are already in the air and on their way to the research lab. We have a bird waiting for you." The giant nodded and Harry lead the man to the waiting Chimera. "Good to see you are still alive, sir."
Harry blinked and found her... himself back in the kitchen of the Dursley's, watching Vernon take his third step towards him with his beady eyes highlighted by his red face. 'What an ugly man,' Harry noted absently. A lingering pain in his cheek and the ache in his arms remained even if he had just been having the weird vision for barely a second. The feelings transferred over though. The feel of the heat from the roaring weapons around along with the fires everywhere from the burning world, the taste of gunpowder on his tongue, the ringing from bullets hitting too close were all still with him.
For some reason, the vision didn't freak him out as it should of, it felt more like he was simply remembering something, though the fact he had never held a gun in his life was telling that it was some weird aftereffect from the dementor attack.
The fat man was about to take a step out of the living room, into the dining area when a bird flew in through the opened backdoor. It must have been tired as it hit the roof above the couch and dropped onto the floor, letting a letter drift onto the couch cushion.
A feeling of protectiveness filled the teen as he quickly made his way over to the twitching owl and picked it up. Cooing a little under his breath, Harry took the dazed bird back to the counter and filled his glass with more water from the creature. It happily started to drink the water as it lapped up the attention, while Vernon was staring with squinted eyes at the teen that was caring for the strange bird.
A rustle of paper drew Harry's attention from the recovering bird back to the couch where the letter started to float up. The man was worried about it being a howler for all of five seconds. The worry was laid to rest when it opened its paper mouth and spoke at a reasonable volume. "Dear Mister Potter." Harry sighed with relief. The letter continued "We have received intelligence that you performed a variant of the Patronus Charm at twenty-three minutes past nine this evening in a Muggle-inhabited area and in the presence of a Muggle."
"The severity of this breach of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery has resulted in your expulsion from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ministry representatives will be calling at your place of residence shortly to destroy your wand. As you have already received an official warning for a previous offense under Section 13 of the International Confederation of Warlocks' Statute of Secrecy, we regret to inform you that your presence is required at a disciplinary hearing at the Ministry of Magic at 9 a.m. on the twelfth of August." It bobbed with every word given. The tone never changed from anything but formal. "Hoping you are well, Mafalda Hopkirk. Improper Use of Magic Office Ministry of Magic." The letter seemed to nod and closed up, fluttering to the floor.
The first thing that came to the expelled teen's mind was, "Fucking Dobby." Pausing, only continuing to scratch the bird's head like he did with Hedwig. The silver chain at his wrist jingle a bit as the three charms hanging off it moved against each other.
The sound of footsteps broke the teen out of his thoughts and he saw Vernon with a smug look on his face. "Justice!" He hissed out with a grin in his eyes. This word broke the dam that Harry had his emotions behind for the evening, this fresh new damn.
Pushing off the counter, the teen sneered like a battle mentor at the large man, making him step back with a trace of fear. "Yes Vernon! Sure. Me being expelled for saving your son's soul from eternal damnation in the pit of a daemon's stomach is justice!" Petunia flinched a bit at the harsh words, but Vernon seemed to only get angrier. "I'm sorry I brutally maimed the daemon that tried to kill your son, I mean, mine was already dead, so why would I do something as sinister as to save your son?!" Harry took a deep breath, chilling the rage. "I'm sorry I allowed your heathen son to not die in the worst way possible, never to be judge if he deserves damnation or paradise."
The words he choice confused him, but they felt right, no, they were right. He saved their son from being eaten by a daemon of chaos and was thanked with a devastating punishment. One that promised that he would remain in the hell that was being under Vernon's rule for another three years until he can legally get away of get emancipated. With the lack of formal education however, that was far off. The fact that he had hundreds of equations for space age weaponry, chemistry, medicine, and physics cycling in his head just made mentally unsuitability part of the problem as well.
