The wind outside was a banshee without lungs—low and cruel, whispering along the cracks in the wooden seams like it wanted to be let in. Inside the longhouse, silence had settled like snow on bone.
The fire burned low. Seal oil sputtered. It made a sound like weeping grease, catching now and then as if even it had grown too tired to burn.
Twelve elders sat around it, hunched beneath layers of fur and age, their faces hollowed out by more than just famine. The kind of silence that lived between them wasn't peaceful—it was funereal. The air smelled of damp wool, old smoke, and too many nights where no one dreamed anymore.
Their breath fogged the air in slow, reluctant bursts, and for a long time, no one wanted to break the quiet. Speaking meant remembering. Remembering meant hurting.
Qilak, brittle as driftwood, finally spoke.
"We buried six this moon," she said, her voice dry as bone, each word measured like a ration. "There's no soil left. Just ice. We've stacked them in the cave near the coast. They'll freeze solid before spring."
She said it like someone commenting on firewood. As if these weren't children. Brothers. Lovers. But meat, stored and forgotten in a world that no longer cared to rot properly.
Miksaq snorted without humor. "If spring comes at all."
No one corrected him.
Not because he was right—but because everyone else had run out of lies.
For three winters now, the storms had come earlier, harder, more spiteful. The sun visited less each year, offering no warmth when it did. The sea ice, once a pathway to hunting and fish, had thickened and blackened. The seals had vanished. The birds too. Even the cold itself had turned… wrong. Not natural anymore. Not honest.
The dogs were dying.
They had eaten two last week.
One was still wagging its tail when they slit its throat.
No one wanted to remember that—but they all did. It was the kind of thing that stuck under the fingernails of memory, no matter how you scraped.
Then, the longhouse door groaned open like a dying man shifting in his sleep.
Unarjuk stepped inside like a ghost who hadn't finished his business.
He was tall but thin now, skin tight over bone, eyes too awake for someone who never seemed to blink. His coat was a chaos of salvaged materials: polar bear hide patched with frayed wool and sealskin, stitched together with sinew and obsession. Snow clung to him like he'd dragged a storm in on his back. His beard looked half-frozen, stained dark with something that might've been seal blood or just dirt. No one wanted to ask.
His eyes were wide.
Not with wonder.
With certainty. With purpose.
The worst kind of crazy: the kind that believed itself righteous.
Everyone sighed like a single shared lung had deflated.
"Oh fuck," muttered Miksaq, not even bothering to look up.
"Not again," said Tulimaq, tugging her coat tighter, as if it might shield her from Unarjuk's voice.
Unarjuk strode into the center of the room like a man who had never once considered whether he belonged anywhere. He stood before the fire, his arms out like some Arctic Christ.
"I have seen the future!" he declared, voice loud enough to wake the bones buried in the cave.
"Please no," Qilak whispered.
But he ignored her, the same way blizzards ignore prayers.
His voice rose with the crackling pitch of someone halfway between prophet and maniac. It had that edge of religious theater—part sermon, part fever.
"If we do nothing—if we sit here waiting for the ice to swallow us—we will perish not only as people, but as a concept!"
Miksaq squinted, face lined with contempt. "What the hell does that mean?"
Unarjuk didn't miss a beat. He spread his arms wider, as if ready to embrace the collapse of civilization.
"The British will come. With their horses and their tea and their diseases. They will build railroads across the snow. They will make us wear pants."
A collective shiver passed through the room.
Even in starvation, that idea had weight.
"Then," he continued, "the Americans will follow. With their flags. Their democracy. Their guns shaped like churches. And we will be forced into museums, frozen in poses, as their children throw candy at our statues."
Sulia frowned. "That doesn't sound—"
"And then!" Unarjuk bellowed, his arm shooting upward so violently he nearly threw out his shoulder, "the Finno-Korean Hyperwar will begin!"
Dead silence.
Even the fire seemed confused.
Smoke twisted upward in lazy spirals, filling the longhouse with the thick, greasy scent of desperation and old seal fat. The elders stared at Unarjuk like they were hoping he'd explode just to reset the conversation.
He didn't.
He stood tall, wheezing slightly, hand still pointing at the ceiling like he could see the battle playing out in the aurora above.
Miksaq blinked slowly, as if the gears in his brain had jammed.
"…The fuck is a hyperwar?"
