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The Anchor of Vaul
745.M32
Teleportation was always a dangerous and risky endeavour. To pass through the Empyrean, however briefly, was not something the weak-minded could survive, and even the greatest and strongest-willed warrior was at the mercy of chance's cruel whims. Such were the tactical advantages the technology provided, however, that generations of Humanity's finest had continued to make use of it despite the hideous risks it presented, and the countless martyrs who had been lost in transit, condemned to a fate infinitely worse than death.
The Fire of Dawn's Teleportarium was a relic from the Dark Age of Technology, scavenged from the ruins the Heresy had made of Mars' once-great forge-cities without the tech-priests' knowledge and secretly added into the battle-barge's structure. It was far bigger and more reliable than those used by other Space Marine Chapters, capable of displacing entire Companies of warriors at the same time. It had delivered the Grey Knights to hundreds of battlefields, and only very rarely taken the life of even one of them in return.
It was also the only teleportation device in the entire Imperial (and probably Eldar) fleet capable of penetrating the shroud of space-time anomalies that surrounded the Anchor of Vaul. And even that had its limits : the closer to the singularity atop the Anchor it tried to lock, the worse the conditions got. In the end, they had aimed for a point behind the known enemy lines, a few dozen kilometers above the floor where the allied forces had disembarked inside the Anchor.
One hundred and eight Grey Knights materialized inside a maintenance corridor vast enough for an Imperator Titan to walk across it, accompanied by three Inquisitors and their most trustworthy and deadly agents.
Most Grey Knights present belonged to the Second and Eighth Brotherhoods, with a few squads from the other Brotherhoods who had been present on Titan when the distress call from Azarok had arrived. There had been more, but over half the strength they had been able to muster had needed to be scattered across the Sector, to prevent threats no less apocalyptic than the Nightmare Fleet to come to pass. Those who remained would be enough to stop the great madness of the Awakened One.
They would have to be.
Surrounded by monsters and with an hourglass in front of him, Asim waited. The Sorcerer Lord knelt beneath a ceiling of black metal and silver lines that pulsed with light. The floor beneath him was a perfectly reflective surface, the reason for which he couldn't begin to guess. By the standards of this place, the ceiling was low, barely ten meters above the head of the Sorcerers.
The glow of eye-lenses and smouldering hellfire was reflected above and below, adding to the silver illumination and casting the Sorcerers of the Coven and their creations in sinister and shifting shadows. They were a terrible sight, of the kind Imperial preachers might have used to threaten the unfaithful with if their imagination was not so laughably limited. Six Daemon Lords, incarnated within the bodies of cloned Primarchs. Seventy-nine daemonhosts, held only by the loosest of bindings. Thousands of Dark Mechanicum skitarii and their heretek handlers, in whose augmetics and flesh coursed the Warp-born lightning of Argenta Primus.
It was a host capable of laying waste to worlds, a parade of horrors that could bring Space Marine Chapters to extinction, and trigger daemonic incursions and pandemonium across entire systems. But Asim had witnessed the might of the Grey Knights, and it doubted it would be enough.
Slowly, inevitably, the hourglass' grains fell down. The glass had been made from the sand of a beach where a hundred battles had been fought between warring nations, the grains within were the ashes of a king, and the wodden support from a tree that had been watered with the blood of human sacrifices for a thousand years. In the correct hands, the hourglass was a powerful ritual tool, capable of rending the veil of reality and bring forth the hosts of Chaos in all their dark glory.
Right now, however, its sole purpose was to mark the passage of time.
Arken had ordered Asim that, when the hourglass was empty, he was to take all the monsters with him and go find the Heirs of Sanguinius and the Guardsmen, slaughter them all, feed their souls to the Neverborn and make new daemonhosts of their corpses. But the Awakened One had also warned him that as long as Asim fully intended to obey that order, he would never have to.
Such a pronouncement might seem strange, and a cause for concern coming from someone as steeped in the powers of the Warp as Asim's liege lord was. But Arken wasn't going mad. Asim had understood his implication without needing to be told : so long as his decision to take his host against the Imperial forces was certain, the Grey Knights would come to stop him. After all, if the Imperials were dead, the Forsaken Sons would be able to focus their forces to wipe out the Eldars, and after that, the Grey Knights would be overwhelmed and butchered. Facing them now was the only way they could hope to accomplish their mission, which meant that it was guaranteed the knights of Titan would come into his trap – they simply didn't have a choice.
