Her bare feet hurt her at every step she took.
But she took a step. Then another. And another.
She needed help. Medical help. She'd lost an arm. Her skull and back hurt from the flaying, every movement sending agony inside her body. Something was moving inside her right eye-socket - the feeling was so unbearable that she felt like reaping her own eye out. She was aware of that.
She embraced the sight of the belly of the Black Ship in front of her, her eyes roaming along its structures - somehow, it seemed alien to her, different from what she remembered. She spotted a few men, clothed in rags, bent over a psyker's dead body. They were taking things from the body. That was good. She loved things. She needed things right now.
Life was a wild game of survival. She was made a hunter, not a prey. Without even thinking, she aimed at them with her left hand and shot. Once. Twice. Thrice. The men fell dead. The pistol had a terrible aim, she reflected, but those vultures had been more dead than alive anyway.
Killing came off so easily to her. She barely had to think about it at all.
She knelt over the young boy's body, the one that had been sharing her dormitory.
"The sobbing lady is coming for you, boy ." She rummaged through his things, looking for the dog figurine she knew he had. She wanted the toy for herself ! " Give me my foci. I need my foci ! " She yelped desperately, her searching becoming more disrespectful and insistent. She didn't find the foci she searched for, but the boy had clothes and the vultures had things like syringes filled with stuff. Maybe medical help ? She injected herself with it and felt the same rush of adrenaline she felt before as a moment of clarity and prescience came back to her. Then she clothed herself with the rags and took their pocket knives.
She caressed their hair with jealousy, wondering if she could scalp herself a wig out of them.
" Lady Maria will help," she said to herself. She was stuck in the Black Ship, with the monsters again. She needed to be a smart girl, to be discreet.
She moved, sticking to the shadows as much as possible - but she wasn't the only one in there. Other psykers loomed around, trying to evade the wardens and the oncoming purge.
She needed to get away from them. Psykers tended to lead to warp incursion. She remembered the sound of the sobbing lady's belly opening up with new eyes and teeth. She needed a dark hole to fit into, a tight space to crawl and be forgotten in.
Moving forward, one step at a time. Kunrad was taunting her nearby : " The cogitator on Kiava Gamma predicted this", he said, walking at her side, unfazed by the goriness of the surroundings. " I would have loved to be the one to deliver you to the loving hands of the drukhari, dear sister, but sadly, I had to pass up on that chance. The Final Dawn calls me elsewhere. "
" Your Master", replied Elena, shivering. She closed her eyes for a second and felt the foul breath of Chaos on her skin, tingling. " He said he set this thread on me. To usher in the Dawn."
Kunrad nodded, bouncing gracefully over a dismembered corpse. " Those drukhari really should clean up. You're gonna slip in this and die. That would be a pity. Whose blood I'm gonna spill for my ascension then ? "
Elena shrugged, avoiding the gory mess totally. She had a bad feeling about it. Kunrad moved forward, alert and oddly healthy for a psyker in a Black Ship. He lifted his fingers up in the air and pretended to play along the strings of a puppet.
" No one can say what the plans of the Changer of Ways truly are, sister dear. Just think about it. All your precious Imperium credos…your Warrant of Trade…all of that. You're only to enjoy them because He allowed you to do so. All your visions, all your instincts, all your intuitions. They come from the warp, don't they ? Just like mine."
" You're a diviner too ?" asked Elena, surprised.
Her brother smiled at that, and put an arm over her shoulder in a show of friendliness. Elena tensed and tried to chase him away, slapping at her own shoulders and mumbling incomprehensibly along the lines of 'don't stab me this time.' " I have seen the pathways of the future, yes, and I have decided that I wouldn't remain on the side of the losers. Your side, Elena."
" An unsanctioned psyker," she said. " That's what you are. No wonder you drew the gazes of evil upon your soul. "
Kunrad laughed scornfully. " Martyr. We're on a Black Ship. This is what we all are."
Yes. That made sense. She didn't have her runes anymore, did she ? She hadn't been flayed alive, no, no, no. Not yet. Not for now. So she must be unsanctioned.
But didn't she witness the light of the Golden Throne back on Holy Terra ? Didn't it burn her eyes and leave her almost dead from its majesty ?
The confusion knitted her thoughts together in broken spirals, collapsing upon each other like dreams in the morning. Except that she couldn't wake up. Cycles being discontinued all together, but with no collective thoughts to make sense of any of it. Fragments and figments of their beings unraveling.
I need an anchor. I need a foci. I'm drifting away. Heinrix, I need Heinrix.