What the words did to harry was much different than what they did to Vernon. While Harry thought they were confusing, Vernon gave an animistic snarl as he lunged forward. Harry knew how to dodge it, could predict everything the moment he saw the fist moving, but he was just too damn slow to enact the movements. All his energy for the day was used running and killing the dementor. So the fist connected with a meaty thud against his temple, his head halfway down for a duck.
The strike had nothing on a greenskin's, but with his weakened and nowhere near healthy body, he might as well have been hit with a truck. He tried to stay upright, but it was for nothing as the second shot struck him across the jaw, finishing the job the first one had attempted.
On the tiled floor, Vernon took his position above the teen and started kicking and stomping on his small frame. "You little freak! Think you can hurt my boy and blame it on another daemon! The only daemon here is you!" A particularly hard stomp broke Harry's lower arm in a sickening crack. Vernon didn't care.
He took a step back away from the bloody teen for a second and in that second, he tried to scramble to his feet, only to be laid out on the floor when a wooden chair broke across his chest, flipping him onto his back, knocking his head against the tiles, dazing him more than the pain did.
Nowhere near done, heedless to the sound of Petunia shouting at him to stop, Vernon kept the two wooden legs in his hands as he rained down blows on the still body of Harry. His small whimpers of pain were music to the large man's ears.
Sweat streaming down his face, panting heavily from the workout of beating the teenage resident of his house, he used the blood-stained legs to hold himself up. Over his panting, a noise became prevalent that silenced his wife's screaming at him. "A spiritu dominatus, Domine, libra nos, From the lighting and the tempest, Our Emperor, deliver us. From plague, temptation and war, Our Emperor, deliver us, From the scourge of the Kraken, Our Emperor, deliver us.
From the blasphemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us, From the begetting of daemons, Our Emperor, deliver us, From the curse of the mutant, Our Emperor, deliver us, A morte perpetua, Domine, libra nos." Harry had no idea where the words came from as he recited them under his breath as the beating never stopped, but praying helped take his mind off the pain. Both his arms were broken, but that didn't matter as the warmth that filled him from the prayer overroad anything the obese abuser was doing to him. He kept repeating the prayer as he started to black out until his mind drifted away from himself.
Harry's little hands clutched the rosary she had just received from her mother. It was longer than her five year old arm, mixed with red and black beads. On the end was the holy symbol of the Imperial Cult hung freely at the end. The skull was detailed as could be and still fit within the I. It was high-quality, that even the five year old could see. Fit for the sermon givers to wear even!
The girl looked up with a large smile to the older woman. Rachael Mira gave a large smile that turned into surprise as her little girl tackled her legs at the knee, almost knocking her over. "Thank you, mommy!" She cried out into the woman's legs before backing up, putting it over her head. It was so large that she had to loop it around so that it didn't dangle past her chest.
Rachael looked down at her daughter with a beaming look on her face. "Now, Vera. I trust you will be careful with that." The girl nodded up and down, clutching the symbol in her little hands. "Okay. Now, I think your daddy has something for you!" Harry grinned another smile and ran over to her laughing father.
"Protect me, my lord," The girl of ten mumbled under her breath as she sprinted through the wilderness that she was placed in for a right of passage, like all Cadians had to go through. She was ready though. While her father was a priest, her mother was a soldier and made sure she knew the essentials on how to survival alone. Now it was in the lord's hands to keep her from dying.
"O lord, please guide me through the darkness of uncertainty, let me never doubt your plan," Harry... Vera said in a low voice as she kneeled in front of the altar, she held her rosary tightly in her hands, the beads worn from being held for so long over the last decade she had held it. "I am your servant and soon, I shall be your fighter to do with as your plan please. Please guide me to be the best use I can be!"
In her pocket was acceptance letter from the Imperial Guard. She'll be shipped out in two days, so she wanted to get as much time in the chapel as possible before she had to be sent off the continent for training in the city.