Unarjuk grinned. Teeth yellow. Chipped. Predatory.
"It's the final war. A war of concepts. A war of beards. The Koreans will deploy orbital shamans riding on missile-bound whales. The Finns will respond with vodka-fueled mechs powered by national trauma and accordion music. The world will split—not in land, but in narrative. Empires will fall. Language will die. And all that will remain…"
He paused, sweeping his hand across the firelit circle like a stage actor soaking up an ovation.
"…is us."
"You mean the Inuit?" Tulimaq asked, frowning.
"No," Unarjuk whispered. "The New Inuit. The Ones Who Ride."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a scroll made of stitched hide and what looked like birch bark, hastily inked with pictographs and deranged symbolism. He unrolled it on the ground beside the fire, revealing a crude but detailed drawing of penguins in Soviet-style military uniforms, marching in perfect formation, holding rifles with bayonets longer than their heads.
Next to them were seals with missile racks on their backs, mid-air, apparently flying. At the center, a chariot pulled by three polar bears, ridden by a woman in full silver armor, her spear crackling with electricity.
At the top: a sun with Unarjuk's face in it, smiling like a man who'd just killed God and inherited His mail.
"Behold!" he cried. "The destiny that awaits us!"
There was a long pause.
Miksaq rubbed his face like he was trying to peel it off. "You drew this?"
"Last night," Unarjuk said proudly. "With whale ink and spiritual clarity."
"Spiritual clarity smells a lot like fermented dog piss," Tulimaq muttered.
"You laugh now," Unarjuk said, "but the Hyperwar is coming. The European colonizers will be vaporized by aurora artillery. The Chinese will drown in reindeer cavalry charges. Russia will collapse under the sheer efficiency of Inuit logistics. And the Americans—"
"Will they be destroyed by the flying seals?" Qilak asked dryly.
"No," Unarjuk said gravely. "By our mothers."
A few of the elders coughed.
Qilak narrowed her eyes. "Say that again."
"They will be unmade," Unarjuk explained, "by a force so primal, so emotionally unstable, that no defense can stand against it: angry Inuit mothers who've had enough bullshit. They will rise with ladles and frozen boot soles and scream in tones only grandmothers can produce."
"I change my mind," Tulimaq said. "He's not just crazy. He's religious."
"Exactly!" Unarjuk said, beaming. "Now you're getting it."
Sulia, still quiet, leaned forward and studied the scroll.
She didn't look amused.
She looked... tired.
Tired in the way young people look when they realize the old ones have finally given up pretending the world makes sense.
"…What if," she said carefully, "the part about the Hyperwar is bullshit—but the part about the stone circle is real?"
Unarjuk opened his mouth.
She cut him off.
"No polar bears with miniguns. No penguins wearing belts. Just... the idea that maybe we haven't tried everything yet."
The longhouse went quiet again.
Miksaq stared at her. "You can't be serious."
"I am," she said.
"Even if the stone circle exists—and I'm not saying it does—what exactly do you think it will do? Open a portal? Give us a secret nuke? Summon a god?"
Sulia looked at the fire, then at the others.
She didn't smile.
"If it kills us," she said, "at least it'll be different."
Nobody had a rebuttal for that.
Not because it was wise.
But because they were that tired of starving.
One by one, the elders looked at each other.
Then, slowly, they stood.
Even Miksaq.
Even Qilak.
"Fine," Miksaq said, grabbing his coat. "We go to the stupid rocks. But I swear, if we get there and the only thing we find is frozen moss and Unarjuk's delusions, I'm feeding him to the penguins myself."
Unarjuk clapped. "Excellent! Destiny awaits!"
"And you're walking," Tulimaq added.
"Wha—"
"You're walking," Qilak snapped, "and if you speak during the journey, we're gagging you with your own damn drawing."
Unarjuk shut up.
But he smiled the whole time.
---
The march was silent.
No one sang. No one spoke. The only sounds were the creak of leather harnesses, the drag of sled runners over cracked ice, and the wind whispering like it was laughing at them—mocking them for thinking they could outlast the world.
They were hungry.
Not the kind of hunger that made your stomach rumble and your hands shake. This was the other kind—the kind that crawled up your spine and started whispering ideas into your ear. The kind that made your dreams red and dripping and filled with teeth.
It was the kind of hunger that turned people into meat, and meat into strategy.
