A line of blood slipped down the length of the sword he held, the unnaturally thin fluid as cold as the metal it slid over. It snaked a vile tongue past the crossguard, past the broken chain that was cast over the weapon, and onto the lacerated black ceramite of his hand.

Its impact was lost in the trickle of data that ran behind the lenses of his helm, barely registered, like the flakes of snow which blew against him. Warnings streamed at the periphery of his senses, needling at the ruptures in his armor.

And yet he felt the slightest shadow of a shudder run through his flesh. It was a minute motion which the synthetic fibres beneath the plating of his armor did not mirror, which the cabling under his sundered breastplate did not fuel.

Please… don't hurt her.

The streams of data feeding into the back of his mind offered no response to that echoing plea. The man which had spoken those words was dead, after all, his corpse lying limp against the ground.

Blood pooled around the fur rags that clung to the body. Deep crimson, still casting a faint warmth over the canvas of ice that it spilled over.

It was first sign of human life he had found here. And it was slipping away into the cold, beneath his boots.

He glanced back to the chain, returned to its place, wrapped over the crossguard of the sword he grasped. It couldn't be made to fully bind his hand to the weapon anymore, not with the link broken as it was.

The jingle of the chain's cleaved ends, dangling in the wind, seemed to register so softly in the confines of his helm. He almost expected it to be carried off into the snow blowing around him, melting away as though it were just a mirage.

She's all I have left.

The frown beneath his helm's vox grill deepened.

The creature he had struck down mere moments ago was sitting upright again already. Whatever twisted force had kept its parody of a human body moving before, had driven it with the strength and instinct to avoid being cleaved apart, still remained. It pulled at the body's dangling arms and hunched shoulders with irregular hitches. Sent quivers through the sheets of black hair that hung before its face.

And yet its flesh was as cold as the corpse which lay beside his boots, its heart just as still.

Let me see her…

His thumb instinctively brushed up towards the crossguard of the sword, running over the power cell's activation rune. As when he had done so at the start of the battle, as when he had first tried days before, there was no response. The creature's blood continued to run streaks down the stony silver length of the blade, washing over the coats of dark red that had been ripped from the others before it.

The creature, despite having found the strength to right itself, made no effort to fully rise to its legs, nor to crawl away, nor to defend itself.

His other hand, the battered armor knuckles speckled with bone fragments, reached over his fractured breastplate. He grasped the hilt of the creature's sword, still embedded in his pauldron.

A fresh surge of warnings flared in his thoughts as he yanked it free, that unknown metal scraping against frozen and brittle ceramite. Ice-coated particles skittered down from the breach in his pauldron, ripped loose. He ignored them, bringing the creature's weapon level to his gaze, helm's red lenses skimming over the length of the black blade. Over the dark red fluid that slathered its tip, the same corrupted blood that coated the blade he wielded.

He glanced back to the creature. The irregular motions coursing through its body had settled somewhat by now. He could see its eyes, cast firmly downwards in a solemn blankness that felt all too familiar.

He could see the frost-crusted sigil which remained just beneath the creature's neck, the dulled metal bearing a noticeable scar where his strike had grazed it.

The ice trembled as he stepped past the fur-clad corpse at his feet. He let the creature's weapon fall from his hand and clatter down next to the human's body.

His legs and the armor encasing them propelled him into strides that seemed to urge him into a sprint, urge him to match the furious rhythm of his hearts.

His teeth ground together. His pace remained steady.

Even then, the space between him and the creature closed all too quickly. He saw its shoulders hike forwards, its eyes squeeze shut. Its hands, the fingers he had briefly glimpsed conjuring hellish swathes of witch-fire, laid limp in its blood-damp lap.

The barred soles of his boots ground to a halt when he was a mere pace outside of striking distance from it. His weapon remained at his side, the bloodstained blade inert, clasped in an armored hand that, perhaps, was never meant to wield it. The metal links of the broken chain upon its crossguard jingled softly.

