Book One: Baptism by Fire
Chapter 2: The Siren Stars
"Burn the heretic! Kill the mutant! Purge the unclean!" – Imperial War Cry
"MAIM, KILL, BURN! MAIM, KILL, BURN!" - Khornate War Cry
Yang sat a solitary vigil beside Hilde's hasty, shallow grave. She felt cold. Numb. It was not the first time she'd seen war, but it had never been so vicious and cruel. Never so sudden and bloody. Vadiik - freshly returned to consciousness - draped a warm woolen cloak over her shoulders. Yang's clothes were soaked through with blood.
She pulled the cloak tight. Brushing sweat-laden locks away from her face, she turned her head to the sky. It was a beautiful day, one that completely ignored the carnage it had seen that morning. After hours furious fighting, the PDF - which Yang learned meant 'planetary defense force' - managed to repel the heretic raid, pushing the maniacs back into their ships and off Woadia.
"How could they do this?" Yang sniffed
Vadiik did not respond immediately, instead drawing a cigarette from within her greatcoat.
"They are heretics, Miss Long." Dried blood caked her coat and arms.
"But it's…" Yang hunched over, hands and knees meeting the cold, hard earth. She would have vomited if she had anything left in her stomach. The image of Hilde's head sitting on that monster's trophy rack... "Oh, Dust. It's so horrible." She still expected to wake up in some gutter in Vale, far away from this repugnant place.
"This is what heretics do," Vadiik said. "They reave and rape and kill at the behest of their foul masters. Or for their own twisted fun." A small, dark laugh. "This is the least I have seen them do."
"How can you be so calm about this?" Yang demanded.
"Miss Long, I've served in the Imperial Guard for forty-five years. I've fought every manner of xenos, every color of Chaos. I've killed orks and cultists by the score. Even fought Eldar and Necrons. Not many Guardsmen can claim that."
Yang sighed. She had no idea what the older woman was talking about. "So you're used to this?" She asked. "All this pointless suffering?"
Vadiik took a long drag. Her cigarette turned to ash, crumbling away in the gentle breeze. She stamped it out, grinding it into a broken heretic corpse.
"Rage is one hell of an anesthetic," she muttered eventually.
Yang tried to process that. Process everything. She wasn't in Vale anymore, or even Remnant for that matter. She had been spirited away to another world entirely, thrust into a conflict more brutal and bloody than any she had faced before. Why? How? What was I doing that landed me here? Vadiik interrupted her thoughts.
"The more I think about it, the more I realize that you weren't fucking with me back in the station."
"What do you mean, ma'am?"
"You have no idea where you are, do you?"
Yang shook her head. "I don't think I'm on the same planet I… hm. Have you heard of Remnant?"
"Remnant?" Vadiik asked. "Remnant of what?"
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Yang's throat worked as she sank within herself. Impossible. This is impossible. Vadiik patted her back.
"Easy now," she said. As gently as she could.
"What happened to me?" Yang asked. "What's going on? How are we even speaking the same language?"
"Easy, Miss Long," Vadiik said. "You're speaking low gothic just as clear as I've ever heard it," she answered. "Not a hint of an accent."
"I'm speaking Lilt," Yang said. "The language of… Remnant."
"Your homeworld?"
"I… guess?" Yang said. She'd never truly thought of Remnant as a 'home'. Just Patch.
Just Ruby.
"I've heard gothic called other things before," Vadiik said dismissively, lighting up another cigarette. "I wouldn't worry about it." Once more, she sucked down a long drag. "The problem is that you don't know how you got here. And you've never heard of the Emperor?"
Yang shook her head.
"As I thought," Vadiik said. "I don't think there's another human like you in the Imperium." She paused. "Most would call you a heretic and shoot you where you stand. Others would call you tainted, but no one as squeamish as you would ever turn heretic. So Miss Long, you're fine in my book. And Emperor Above, you fight harder than any soldier I've ever seen. You killed more heretics than my entire task force combined."
"I did what I could," Yang said. "It wasn't enough."