To manipulate your enemy so that they were forced to do what you wanted them to do even if they realized the trap – such was the beauty of Arken's design, the same vision that had scattered the might of the Grey Knights across Azarok, turning the hammer of the False Emperor into a much frailer arrow. Of course, the arrow could still kill if it reached its target, which was why Asim intended to make sure the Grey Knights didn't go any further.
In the hourglass, the last grain of ash fell down. Asim looked up, toward the door at the end of the room, one of many leading into this chamber. It was opening, and behind it he saw the glint of silver armor. He felt the familiar presences of the Grey Knights, burning at the edge of his perception like a flame held too close to the skin. There were other souls, mortal ones : the killers of the Inquisition, no doubt, sent alongside the Grey Knights to provide what little support they could. He recognized some of them from when he and Carthago had crippled the organization.
And there was another soul, too, one Asim felt he should recognize but did not. It was powerful, its power blazing in the Empyrean with the same sort of power Arken now possessed, though its nature was entirely opposite to the Awakened One's.
The Sorcerer of Blood smiled as he stood up. It was a cold and bitter smile, hidden under his helm, but it was a smile nonetheless.
+And now,+ he silently sent to his brothers and their creations, +we begin.+
The first of the monsters had been born of Angron's blood. Fleshmaster Savarkan had used the vitae of twenty former World Eaters, spilled in the Hand of Ruin's gladiatorial pits, and the gene-seed of ten more as the basis for this Child of Woe. It was over three and a half meters tall, with a body made of bleeding muscle and pearl-white bone. The axe it held in its clawed hands was only an imitation of Gorefather and Gorechild, the Red Angel's legendary weapons, but that didn't make it any less deadly.
With a single swipe, it cut through three Grey Knights, before over twenty storm-bolters opened fire on it at once. Dozens of blessed shells slammed into its incarnate form, obliterating it and sending the Daemon Lord within back to the Warp for the first time in thousands of years.
There were still five more coming behind it, and the sight of their kindred's destruction didn't trouble them. They enjoyed the strong bodies Asim had provided them, but even banishment to the Realms of Chaos was a step up from their former imprisonment, and the bargain binding them to the Forsaken Sons' cause was iron-clad.
Besides, they too hated the Grey Knights, and revelled in the opportunity to spill the blood of the Anathema's last creations. And so, as the Sorcerers and daemonhosts rained hellfire on the ranks of the Grey Knights from afar, joined by the Dark Mechanicum skitarii, the Children of Woe fought their first and last battle.
A formless mass of flesh dotted with thousands of weeping eyes devoured Grey Knights with half a dozen maws, smashing at others with a great power maul held in deceptively thin tentacles, until it was burned to ash by combi-flamers and psychic fire, a terrible, mournful cry echoing over the sound of its warped flesh burning away into nothing.
Inquisitor Silviana, who had survived Asim's attack on the Conclave, the subsequent collapse of Inquisitorial headquarters in the Sector, and the crossing of the Path to Nightmares, saw her metal body rust before her augmetic eyes under the touch of a skeletally thin pale giant covered in a black shroud before it ripped out her brain case and crushed it. Seconds later, Inquisitor Alphon cut its head off, fuming with grief-fuelled anger at his failure to rescue his colleague in time.
At the same time, another group of Grey Knights struggled against an elongated, eight-legged horror with leathery wings, a circular maw full of pointed teeth, and one single, perfect arm holding up a great shard of the broken Mirror of Shox-Tharx, which Merchurion had forged into a blade and affixed upon a pommel. Despite its apparent fragility, the shard-blade sliced right through the knights' armor, and the hungry maw swallowed the pieces of its victims without care for the vengeful cries of their brothers. Eventually, it was brought low, and while the beast writhed under the blades of several Nemesis spears, one of the Chapter's Librarians smote it with a pillar of eldritch lightning infused with the potency of the Emperor's Gift.
Six pairs of arms with too many joints extended from the bloated torso of another Child of Woe, holding a trio of great swords in grips no sane master-at-arms would ever have approved of. The skin of that Child of Woe was covered in pale scales, and its purple eyes were filled with a mix of maddened horror and the vicious joy of the Daemon Lord riding the body. The blades cut through ceramite armor like axes chopping through wood, and the Child's unholy agility let it slither around the bolter fire aimed at it by the Grey Knights.