He could see the creature's lips parting, its chest contracting beneath the damp fabric of its garments, expelling a heatless breath into the wind.

No pity.

Countless foes had already fallen before the blade, whether pulverized by the power field, or cleaved apart by the cold metal underneath.

No remorse.

Whether it had been chained to the hand of Sword Brother Mortis, or his own.

What was so different about this one?

No-

His vox caster snarled to life.

"What are you?"

Its eyelids snapped open.

It raised one hand. Its arm was possessed by such a trembling lethargy that he couldn't mistake it for an act of aggression, even though every neuron that bridged his body to his armor seemed to pulse with furor. Its quivering fingers brushed locks of raven hair out of its face.

And then it turned up to him, its eyes piercing through the distance that remained between them. Its pale visage remained blank, its lips parting only to allow the frigid air to swell into its corpse of a body.

And so he asked again. His vox caster suppressed the slightest tremor that had wormed its way into his voice with metallic spite.

"What are you?"

It froze, mouth hanging open mid-breath, fingers tangled in a few strands of hair. It blinked, its expressionless irises flickering.

He inched his left boot forward, the barred soles scraping over the ice. His right arm hefted the sword clasped in his hand upward ever so slightly. The creature's gaze didn't break from his, the starkly unnatural shade of its eyes piercing through the lenses of his helm.

When it finally spoke, its wispy words were nearly lost to the wind blowing past them.

"I'd like to ask you the same thing."

There was a husky melancholy that weighed down its voice, that mirrored the slump of its ragged body.

"You are in no position to ask anything," he answered coldly, the words seething through his helm with a guttural reverb.

The creature's gaze swiveled away, the ponderous arc of those amber-trimmed irises falling down to the bloodied blade that he carried.

"And you are?"

His grip tensed, his flesh coiling beneath the black plating that had been soiled by the creature's blood. The creature's hand trailed down the side of its cheek, tracing the salty path that had been blazed by a long-frozen tear droplet.

Eventually, its fingers brushed down to the wound in its other arm, absentmindedly running over the blood-slick folds of skin and damp cloth that surrounded the fissure hewn into its flesh.

"It doesn't make much of a difference whether I answer or not, does it?"

The blade he held snapped up to its neck in a flash, the nerves bridging his body to armor surging with an instinct that escaped conscious thought. The tip stopped just short of spearing through the sigil which was stitched into the collar of the creature's garments. His twin hearts pumped fervently, each heart seeming to pull the synthetic muscle of his armor in a different direction.

"I would know why this human gave the last of his breath begging for your survival."

The creature's eyes drifted back to his own, its chin angling back up, unheeding of how the motion brought its neck inching ever so closer to cold metal that was already sodden in its blood.

"I ask you this one last time, creature, if you wish to court death, then hold your tongue as you see fit: what are you?"

A frigid silence fell between them.

The creature's lips curled out of the façade of a smile they had been holding. They did not budge, they did not quiver, and the only response he heard to his ultimatum was the muted howl of the wind.

Don't hurt her.

Why?

Perhaps that was one more thing he simply was not meant to know.

His arm coiled to deliver the execution stroke, to shatter the sigil that rested dully upon the creature's neck. The sigil that mirrored the eight-pointed star of the archenemy. The fact that it bore such a striking resemblance- that was all he needed to know, wasn't it?

A gust of snow drifted by, small particles prickling quietly against his armor.

"I'm a vampire."

A breath rasped out from behind his vox grill, the numb silence and stillness which had taken root in his bones seeming to tremble with the expulsion of air.

It was said, amongst the Chapter, that the discovery of just onevampire had warranted the intervention of an entire Crusade. That the act of slaying it was what had risen their current High Marshal to the ranks of the Sword Brethren in the first place. That others of its wretched ilk were so rare, they had been thought by many to be merely an old Terran myth.