Vadiik laughed, a cold and bitter sound. "It's never enough, Miss Long. Humanity is under attack. From every segmentum of the galaxy. We need someone like you."
Galaxy? Yang decided to process that later.
"Ma'am," She said, "I've been an adventurer for most of my life. Every fight, every monster was a new challenge. Another chance to prove myself. But this… this is insane!"
Vadiik rested a heavy hand on her shoulder. "You can handle it," the old woman insisted.
"I don't know," Yang said. "I don't know anything about where I am or what the Imperium is or what heretics are. I'm lost. I'm so lost and I don't know anything."
"You'll learn. And I'll teach you."
Yang wrapped the older woman in her arms. "Thank you," she managed. "I guess I just want to help… and still, I still feel that itch. I'm still an adventurer at heart, I guess. Even in this fucked-up place." Vadiik seemed stunned by the gesture, but she eventually returned it, settling her head into the mass of flaxen hair.
"The Emperor protects, Miss Long."
"And just who is this Emperor?"
Vadiik sighed. "We have a long way to go."
After securing the village and piling the heretic corpses atop a towering pyre, Vadiik escorted Yang back to her house. Dusk had reached them, bathing the hills of farmland in a yellow-orange glow, while the maize drew long and shifting shadows.
"Make yourself at home," Vadiik said, gesturing at the cottage before them.
Vadiik's home stood apart from the rest of the village, its design quite unlike its neighbors. Built from solid grey brick, it looked sturdy, defensible - more a bunker than a home in truth. Yet there was a garden in the back, where long grapevines overlooked row after row of fruits and vegetables Yang didn't recognize.
A screened-in wooden porch extended from the facade, Vadiik's only concession to comfort. Within it stood a single homemade rocking chair with a battered guitar leaning against it. Removing a heavy keyring from her greatcoat, Vadiik unlatched her front door. It took her awhile - there were a lot of locks.
"Clothes off," she said, placing a bucket at Yang's feet. "You're not tracking heretic blood in here."
Yang didn't protest. Blood by the gallon still clung to her, heavy and wet, congealed against her skin. She stripped carefully - the last thing she wanted to do was violate Vadiik's hospitality. Something told her she wouldn't have it better anywhere else.
"There's a shower in the back," Vadiik said, pointing down a hall.
The interior of her house was the antithesis to the outside - souvenirs and photographs lined the walls, covered a dozen shelves. Below them stood just as many bookcases, each packed tight with massive volumes with worn-out spines and yellowed pages.
Above a central fireplace hung more eagle iconography, along with a few medals, photos, and a stand covered in rusted dog tags.
"Shower," Vadiik reminded her. "You'll have time to gawk later. With clothes on."
"Right," Yang said. "Sorry."
She entered the bathroom. Like everything else in the house, it smelled like Vadiik's weird cigarettes. Another framed photo sat face-down on the countertop - it'd been left there. Shutting the door, Yang flipped it over.
A much younger Vadiik in military garb stood at the forefront of a full squad of soot-stained soldiers, her lips pressed against a comrade's cheek. Even though the picture was black and white, Yang could see the man blushing scarlet red.
She flipped it back over. It was time for a shower.
Yang spent the next few days at Vadiik's house learning about the world. But 'world' was far too small a word to describe the breadth of the Imperium. It was a regime that spanned the breadth of the entire galaxy, centered around a distant world called Holy Terra, the supposed birthplace of mankind. Of all the things the old veteran had told her, Yang still struggled to conceptualize the immeasurable vastness of space.
According to Vadiik, humanity had long ago reached the stars, filling millions of worlds with trillions upon trillions of souls. Yang's mouth dropped when she heard that - Remnant barely had a few hundred million lives spread across its surface, holed up in the relative safety of the Four Kingdoms.
Trying to parse the Imperium's logistics made her head hurt.
But Yang knew Vadiik told the truth - she wasn't regurgitating propaganda or making bold claims out of fanatic loyalty. Yang heard how the old veteran had personally witnessed an infinitesimal sliver of mankind's dominion, warring across dozens of worlds in her service to the Imperial Guard - the Imperium's trillions-strong military.
