— Sometime, somewhere in Comorragh –
– Abelard's point of view -
The old man dragged his sorry carcass along the edge of the moving platform, mumbling to himself. He was old. He was tired. His bones hadn't felt the embrace of warmth for a long time. His memory was scrambled, confused. Only the reassuring hilt of his thunder hammer at his side, and the remnants of his naval uniform and chestplate, spoke of times of grandeur.
Seneschal Abelard Werserian. That's what he was. Right hand of the Rogue Trader. Servant of the von Valancius dynasty. Husband of Lady Quatharina. Father of many. Amasec enjoyer, but he had quit that long ago.
But where was the Rogue Trader, he kept wondering ? He had failed her. There had been an ambush on the ship. The damned xenos ! Yrliet had sold them all to the drukhari. To that wicked, arrogant son of a bitch. Abelard didn't know where he had taken Elena. Marazai had put his claws on her. Heinrix, Pasqal and Idira had been taken away in a separate place - to receive a special kind of attention that Abelard's mind did not want to think too much about.
Argenta and him, well…someone spoke about sending them to the Arena, but he was deemed too old. With a laugh and total indifference, they threw him down there in the sewers of the Dark City. He had been erring ever since, searching for the Rogue Trader. Something had attacked him, a mechanical horror that had drunk on the marrow of his bones. Ever since he didn't feel quite right. The pain had subsided, but the fear had not. Abelard barely recognized himself with all this fear in his heart. His hands had changed too. They had more wrinkles on them.
Breathing heavily, he waited away for the beggars to come through. He would then kill them and proceed to drink off their blood and steal whatever food they had. Abelard wasn't the kind of man who would fall down into cannibalism…at least not on record.
But off record, he was the kind of man that did what he had to do to survive.
Finally, a prey moved into his vision. A tall, lanky silhouette with barely any flesh on her bones. It lacked one arm. Covered in filth, barely clothed with tattered rags, she was limping around and speaking to herself. Abelard crouched down, cursing his back and kneecaps, and waited…waited…
He surged forward, pushing the woman down on the ground, and raised his hammer up and up…it fell down but the woman had the quick-lightning reflex to turn her head around, and the hammer crushed the ground.
Her only left hand gripped at his chestplate.
" Dad ! Dad ! " she was calling desperately. " Please don't kill me Dad don't kill me - "
That was when it hit him.
His hammer suspended in the air, Abelard took a good look at that ravaged face. Eyes hollow and sunk in, skin covered in piss, shit and blood that had dried off in a horrible mask. But those eyes…even with the glimmer of madness in them, he would recognize that feline-like black sclera, those mutations he would have deemed an abomination if it hadn't been that of the Lord Captain.
His hands trembled at the prospect of the blasphemy he was about to commit. Under all the dirt, he could barely recognize Elena von Valancius. Useless clumps of hair hung down on the side of her skull, but otherwise she had become bald and her head wore scars and purulent flesh.
She had always been slender, but now she was just a sack of bones and she looked half-dead already. Something had taken away her arm and the stump of what was left was disgusting and irregular.
Most of all, he understood as he plunged into her eyes, she was gone. She was not the Lord Captain anymore.
As she kept calling him Dad and pleading for her life, Abelard's heart constricted in his chest and he let the hammer fall down on the ground. Tears bursted forward in his old eyes and he knelt by the side of the woman who had been his Lord Captain and was now just a fucking bloody mess on the ground. He took her in his arms and cradled her like a child, and it made him feel better to do that.
" At last I have found you, Elena," he said, pressing her against his torso.
He saw that her back and neck had been flayed and the skin was barely regenerating there, hindered by all the dirt and mistreatment.
" Sssh, sssssh", said Abelard, trying to pat a part of her head that hadn't been caved in, battered or peeled.
He wasn't that surprised when she coiled herself against him. " I'm sorry I made the statue cry Dad…" she kept muttering gibberish.
" I'm not your Dad, Elena," he said.
She didn't hear him. Wherever she was, she didn't hear him.
" But I can pretend to be, if this helps you get better." Cradling her - holding her close felt like holding a dying bird - he dragged them away to his hiding spot, waiting for another ambush, hoping to be able to feed her.
He sang her the lullaby he sang to his newborn, that he'd sung her before on Dargonus, and it brought him relief.
He had found his purpose again.
He had someone to protect.