He had never seen one. None of his Brothers had either. He wondered if they could've recognized this thing before him now as one by sight. If Brother Guillame would've given the kill order that he needed to hear now.

Please don't hurt her.

"You want to know why this human… Cedric- stood by me?" A droplet spilled out from the shimmering red orb of its eye onto its cheek.

Its eyelids drooped, as though the weight of the snowflakes balancing on its eyelashes was too much to bear.

"It's because he didn't care what I was. Vampire, royalty- it didn't matter to him. Maybe only because he didn't really know the sorts of things that the clan has done. Maybe that let him see past all… this."

Its knuckles grazed against the tip of the sword held to its throat, fingers snaking around the metal sigil beneath its neck. They twisted and pulled. The star came loose from its stitching, a few threads dangling like cut puppet strings as it plummeted down to the ground. It clattered unceremoniously against the ice to the side of the vampire's leg, as dull as it had been when it was latched to the vampire's garments.

"I thought I could help him- I wanted to help him. Maybe that just… made things worse for him."

It inhaled a shaky breath. Its throat contracted and relaxed with the motion, its skin dangerously close to the tip of the blade.

"But what's done is done."

Its eyes flickered shut, its lips still trembling.

When those eyes snapped open again, they were cleared of the tears that had been swimming within them. Vivid, stark red staring back at him.

He did not respond, his tongue frozen as though the chill of the alien world outside had sunk its claws through his armor like the foul abomination he had put down before this one.

"That chain." Those two simple words seemed to make the jingling metal links ring like cathedral bells. "Cedric told me he was plagued by visions, voices, leading him towards it."

Its eyes seemed to pierce through the lenses of his helm.

"Does it belong to you?"

His thoughts floundered in the cold trickle of data that his armor continued to feed to the void inside his helm. The breaches in his armor could not be sealed. Just as the machine spirit in the blood-tainted sword he held could not be placated, just as the chain which was cast over it could not be reforged.

"I cannot decide that."

The vampire's gaze sharpened into a glare. The rest of its face, uncanny in its pale resemblance to a human's, took on an expression as cold as the snow drifting past them.

"What can you decide, then?"

His tongue remained still, tense with the deathlike rigor that gripped his armor.

His heartbeats pounded in his ears like primitive war drums.

He'd not needed the guiding voice of Brother Guillame to strike down the other creatures that had been pursuing this vampire. He'd not needed the blessing of the Chapter to wield the now-dormant blade he held during that battle.

'Suffer not the unclean to live.' 'Abhor the witch, destroy the witch.' Two simple vows were all that had been needed to flood his veins with numbing fury, to erase the doubts that had weighed upon him so before battle.

What had changed?

The remnants of his tabard fluttered against his armor, torn by claws, scorched by sorcerous lightning. Inky tatters were all that remained of the black cross emblazoned on the soiled white fabric.

There was no malice to be seen within the unnatural eyes of the vampire. No treacherous sleight of its cold and limp hands.

"It is not my place to decide." The fearsome bellow of his vox caster echoed hollowly back at him.

"If you will not decide, will you listen?"

The alien winds howled by, snow grazing against his battered armor.

Please don't hurt her.

The vampire's eyes were alight with vividness, even as its tainted blood trickled out from the wound in its arm and ran down to its fingers.

A sigh wisped out from its lips, the wind unable to drown out that soft sound.

The hand of its intact arm crept across the ice, the stride of its fingers deliberate and overt. His lenses watched the wounded arm instead, images of witch-fire springing to life in its hands fresh in the stream of memories that flowed in the back of his helm.

Not a single ember of warmth could be seen in its palms now.

A single one of its fingers grazed against supple parchment. His helm pivoted, the fibres beneath his cracked gorget craning only so slightly to follow where the vampire pointed to. An embroidered scroll lay on the ice at its side, the spiderwebs of lines faintly visible in the scroll's surface almost seeming to pulse at its touch.