The prospect of visiting a world other than Remnant was strange enough to Yang, let alone a dozen. Millions. She plumbed Vadiik for details about each, listened raptly as the veteran recounted stories of towering 'hive cities' packed with billions, of vast agriworlds like Woadia that fed the Imperium, of exotic planets with vast pillars of stone, blood-red seas, and silvery, metallic rains.
Yang found the history of the galaxy endlessly fascinating. She wasn't as studious as Weiss or a bookworm like Blake, but she still found herself poring over history books and religious writings - which, she soon found, were usually one and the same.
The village began to rebuild around them, recovering from the raid. More thought was given to its defense, and large berms were shoveled into place - wards that would help to repel future attacks. Yang joined the villagers when she wasn't with Vadiik. The backbreaking labor felt good.
When night came, the stars were different. Alien. Dominating the sky was a purple swathe of seething light, as beautiful as it was ominous - the Eye of Terror, according to Vadiik. Yang thought the name fit.
In the morning, she learned about the Imperium of Man, of its structure and its enemies. Like the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, which had stormed the village just five days ago. Following four terrible, unknowable deities that hailed from the Warp, they sowed violence and horror wherever they tread.
This 'Warp' was mind-bending to Yang. Apparently, it was a region of utter, raw emotion, ceaselessly shifting and home to legions of daemons. However, Vadiik explained, this region is also utilized by humanity, harnessed in order to traverse the stars and maintain its borders.
But Chaos was not all that threatened mankind. Aliens, which Vadiik insistently referred to as 'xenos', were no friends to humanity. Yang would have scoffed at the impossibility of all the varied flavors of alien if Vadiik had not killed so many of them herself. When she asked Vadiik about why the Imperium was at war with so many xenos, she learned - at length - the unfathomable depths of mankind's xenophobia and hatred for the impure. Best not mention the faunus. Yang realized Vadiik was radically more accepting than others, but even still, she spat and frothed over the evils of the inhuman. And something about... witches? Si-kers? Psychers? Wasn't that what the Traitor Marine called me? Didn't matter. That bastard was dead.
And while Chaos was hard to accept, the most difficult and baffling lectures were those that focused on the God-Emperor. His worship was universal among the citizens of the Imperium, ever-present and domineering in its authority. This Emperor apparently sat on something called the Golden Throne of Terra, guiding and protecting Humanity in a deathless, catatonic state.
The claims Vadiik made about him were impressive, sure, but Yang surmised that much of the actual history of his rule and rise to power was buried or twisted under religious dogma and ritual. Even so, she didn't bash her head against the text trying to make sense of it. This was how things worked here.
Yang knew one thing for sure- Death and war thrive in this galaxy.
It was the likely reason why she felt the malevolence around her all the time, stirring and pulsing in the air. Maybe it was the week-old battleground, maybe not. She struggled to imagine her friends inhabiting such a cruel lacep.
Eventually, the books were finished, Vadiik's lectures exhausted. Wanderlust ate at Yang again, as it always did. She felt compelled to explore, to seek a life beyond the rows of wheat and maize that surrounded her. Pondering the veteran's teachings, she wondered what it would be like to soar through the stars, to see new worlds and new peoples. She wanted to be a real Huntress again, even though no such concept existed in the Imperium.
But there was something close enough.
"Well, Miss Long?" Vadiik asked, strumming her guitar. The sound was sparse and lonely, but warm as well. Comforting.
"Well what, Ma'am?" Yang asked. They sat on the woman's porch, watching the sun dip below the rolling hills. The corpse-smell that had pervaded the village had mostly dissipated.
"Where are you going to go?" Vadiik returned. "What will you make of life in the Imperium?" She gave a small laugh. "Though I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to off yourself."
Yang already knew her answer.
The next morning, she recovered her old clothes. Inside one of the pockets was a slip of paper, her first clue that something was off. Red stains lined the edges, but it was still readable. She packed her clothes from Remnant away but kept her gloves. Everything else she stuffed into rucksack.