"Allow me your most holy guidance. Please, did I do the right thing, my god? Did I carry out what you had planned, or did I kill those men for nothing?" the twenty-five year old officer prayed in front of the company's alter. She had only been an officer for four years since she graduated the one year course, and already her orders had men dying. They struck the invaders where it hurt, even killed the WAAAGH, but she still had sent men to die.
"O God Emperor, please allow me to survive this coming battle. Let me strike a hammer into the forces of Chaos and their filth!" Vera shouted over the sound of her own gunfire as daemons converged around her position. Her men's numbers were dwindling from the fiery orange abominations' blades.
"DIE!" She screamed at the end of her prayer as the bolter in her hand bucked painfully back, having been salvaged off its mount after a stick grenade had knocked it down. Now she had her back pressed against one of her soldiers as she fought against the painful recoil to keep the gun aimed where the shots needed to go.
The men matched her cries with their own as their lasguns wouldn't cease their killing until the wielder was dead. Already, dozens of Chaos marines laid dead at their feet, having taken down ten men each before they could be put down. Blood was dripping down her arm as shrapnel coated it from one of the grenades that a marine threw at her.
A tearful woman kneeled in front of her alter, her company all dead and a letter grasped in her hand. "Why did they have to die?! Mother was retired and father was a holy man! Please, help me, my lord! What do I do now that everyone is dead?!"
"Please, guide me in the coming trials so that I may be one of your guardians. My life is yours to use however you fit," She prayed at the alter her room had at the Adepta Sororitas. "I thank you for this chance to become one of your daughters. I will never squander it."
'What the hell?' Harry thought as he awakened to find himself on his wooden bedroom floor. His head throbbed with a blinding pain, so when he went to hold it, he nearly fainted from the increase that moving two seriously broken arms brought along with shifting many broken ribs.
Softly coughing so not to hurt himself further, Harry quietly moaned on the floor, his face felt wet with blood. He carefully shifted his head to see that it was only seven-thirty, having been out for a total of half an hour. "Fucking sadistic bastard," Harry growled under his breath as he forced himself to his knees, heedless of the pain it caused him. His left leg seemed to be fractured, but not broken due to the ability to bend it.
He shuffled on his knees over to where Hedwig was watching, a worried gleam in her eyes at seeing her wizard so badly hurt. Mustering a grin to the smart bird, he opened the door to her cage. "I might not be able to wake up for a while if I fall back to sleep, so please wait outside for me. I don't want you to starve, luv." The bird landed on the man's shoulder and started trying to preen his blood-covered hair. "Now now, that can wait for later. I know you haven't eaten all day," Harry waved her off with a gentle laugh.
He barely made it across the room to the window. Even with his arms broken, he forced it open. He had felt worse. 'Wait, no I haven't... Vera had felt worse.' A small voice in his head spoke at this thought. 'You are Vera, Potter. How else would you have her memories.'
The teen waited until Hedwig was gone before dropping his head onto his bed, knees under him in the increasingly familiar fashion that he had held for decades. 'No, I have never prayed to any god!'
'You have prayed extensively to the God Emperor. You know his words by heart,' the voice told him, filling his head with literal books of creeds and prayer.
Harry argued back without raising from the bed for a moment, his face against the bunched up blankets, arms hanging loosely at his side, hands grazing the floor. 'I don't even know who this God Emperor is!'
Images of lore and religion bombarded his head, taking root so that he could easily recall everything. It pained his already concussed brain as the onslaught was relentless. Filling his mind with many books worth of studied information, partly focused later on with the branch of the cult called the Adepta Sororita or Sisters of Battle.
'He is the father, guardian, and God of mankind. He is order against the chaos. He guides us through the darkness of life! It is in turn, the children's duty to purge the heretics,' Images of pale human beings and strange abominations filled his mind with labels like, rogue psker, traitors, and daemon consorting humans. 'beware the pskers for they are apart of the warp,' images of texts explaining what was known about this chaotic realm and how the faith and the God Emperor kept his people safe. 'And abhor the alien.' This time, the orks and daemons were show in their slaughters on Cadian, a 'forgeworld' where they built arms for the empire.