Then Janus reached it, and it died.
The Supreme Grand Master towered over the other Grey Knights, taller even than their Terminators. He wielded the Titansword one-handed, holding in the other a tower shield covered with holy symbols, which he slammed into the face of the white-scaled Child of Woe. It recoiled, screaming in pain as the seraphic power of the shield burned at the infernal essence of the Daemon Lord. Before it could recover, Janus attacked, the Titansword passing between the blades the Child had raised to defend itself, severing its neck in one stroke.
Another monstrosity had taken advantage of the few heartbeats it had taken Janus to kill its kindred to flank the Supreme Grand Master. Metallic tumours festered under its skin, and it looked like it had once possessed two heads which had been melted into a single unholy sight. Alone of its kind, it carried no weapon, for it was simply unable to carry the tools of war crafted for them by Merchurion, but that hardly made it defenceless. It lashed out at Janus with its nine-fingered claws, tearing deep gouges in the Supreme Grand Master's right shoulder paldron.
The Chapter Master stumbled, thrown off-balance by the sheer strength of the blow. But before the Child of Woe could capitalize on that advantage, another Grey Knight, whose armor was far more ornate than that of his brothers and whose psychic power was second only to Janus' own, slammed into its side, bringing it down.
Koios, Grand Master of the Second Brotherhood of the Grey Knights, ignited his blade deep inside the flesh of the last of the abominable Primarch-replicae the Forsaken Sons had deployed against the Emperor's servants. The creature howled with its twinned mouth as the Daemon Lord possessing it struggled to endure, until it could no longer sustain its physical form and died.
Koios briefly wondered where the Forsaken Sons had found so any of the Warp's greatest monsters, and whether they had had any hesitation before creating the monstrosities they had unleashed this day. In the end, it hardly mattered, and they had more pressing concerns to attend to.
Over forty of Koios' battle-brothers had already fallen. Not since the Black Crusade of Abaddon had the Chapter suffered such losses as they had in this war, and yet the consequences of inaction would have been infinitely worse. Koios had shared the Prognosticars' visions of the Nightmare Fleet unleashed. He had seen the traitor Arken raised up by the Ruinous Powers as an incarnated god, directing the daemonships and Abominable Intelligences of the Riaway Noara against the Imperium. He had seen the entire Segmentum burn, the Imperium crippled almost beyond recovery, the thousand years of darkness that followed, and which might all too easily end in the total collapse of the Imperium and the extinction of the galaxy's last hope.
That horrific future may yet come to pass, he knew. Victory against Chaos was never certain. But he, and every Grey Knight, every Imperial aboard the Anchor of Vaul, would give their lives before this happened.
With the last of their great monsters slain, the traitors unleashed their lesser abominations upon the host of the Ordos. Daemonhosts flew, ran and crawled, while rank after rank of Dark Mechanicum cyborgs charged. The Sorcerers cowardly hid behind their slaves, throwing spells at the Grey Knights, forcing the Sons of Titan to cut through the chaff to reach the heretics and bring them to justice for their sins.
Koios fought at Janus' side, the two of them ripping through the skitarii. Repugnant energies dwelled within the cyborgs in vile mockery of the Motive Force their loyalist counterparts held sacred – somehow, they were using the Warp itself as a source of energy. It didn't help them; if anything, it made them even more vulnerable to the Nemesis blades of the Grey Knights.
The Grey Knights didn't fight alone, though they did most of the damage. Protected by his retinue of Storm Troopers, Elydeos Akhaman was confronting a trio of daemonhosts, castigating them with words of power that made the wards on Koios' armor vibrate in sympathetic echoes. One by one, even as the Storm Troopers died in agony to hold them back from their lord, the abominations turned to ash, their bindings undone and the infernal spirits possessing the corpses of the unfortunate wretches the Forsaken Sons had sacrificed banished back to the Warp.
Like most Grey Knights, Koios had his misgivings about the Inquisitor Lord. The files of the Ordo Malleus to which he had access depicted him as edging dangerously close to Radicalism, and the fact he had risen to leadership of the Azarok Conclave on the corpses of his dissenters wasn't exactly reassuring. However, the Supreme Grand Master had told them Elydeos Akhaman was a faithful servant of the Emperor, at least for now. Perhaps, if he survived the Black Crusade, the man might yet succumb to the temptations of the darkness in which he chose to thread to best fight the Archenemy, but he hadn't done so yet.