Yang stood outside the officer's home, rucksack slung across her back. She was wearing Vadiik's old Guard attire - a green t-shirt she'd cut short to reveal her midriff and give her chest some breathing room, as well as some old fatigues she'd rolled up to her thighs and tied tight with a plain black belt. Simple, but serviceable. A little drab for her tastes, but showing up downtown with her regular duds would raise too many questions. And if Yang learned one thing from Vadiik's lectures, it was that questions in the Imperium were dangerous things.
Ember Celica remained on her wrists, the reinforced dust-alloy shotgun-gauntlets a reassuring and familiar presence. She could put away her clothes, but she would never hide her weapons.
"Goodbye, Miss Long," Vadiik said. The ever-present cigarette twirled lazily in her fingers.
"Goodbye, Ma'am. Thank you… for everything," Yang said. "I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met you."
"Probably would have died I think," Vadiik replied, the ghost of a smile on her face. "But don't worry, I have a feeling we'll meet again. Imperium's a big place." She waved, and Yanag started off down the road.
"By the way!" Yang called as she walked further and further away from the village. "My last name isn't 'Long'! It's Xiao Long. Two words!"
"That's nice, Miss Long."
Yang left, heading into Aesbrouth. It was a two-day walk, but nothing she hadn't done before. She slept beneath the stars. Still alien, yet closer than they'd ever been. Nestling into long stalks of grass, she looked up at the inky blackness, and each dot of light, each nimbus of flickering white flame… the vastness took her breath away. She could spend her entire life traversing the Imperium of Man. The thought brought a smile to her face, one that lasted until sleep took her.
When she reached the city the next day, her mouth hung open, awestruck at how unimaginably vast it was up close. The smallest of the skyscrapers dwarfed Beacon, and each building was built in the same manner - sheer, soaring, bleak. Busts, eagles, and statues adorned almost every corner, lending a mystic and ancient feel to the city. Citizens giggled and mocked her as she marveled, but she ignored them. She'd never seen anything like this before.
After a few hours of wandering around in the shadows of the colossal buildings, she found her destination - the Departmento Munitorum depot. It was a titanic structure surrounded by swarms of ships, each one carrying dozens of shipping crates into the sky. Entering the depot, Yang found herself at the back of a long queue. Men and women in the hundreds lined up before a towering lectern, one that rose almost two stories above them. Dozens of servitors scratched and scribbled, while some typed furiously on goliath-sized computers. The man-machine hybrids still unnerved her, but the oddities of the Imperium's gritty and rudimentary technology were noticed by no one but herself.
No one said very much - Yang guessed their minds were still on the attack. The longer she stood in line however, she realized that she was drawing quite a few stares. Yang decided it was probably her height and blonde hair. Like the village, each Woadian citizen was short-statured and brown-skinned with whitish hair.
A kid no older than sixteen attempted to catch furtive glances at her while he waited his turn. He was a tiny little runt, probably just reached Yang's bust. Unlike the others, his hair had been hewn at the sides, and he was missing bits from his left ear. Yang grinned. Catching his eye on his next attempt, she threw him a quick wink. He blushed furiously, and she bit her tongue to keep from laughing.
When her turn finally came, she handed the servitor the little stub. It scanned the paper before making a mark in a colossal ledger.
"RECRUIT REGISTERED FOR DUTY IN ASTRA MILITARUM." A rear of paper spat out from the lectern. They were registration forms and instructions on where to begin her tour of duty. She beamed. The Imperial Guard was her ticket to the stars. They were waiting, those countless dim lights, and Yang wouldn't deny them any longer.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed the chapter! You might say that Yang's not the one to sign up for the military, but I think since it's the closest thing to being a Huntress, and she'd jump at the chance to have her old life back. Yang is an adventurer after all.
Addendum (05/31/2019): This chapter has undergone minor revisions! I think it flows a lot better than it used to, and I added a brief scene describing Vadiik's home.