"It's said that written within this scroll is a prophecy. One that says the sun will be blotted out, and eternal darkness will fall upon the land."

The tremor which eked through his nerves was swallowed up by his armor. It trickled down to his arm, the tension beneath the plating coiled without release.

"My... father… will stop at nothing to reclaim it. To bring that prophecy to fruition."

For a moment, it seemed as though the blade he held slid forward on its own, as though the machine spirit within the blood-tarnished weapon possessed such righteous fury that it could manifest the strike its wielder could not make.

It was not so. The chain weighed upon the sword just as it did his hand.

The vampire that slid its own head forward. Its voice swelled, an uncanny conviction lacing the husky velvet tones which sliced through the frosty air that separated them.

"He can't be allowed to do that."

His helm drifted back to its unwavering gaze. Every heatless breath it took brought its skin grazing against the bloodstained point of the blade levelled at its neck.

One second passed, and the razor point nicked a micro-fissure into its throat. Another trickled by, and this time a thin droplet of blood slipped out from the point of contact.

"Why would you stand against your own kin?"

The colors within its eyes so vivid that they seemed to cast an unnatural light of their own.

"Not every vampire in my father's court wants to see the prophecy fulfilled- but the rest follow my him fanatically. You've seen how bold they can get already. Their actions would bring the wrath of the entire mortal realm down the clan."

Its voice remained level, softer than he had heard it before, but enduring in the howl of the icy wind nonetheless.

"Maybe running away with their scroll just made it worse. Maybe it's already too late for them as it is. But the rest of the world shouldn't be made to suffer in eternal darkness."

There was no reason to believe it was lying. Perhaps that was what made what it said all the more difficult to process. He saw its gaze trail past him for a moment, an instinct in the back of his mind knowing that it was looking towards the fallen human and not its discarded weapon.

His sword arm drew back, the coils of force that had been tightening within his synthetic and flesh muscle at last unravelling. His own movements seemed to pass in a blur as the blade raised up over his head.

And then it arced down. The vampire's eyes closed, a porcelain mask of serenity washing over its dead flesh. Its neck went slack, its shoulders slumped. The blade struck down before it could so much as expel the breath gathering in its lightly nicked throat. The bloodstained edge fell upon the metal sigil by the vampire's side, in an empty mimicry of an executioner's stroke that should have cleaved its head from shoulders long ago. The accursed eight-pointed star fractured on contact, the splintering sound of the dull metal it was cast from ringing hollow in his helm.

The vampire, no less intact than it had been moments earlier, flinched. He saw the flesh between its eyes pinch, saw its shoulders jerk upwards. It froze in the midst of its micro-contortions, head angled just slightly away from the blade resting against the ice beside it.

His arms returned to his sides swiftly, his armor refusing to let the quaking shivers that threatened to overtake his flesh break his posture. The blade slid past the vampire as it retracted, not another drop of its blood staining the stony silver alloy.

The vampire's eyes peeled open, slowly, as though struggling against some invisible force holding its eyelids shut. His entire body and armor both remained rooted to the ice, unable to much as muster the force to turn his helm away from the thing's eyes. The amber-trimmed red irises beneath its eyelashes swelled like alien suns on the horizon.

A numb silence fell over them both, the dimmed glare of the sun above filtering down to them through swirling clouds of snow.

He whispered to himself, beneath the snarl of his vox caster, as he had many times in the past days and nights. The meaning of the words was lost to the alien wind, swallowed by its quiet howl- but if he strained his ears just enough, delved far back enough into the stream of memories trickling down his helm, he could almost feel his Brothers chanting alongside him once more. Kneeling within the candlelit holds of the Oriflamme, drifting amongst the stars beyond, waiting to one day be reunited with the Crusade Fleet.

His free hand took hold of the chain draped over the sword he held, sluggishly working to tie it into a knot over the crossguard.

"Without the dark, there can be no light…"