She stopped, coughing blood, and Kunrad gently patted her on the back. " There, there", he said with compassion. " It hurts, doesn't it ? Dying. I would strongly suggest you avoid that fate. "
" Shut up, Kunrad", said Elena, gritting her teeth. " Go away. "
Kunrad shrugged. " Fine. You'll come calling for me when you realize I'm the good one. "
Elena focused on the details of the Black Ship. She had made her way towards an upper stage, where warp-infested psykers roamed and preyed upon the unsanctioned minds and unguarded souls. She hid away, studying their dance and movement, and how they chased their preys.
Behind the ambush, there was a lair. Dark, gloomy, murky. A place to hide. Probably already occupied. She spotted human faces there. Imperial guardsmen ! She recognized the sounds and blasts of their pistols. Old ammunitions, those pistols. But at last ! Familiarity in this drifting voidship. The Imperial Guard's men would possess medical equipment, maybe perhaps even a doctor. Surely she could buy help from them.
The corpses littering the ground there held out their little bones towards her body, pressing ever so slightly against her skin with their warm touch. " Don't go," they said. " Stay with us. "
Elena looked down upon the disfigured bodies of the psykers that had been killed by the monsters of the warp. The little girl shivered and stepped away. It was bad luck to remain with the dead.
The girl lifted her eyes up. The void rat scum saw a pathway amongst the monsters. She could leap and hide and run there. She waited a long time, for a good moment, for another victim to fall into the ambush. Then - hop ! - she bounced and scurried off, mimicking the ways of the rat. She skirted around the monsters and they didn't see her.
She sighed with relief and went down the lair in the rabbit's hole.
" Guardsmen", she said, saluting the soldiers there. But they didn't react. If anything, they laughed at her. Accusing her to be an envoy of the Commissar.
Her brows furrowed. The Commissar ? He was looking at her right now, with a gun over her head.
" Psykers," he muffled in her back, " always need someone to keep an eye over them. You're just a bunch of ticking bombs and it's my job to make sure you detonate in the enemy's camp. Don't want any disjunction in here."
Disjunction . The word seemed foreign in the words of the commissar she used to work with in the Imperial Guard. In the past, this was someone from her past. He couldn't be here right now. He felt alien. Like sand scratching in her mind. Trying to tell her something.
A spark of Elena's consciousness revolted against its delirium, trying to bring her back from the marsh of madness she was slowly drowning in.
" Pay attention." Kunrad again. He frowned at her, gesturing for her to turn her head towards the creature in the center of the lair.
She was vaguely aware that it was a slyyth. But also, it was Aurora.
" Am I on Rykad Minoris again ? " she wondered aloud.
She felt hands throwing her to the ground, boots pressing over her flayed back. She screamed and was surprised that she had the strength for that alone.
They were asking questions - was she working for the commissar ? Was she going to kill him ?
" Kill him ! " she screeched as the boots made her shoulder blade crack. " He sent Orlon off to die", she babbled, wriggling helplessly on the ground. " Please help me. I will kill him. But help me first."
While the guardsmen were busy interrogating her, Aurora leant over her, saying that she could prove her words by tending to the maintenance convector in his lair. Elena agreed to it and the boots relented.
" Pathetic", commented Kunrad. " How did you even succeed in thwarting my plan, I wonder ?"
" Maybe your plans were terrible, brother," she accused, not missing a beat as she dragged herself up. Her eyes were filled with tears and dust. She could barely feel her body anymore. The injections were fading off. Only Kunrad seemed to have any reality to him, any coherence. She scanned over Rykad Minoris, inspecting the bunker of the governor for the convector. Where was it ?
" It's over there", sighed Kunrad, gesturing for her to get up and indicating a direction.
The periphery of her vision was growing dark. She didn't have the strength to double guess herself. She got up unsteadily and moved towards Kunrad's direction.
There was a convector indeed. Something was broken in it. But she could not for the life of her see what. Her vision was blurring as she spoke.
" Sentinel. Nomos ! I need rescue", she called, placing her hand in the gargoyle's hand. Though her blood fell into the mouth of the machine, it did not activate the spirit machine within. Nomos wasn't here. He wasn't and couldn't be because she'd left him behind in her ship. She had a ship. She was someone important then. But who ?
" Hey, lucky charm", said a familiar voice - one she hadn't heard for ages.
The little girl lifted her eyes up into the serene face of the conman that used to be her father. Love, pain and grief burnt her heart all at once. Her voice got strangled in her throat.
" Daddy," her breath was heavy. " Oh, dad, I'm sorry…"
The voidborn shook his head and leant over the convector. " That you can't tinker with the machine ? You ain't a true child of the void until you learn how to swap a copper circuit with a polycarbonate one. Just need to tweak it a little here…and tinker there…and say a prayer to the Motive Force."
The child obediently followed her father's steps, and felt a spark of joy when the Motive Force responded, the machine whirring.
" Goodnight, lucky charm. Sleep tight", said her father as he leant over to kiss her on her forehead. She crumbled to the ground and into the darkness in her mind.