Harry pondered the text and they felt like old friends to him, even though it was Vera's mind that gave it to him. 'Accept it, Harry. You are Vera and you are Harry. The God Emperor is your true god and you are a wizard.' The voice told him as it died down. 'It will all make sense when you no longer doubt it.'
She knelt in front of the major idol of the God Emperor, knees burning on the coal under her, a cane beating her back bloody. Yet she did not make a peep. A simple ritual to cleanse the soul and body if extended to show her faithful endurance. This was but a pinprick in the face of what the God Emperor faced every second of his life to keep his children safe. She was working through all the creeds or prayers she knew by heart. All one hundred and thirteen of them. It shamed her to no end that she only knew a few verses out of the other ten, something she would need to work on to live up to being a battle sister if she passed the coming trials.
The mentors told her that she didn't need to memorize them all verbatim, but she had to. The Emperor had given her a once in a lifetime chance and she spit on that by not knowing all his words by heart.
In five days time, her knees raw from the cooled coal, Harry rose from her position, barely standing. A medic came over and applied a healing balm to her knees so that she could be combat ready sooner, for tomorrow was her initiation trial.
The robotic ork threw a hard punch at her face that the thirty year old barely dodged to the side from. Four years of nonstop training under the sisters had gotten her to the pinnacle of human fitness, so when her chainsword struck the robotic, it dug in deep, destroying all the vital components in the way.
The novice had to slid under an oncoming strike that took the head off the ork she had just 'killed.' The punch had come from another ork that she cut the arm off of before finishing it off. The battle had been going on for days, testing her peak efficiency and beyond. It was only her faith that kept her from falling to her knees in exhaustion and pain.
In the month long trial, there had been many injuries. Foremost was her right arm was shattered in multiple place which was her shooting arm, so her shots were not as accurate as they should have been. Training had made her ambidextrous, but she was still working on accurate bolter rifle shots with one arm, a feat she could barely handle as the recoil jarred her arm with each shot.
The technique needed power armor and it was only her will alone to please the Emperor and the mentors that she suffered through the pain to make those shots in battle. Another six-armed daemon tried its luck at her, but a burst of huge slugs from the bolter took its head off as the to be sister parried another daemon with her chainsword.
A kick and a slash killed that daemon and all was quiet until a loud speaker came on. "Well done, novice. Please come forward to the mentors." Vera Mira nodded and walked or stumbled to where the observers were waiting. Standing at a tight attention, Harry waited for the verdict. "You have down well novice. Not the best, but you have displayed enough skill that you may have the honor as a battle sister. Congratulations."
The speaker pulled out a small gun looking object and beckoned the woman forward. Harry did so without hesitation, neither did she flinch when the barrel of the gun was placed just right and under her right eye. In a flash of pain, it was over. Left in the gun's wake was a tattoo of the Adepta Sororitas symbol. Vera had become a Battle Sister at thirty years of age.
Yo! So this is a new story of mine. A little explanation. I was playing 40k a while back and I thought 'how can I make a crossover with this' and the idea that using the good Mira from space marines game because, as many of my fans know, I like gender-bending a lot and femslash. So I figure I'll do that with Harry, mixing him with Mira's personality, but then I thought, 'This is not what I usually do.' Harry will be male in this, but magic will not physicaly change his birth gender. I glance over or outright do not show the struggle past a few uncomfortable moments for the characters I change in past stories such as Vulpine Wizard and... some stuff I haven't posted, but I felt like I had to go over how the changes slowly affect Harry as a person.
Harry will be trans in this if you couldn't tell. He will think himself a woman to warn those who are against that. I have tried to do the transition justice and I hope I don't offend anyone that is actually trans with this story.