And then, of course, there was Inquisitor Alphon, who had managed to kill one of the Primarch-replicae in a single blow. There was something about the unimpressive-looking Inquisitor that made Koios, not worried, but definitely wary.
The presence of two such figures might seem strange, but for one thing, they were Inquisitors, and the heirs of the Sigillite were all incredible individuals in the first place : they needed to be in order to survive even a single decade of doing the Emperor's work, regardless of their specialization. And for another, natural selection had most brutally reduced the ranks of the Azarok Conclave, so it should be expected only the truly exceptional had survived.
Or perhaps it was the hand of the Emperor at work. For all that Koios remembered the ideals of the Great Crusade he had once fought in and hadn't embraced the blind zealotry that was spreading ever further through the Imperium's foundations, the Grand Master knew that the Master of Mankind was still active in the galaxy from His entombment on the Golden Throne.
As more daemonhosts and corrupt skitarii were cut down, the Sorcerers began to summon reinforcements. Daemons of Khorne and Tzeentch rose from the corpses that hadn't been burned or emerged from tears in reality cut open by ritual blades, and threw themselves on the Grey Knights. Koios would have expected the Anchor's defenses to prevent this, but then he realized that the blood of the slain Primarch-replicae must have defiled the chamber to such a degree the minions of the Ruinous Powers could now enter the great construction of their ancient enemies.
Killing daemons, however, was the very purpose of the Grey Knights' existence. If the Sorcerers thought to overwhelm them with a tide of Neverborn and Warp-infested cyborgs, then they were fools. Unfortunately, the Black Crusade so far had proven that the Forsaken Sons most definitely weren't fools, unlike so many other Astartes who had lost their path and sworn themselves to Chaos.
Even as he fought with merciless skill, Koios perceived the flow of the wider battle through senses honed by centuries of warfare. Bar some terrible calamity (which he doubted the traitors were holding in reserve, seeing how they had been throwing everything they had at the allied forces since the beginning of this battle), their victory here was assured, though it would not come without a price in irreplaceable Grey Knights. But it would take time, time that they didn't have, for it was for time the Forsaken Sons fought now. They might slay every abomination and their sorcerous masters, only to be too late to stop Arken from unleashing the Nightmare Fleet.
Obviously, this hadn't escaped Janus' attention either.
+Koios,+ came the silent voice of his lord. +I cannot linger here. The works of our foe draw near completion.+
+We'll deal with these heretics then, Lord Janus. Go ! Do what you must.+
The Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights called his retinue about him, twelve warriors clad in Terminator war-plate, each a champion of a thousand battles against the Archenemy. Psychic power gathered around Janus, near-blinding to Koios' second sight, forcing their attackers to step back as a convenient side-effect. The Grand Masters of the Grey Knights were stronger than their brothers, having received the Emperor's Gift from the Master of Mankind Himself, but Janus was one step beyond even that. Koios didn't know the true origins of the Supreme Grand Master, but he had his suspicions, even if he had never voiced them, nor would ever do so lest his words be heard by the Powers his Chapter had been created to oppose.
With a swipe of the Titansword, Janus cut through reality. The aether erupted with the pained screams of daemons as the domain they claimed as theirs was penetrated by the holy light of Him on Earth, and the screams redoubled as Janus and his retinue strode into the opening, passing through the Empyrean to emerge higher up the Anchor, closer to the arch-heretic whose madness threatened to drown the Segmentum in a tide of antediluvian horrors.
Then the rift closed, and the screams grew quieter. Of Janus and his warriors, there was no sign.
Asim cursed under his breath as his sight returned, letting out a string of Tizcan profanities that would have impressed a Space Wolf, if the barbarians had ever bothered to learn the language of the people they had all but exterminated on Horus' behalf. Janus had fled, somehow managing to use teleportation here of all places. If the Sorcerer of Blood or his peers had tried it, they would have been destroyed by the backlash from the Anchor's dimensional anomalies, but somehow he didn't doubt for a moment the Supreme Grand Master had managed to arrive precisely where he intended to.
