For seven days, she wandered the halls of her House without speaking.
The ground did not shake, and yet each of her footsteps rang deeper on stone. Her presence carried no command, yet men bowed. Not out of reverence, out of something colder. A reflex born of unease.
The air around her seemed heavier. Vox units cracked and spat static when she passed. Machine-spirits, once vibrant in their forge-song, fell silent in her shadow. The oldest tech-priests began to murmur of a wrongness they could not name.
Her Knight, if it could still be called that, stood idle in the hangar vaults, its limbs bent at angles that should not have supported it. Its once-praised pristine armour degraded into spirals of unreadable glyphs. No activation rites functioned. No litanies soothed it. The Manifold Interface rejected every communion. Its nameplate had turned black. Not scorched. Not defaced. Just… blank. As if the name had never been spoken.
They brought her questions, hushed supplications, even rituals of confrontation masked as ceremony. She answered none of them. She offered no counsel, no denial, no word at all. She spoke to no one. She did not explain. But her eyes, when seen through the glare of the sanctum's torches, did not reflect any light. They drank it.
At night, some claimed to see her standing before the Knight in silence, her body draped in the same shadow that clung to its limbs. Others said she was heard whispering in binaric tones too corrupted to parse.
She walked among her kin like a shadow mistaken for flesh. And after her return, others began to dream. At first, it was dismissed as just a shared hallucination, void exposure, stray scraps of warp-echo. But the dreams spread. Those who served closest to her even began to change. It did not happen all at once, but a long, slow erosion.
In the months that followed, things went quieter and still. The forge fires no longer roared; they murmured. The vox traffic grew thin. Conversations, even in the great hall, took on a whispering cadence, as if afraid to be overheard by the walls. Then, one night, Serida and her Knight disappeared. Without fanfare. Without warning. Never to be seen again.
No formal edict was issued. But the lower halls and hangars of the fortress were quietly sealed. The vox arrays were "under maintenance" for weeks. Then months. Sections of the keep levels were declared structurally unsound, though no damage had been recorded. Patrol schedules were redrawn to avoid entire wings. The hangars were emptied. Doors were welded shut and forgotten. Data-scribes altered cartographs so the corridors no longer appeared on internal maps. An unspoken doctrine took root: do not look where the light cannot reach.
And beneath it all, the House endured. In silence. In secrecy. In slow descent.
Yet the dreams persisted.
Far-off places, coiled and broken. Stars that bled. Figures of ink and fire reaching upward from a sea of obsidian glass. Other pilots awoke with the taste of rust in their mouths and the certainty that something vast had brushed against their minds. Most spoke nothing. Some whispered fragments to trusted kin. A few began sketching. One by one, they made requests.
At first, they were dismissed, forms to be filed away, never to be answered. But then the numbers began to grow. More pilots spoke of the dreams. More began to ask questions, though they had none to offer in return. Their requests were vague but urgent. They spoke of anomalies in the system, unexplained echoes in the data, shifts in the feedback from their Knights. One by one, they gathered, a clandestine chorus of voices seeking something they could not name.
"Reassessment of the synchronisation."
"Access to the raw data from the Dark Pool survey."
Some asked more cryptic questions, their eyes hollow, their words trembling as if afraid to say too much aloud.
"Where does it end?"
"Will it speak to us, as it spoke to her?"
When the high command refused, after all, there was no rationale in the reports, no answers in the data, and the requests became demands. A handful of officers disappeared. Some were found dead, their bodies stripped of every identifiable mark, their faces frozen in expressions of awe, or perhaps terror.
The whispers grew into something else.
The tech-priests began to question their own place in the House. They gathered in the hidden, once-sealed vaults beneath the fortress, speaking of the shadow that had taken root within the walls. Even the most devout among them, those who lived by the sacred liturgies of the Omnissiah, began to falter in their belief.
Then came the visionaries.
They were not just pilots. They were senior officers, scribes, even some of the lowest ranks in the crews. Each one came to the others in secret, speaking of impossible places they had visited in their minds, of dark suns that stared back at them, of vast darkness that clawed its way to the edges of their understanding. Each of them spoke, without exception, of the same thing.
The throne. The stone throne at the heart of the dark.
Some said they had seen it in their dreams, others that it called to them from the depths itself. They were no longer sure where the vision had come from. And yet, they felt its pull, a constant tug at the back of their minds. It was a lure, a whisper promising knowledge, an embrace, a transformation.
The keep became a place of silence and waiting, a place of secrets locked behind too many walls. The walls seemed to breathe, and the corridors that once had been full of life were now eerily empty. Most had fallen into a kind of stasis, an endless, resigned waiting. But still, some could not ignore the change.
The request to search the depths of the Dark Pool, the one Serida had made all those years ago, was authorised by a small, secretive faction of the House. It was no longer a question of retrieving the fragmentary records of the expedition. No, now it was a matter of something far darker: to unearth the unknown. To trace the contours of that which had touched their minds, to understand what Serida had found, and whether it could be controlled, contained, or, most horrifying of all, embraced.
And so, a new expedition was assembled, its orders cloaked under layers of secrecy. Only a handful knew the true purpose: to find the source of Serida's transformation and why she had disappeared.