They called her clairvoyant. Not in official records, vox logs or the mission brief's margin scribbles, but in the hushed words that passed between pilots like static across shared frequencies. Behind visors, behind walls, in the hush of war idle silence: they said her Knight moved before orders were given. She once dodged a barrage that her systems hadn't detected. That she spoke answers to questions no one had yet asked. Rumours, all. But whispered often. She ignored them at first. But when her Knight's data vaults revealed something they shouldn't have, something no one could explain, the whispers began to feel less like superstition and more like a warning.
It was a map no one else remembered making. Serida had accessed the Knight's memory vaults during routine diagnostics, expecting maintenance logs. Instead, she found it. Like a glitch wearing the shape of a star chart. Each time she returned, the pattern grew clearer, as if waiting to be understood. The coordinates were unattached to any known route or chart. The system was blank. No name. No orbitals. Just a smear of digital uncertainty at the ragged edge of a long forgotten region that many a rogue trader called the Screaming Stars, where twin microquasars howled across the void.
But in the static nested deep, a shape. A gravitational dip. A world. She called it the Dark Pool.
Her report was measured, reverent. She proposed that a forgotten Mechanicus outpost, possibly rich with STC relics, was lost to time there. The language was crisp, deferential. No mention of the dreams. No mention of the sketches she'd found beside her bunk, scrawled by her hand, spirals, coiling inward toward some impossible centre. No mention of the low melodies her Knight had begun to hum in the silence before battle.
Command approved her request without hesitation. She was, after all, heir designate to the House. A lander was provided. A small team assembled. Mechanicus magi, escort servitors, and a pair of Armigers. Enough to survey, not to claim. Caution wrapped in protocol.
The journey was uneventful, technically. In practice, every crew member reported symptoms of unease: headaches that pulsed in time with the drive core, shifting shadows on auspex displays, dreams not their own. The magi chalked it up to proximity to the Screaming Stars, the interference that plagued the systems. Nothing out of protocol.
When the world resolved through the lander's screens, it was exactly as Serida had seen it: endless forests of leafless trees, rotting but unfallen. Marshlands slick with oil black water. A sky the colour of old bruises. The air hung thick with mists.
"Doesn't feel dead," one of the escorts muttered, helmet retracted. "Feels like it's waiting."
The others said nothing. The servitors twitched. The magi refused to stray far from the lander's shielding bulk, citing 'atmospheric instability' though their voices shook more than the data warranted.
She felt it again, that impossible sense of familiarity. As if she were retracing steps she hadn't yet taken. The forest, the air, the hum beneath her feet it all sang with a rhythm she knew too well. Not memory. Not prophecy. Something stranger. As though she were not discovering, but returning.
The cockpit opened with a hiss, and the scent of sacred unguents lingered. She climbed the steps alone, boots ringing on ceramite. At the threshold, she paused, not in fear, but in recognition, something odd. She sat, and the link engaged. Her thoughts threaded into ancient circuitry. Neural filaments braided her senses into the vastness of the Knight's awareness. Metal sinew flexed. Hydraulic hymns echoed in her lungs. Her heartbeat slowed to match the rhythm of its core.
No destination was entered. No coordinates aligned. Still, she moved. She wandered for what felt like weeks.
No path marked her passing, no sun traced the sky to guide her. The mist never lifted, only shifted sometimes thin as gauze, sometimes thick as cloth. She did not sleep. She did not eat or drink. Her Knight sustained her in ways no machine should. "Her Knight"? She couldn't remember its name anymore…
Time stretched, folded. She would have sworn she walked in circles, and yet each hour brought her deeper into the forest, where the trees leaned close and the ground grew soft with silence. Once, she saw her footprints emerge ahead of her and vanish beneath her steps.
The forest did not register on sensors. Trees appeared only after she'd turned to avoid them. Roots gave way before her steps, clearing a path not through force but intention. The Knight walked with grace, its bulk parting the mist as if it were silk. Something beneath the crust of the world pulled at her not forward, but inward.
Then the voice came… Not in High Gothic. Not in the binary chants of the Omnissiah. It spoke behind her eyes, in a tongue without sound, shapes, textures, aches. It said her name. And then something else.
She could not repeat it. She could only feel it.
The trees fell away as if repelled. Her Knight stepped into a clearing she had never seen and had always known. At its centre, it waited. A pool. Not of water or oil or sludge, but of something else. Flat and lightless. It did not reflect the stars, it devoured them. A void like a bottomless pit. Not an object. Not a surface. A presence shaped like absence. A silence in the shape of a scream.
Her Knight stilled. Serida opened the hatch.
Mist curled at her feet. The swamp mud sucked gently at her boots, but never pulled. She walked to the edge of the Dark Pool, each step known before it was taken. The void regarded her. It did not beckon. It simply was.
She removed her gauntlets. Her bare fingers trembled not with fear, but resonance. Her reflection did not exist in that black. The voice spoke again, louder this time. Not commanding. Welcoming.
She stepped forward.
And the Dark Pool opened.