This, he thought with an unexpected surge of rancid hatred, was the face of the Enemy. It was the will of the False Emperor stamped upon the universe, stifling all opposition to His rule until only He remained as sole corpse-monarch of a sterile cosmos, populated only by the wretches who sang His praises unto eternity. All the horrors of the Realms of Chaos paled in comparison to such an accursed state, for at least within Chaos was the potential for change, for rebirth and renewal.
The Grey Knights called the Forsaken Sons and their kind monsters, but they didn't know the meaning of the word. They were, after all, nothing but mind-wiped children, their bodies transformed by gene-craft, their souls filled with eldritch power so that they could be turned into living weapons, little more than automata dancing to the lingering echoes of a tune whose singer had long since fallen silent.
They had no will of their own, and yet they thought to decide the fate of the galaxy, blindly following the dogma that had been forced inside their skulls. Really, it was a mercy to kill them. Freeing them from their mind-shackles and illuminating them to the true of the universe would have been better, but Arken had been very clear that even attempting such was beyond foolish. The Awakened One had set all of his power to bend Fate to his will here, in the Anchor of Vaul, yet even he didn't think they stood a chance of actually turning a knight of Titan.
No, killing them would have to suffice. It certainly already was difficult enough : even with their leader having left, the remaining Grey Knights were still fighting like devils. They had been winning this fight before Janus' departure, and the Supreme Grand Master's absence wasn't going to be enough to turn the tides. But now that the forces of destiny drawing Arken and Janus toward their inevitable confrontation no longer had any reason to interfere, Asim had options that had gone from suicidal to merely extremely dangerous.
After checking his protections were still up, the Sorcerer of Blood briefly cast his mind into the roiling depths of the Empyrean, and spoke the words that signified his agreement to one of the several pacts he had prepared but not agreed to before the battle had begun. In truth, the bargain was a hasty, half-formed thing. But it would still function : if he killed the Grey Knight Grand Master, the Dark Gods would reward him with the power needed to kill every Grey Knight in this room. It would also most likely destroy him in the process, and the odds he would be able to find a way to return to life after that were slim, though not non-existent. But right now, with the fires of his hate stoked by the ghost of Carthago and the whispers of the Herald of Blood, Asim was willing to make that sacrifice.
"Grand Master !" he shouted, using a trickle of power to make sure his voice was heard over the dim of battle. As he spoke, he advanced through the battle, the skitarii and daemonhosts parting to let him pass. "Would you like to know how Khyron died ?"
After severing the head of another skitarii, the Grey Knight officer turned toward Asim. One of the mortals – the one Asim had faced on Kemyros, and whose tricks had sent him and Carthago back to the Hand of Ruin – recognized the Sorcerer of Blood :
"This one was there when the Conclave was attacked," called out the Inquisitor.
"Indeed I was !" replied Asim with a mocking bow, not taking his gaze off the Grey Knight. "I am Asim, Chosen of Arken. And the Inquisitors at Kemyros died as pitiously as Khyron. I was there when he came to stop us. I saw him burn in the fires lit by the sins of empire, and I heard the last screams of his soul as it fell into the waiting jaws of the Dark Gods. He died, and the Imprisoned escaped its cage beneath Kemyros. I wonder how many worlds will burn as a result ? How many loyal, faithful, obedient Imperial lives will be lost, because the Grey Knights failed ?"
The Grey Knight didn't shake in rage at the provocation, not that Asim had expected him to. The silver-clad killers were entirely too dull for such emotional displays. But the taunt did get the Grand Master's attention, and that was all Asim needed.
"I am Koios," said the swordsman, "and I will be your end, traitor."
Koios was not without anger.
He and Khyron had not been especially close : he had been busy in the Baal system when the former Night Lord had been recruited by the Sigillite, and their duties on Titan had left little time for fraternisation. But the other Grand Master had been his brother nonetheless, and he had felt the echoes of his death through the Empyrean as the Fire of Dawn sailed at full speed to join the Imperial flotilla at Nerel. He had thought that avenging Khyron would have to wait until the end of the Black Crusade, when Arken had been slain and his plans for the Anchor thwarted, but it seemed fate had given him the chance to do so sooner.
A cold anger burned within him. Far from diminishing his concentration, it sharpened it, and Koios used it to stoke the fires of his power as he fought the Chosen of Arken.
Sword met staff, and both weapons flared with psychic power as well as the meeting of their energy fields. Many of the sons of Magnus Koios had met had been merely competent with their weapons, relying instead upon the psychic powers that would lead them to damnation. Asim, however, had clearly mastered the martial side of his weapon as well as its psychic one. As their minds grappled with each other, their weapons continued to clash, neither of them giving one step back.
And still Asim talked, venting the venom that had accumulated in his soul over the centuries of his service to the Ruinous Powers. According to the Grey Knights' intelligence, the Forsaken Sons had spent most of the time since the Heresy inside the Wailing Storm – they were rumored to be the ones who had unleashed it upon the lost Trebedius Sector in the first place. And in all that time, Koios doubted they had met many loyal servants of the Golden Throne, as even the most devout and strong-hearted mortal couldn't survive and stay sane for long in a Warp Storm.
"You will fail too," snarled the Sorcerer Lord in a voice that wasn't entirely his own. Koios could see shapes in his aura, presences that clung to his withered soul, whispering hateful words through his lips. "Again and again, here or somewhere else, it doesn't even matter. You will fail and keep failing, every failure and every victory costing more and more of the lives you were supposed to protect, and the Imperium will slide down into darkness until it finally, mercifully DIES !"
"Never," replied Koios, before letting go of his power sword with his left hand and punching the traitor in the face.
As Asim's head was thrown backward, Koios moved his feet, mag-locked his boots to the mirrored floor, returned to a two-handed grip, and focused his will on the edge of his blade, before making one brutal motion, putting all of his armor-enhanced transhuman strength in the blow. The power sword cut through the staff with the sound of thunder, and the resulting detonation hurled the Sorcerer Lord in the air.
Asim crashed on the ground, which was still completely untouched despite the violence unleashed within the chamber, a testament to the toughness of whatever material it was the ancient Eldars had built it from.
The Sorcerer of Blood stared at the Grand Master, wounded and bleeding, his staff broken and his power spent. Yet diminished as the Sorcerer Lord was, Koios could still feel the embers of great might within his foe, waiting to ignite again in a blaze that would damn stars.
"The Imperium will stand forever more," declared Koios as he advanced on the downed heretic. "And you are your kind shall be wiped out, the memory of you consigned to oblivion just as your souls are consigned to the Warp's deepest pit !"
Koios raised his blade, preparing to deliver the final blow that would sever the thread of menace Asim represented. Before he could strike, however, his retinal display was suddenly filled with static, and his ears echoed with a thousand screams. Amidst the storm of white pixels and noise, he saw a small figure standing between him and Asim, surrounded by a corona of fire and glaring at him with alien eyes overflowing with hate.
THE IMPERIUM WILL BURN
He blinked. Just like that, the image was gone, the screams silent, and his vision had returned to normal. But by that point Asim had gotten back to his feet. The heretic laughed, then turned and ran out of the chamber. Koios cursed under his breath at the Sorcerer Lord's cowardice.
The other Sorcerers were also fleeing, scattering across the immense mirrored chamber, of which the battle only occupied a tiny fraction. They were running toward the corridors leading out of the room, abandoning their allies to die at the blades of the Grey Knights. The remaining daemonhosts cried out in outrage, and a few of the cyborgs' elites appeared similarily dismayed, but none retreated, compelled as they were to fight to the death.
Koios didn't doubt for an instant that there were plenty of traps and ambushes waiting, defensive positions prepared in what little time the traitors had before the arrival of their foes. And of course, there were the rest of the Traitor Marines who must be waiting elsewhere in the Anchor, ready to bleed all those who opposed their dark master's mad plan.
It would not save them.
The Grand Master turned his focus on the battle still raging, his mind rejoining the communion of the warriors of Titan. First, they would purge the daemonhosts and Dark Mechanicum skitarii; then, they would resume their advance to the top of the Anchor. Koios' own precognitive powers were but a shadow of Lord Janus', but he had enough of the gift to know that the path forward was the same one Asim had fled through. The threads of fate were converging as the Black Crusade reached its apex, pulling the actors of this whole sordid drama together. He could feel the gaze of the Dark Gods pressing on them all, watching from the Warp in rapturous anticipation.
They would be disappointed by the ending, this Koios swore.
AN : A shorter chapter than usual, I know. I hope you enjoyed it anyway.
Zahariel out.