Qilak hadn't said it out loud. No one had. But the look Miksaq gave her sled—that quick glance, just long enough to linger on the shape beneath the tarp, where her husband's frozen leg still poked out like a bone wrapped in regret—told her everything.
He'd thought it.
So had she.
So had everyone.
If someone dies on the way…
Well. Waste not.
It had become a silent rule, unspoken but fully understood: If they collapse and they don't get back up, they're no longer kin. They're calories.
No one wanted to be the first to say it.
But everyone was waiting to see who'd be the first to fall.
Even the dogs knew.
They didn't bark anymore. They didn't whine or wag. They watched their handlers with dead, waiting eyes. Some had started sleeping standing up, as if lying down might be an invitation. Others limped with no injury—slow, theatrical limps that looked too clean to be real.
Miksaq whispered to himself, once, that they were faking it. That the dogs wanted to die so they wouldn't have to keep pulling the sleds. That maybe the dogs understood everything.
And still they walked.
Not because they believed Unarjuk. Not really. Not about the penguins with rifles, or the seals that flew, or the Finno-Korean hyperwar that he claimed would consume the world in flames and whalesong.
But because somewhere inside all of them, beneath the bones and blisters and frost-numbed fingers, was the smallest, bitterest whisper:
"What if he's right?"
What if the circle was real?
What if it meant something?
What if this one madman had seen a future that actually mattered, and this brutal pilgrimage through the white hell was their last chance to do more than die forgotten in a snowbank?
Hope didn't need to be rational.
Hope just needed to hurt less than despair.
And so they walked.
Feet bleeding into stiff boots. Eyes crusted with ice. Souls scraped raw by wind and silence.
It wasn't until the third day that the fog began to thin.
First, just hints—shapes in the whiteness, darker than they should be. Unmoving. Too regular to be natural.
Then the shadows sharpened.
The monoliths rose from the snow like buried giants, towering above the landscape in a perfect circle—each stone thick as a man, twice as tall as a bear. Black, smooth, ancient.
They did not glisten.
They did not pulse.
But the snow around them had melted—mossy, blackened earth exposed in a perfect ring.
The circle had cleared itself.
Not one flake rested on the carved floor.
And yes—they were carved.
The elders approached like priests entering a church built for gods that had stopped listening.
Twelve stones. Precisely spaced. A circle you could measure by instinct, like it had been built into the bones of the world.
And on each one: carvings.
Not words. Not runes.
Stories.
Images.
Visions burned into stone with the kind of precision no hand should've been able to shape.
One showed angels—wings like razors, blades of light clashing with horned things that screamed in fire. Another showed a city split in half, flame swallowing its towers, the sky above it cracked open like a skull.
One had a child at the center, naked and small, surrounded by both serpents and swords, its eyes hollow and full of light.
Another showed a wheel of flame descending from the heavens, a spear of fire erupting beneath it, bodies curled around the impact like offerings—or sacrifices.
Sulia stepped forward.
Her voice was barely a whisper.
"These are…"
"Holy," said Unarjuk, his tone reverent, awed.
And for once, no one told him to shut up.
Even Miksaq, mouth half-open in protest, stayed quiet.
Because for all his bile, for all his mocking, the look on his face was no longer contempt.
It was fear.
Not fear of the cold.
Not fear of dying.
Fear that maybe the old madman had been right all along.
For a long time, no one spoke.
They stood inside the ring of twelve stones like children in the ruins of something they were never meant to see. The carvings stared back—not alive, not glowing—but there was a weight to them. A silence that wasn't just silence. A silence that pressed on your skin.
The air was warmer here.
It shouldn't have been.
The wind had died. The dogs—those that remained—whimpered and lay down, refusing to move any closer.
Sulia stepped carefully to the center of the circle and turned, slowly, looking up at each stone.
She whispered, more to herself than anyone else, "What is this place?"
Unarjuk stepped into the ring like a man returning to a throne he'd been promised since birth. His boots crunched on brittle moss as he walked toward the center, where the spiral of lines and symbols formed a perfect disc at his feet.
He turned to the others, arms outstretched.
"This," he said, voice trembling with something dangerously close to joy, "is the beginning. The proof. The fulfillment."
Miksaq narrowed his eyes. "You mean this isn't bullshit?"
Unarjuk grinned. "Oh, it's exactly the bullshit I told you it was. The war. The fire. The penguin legions and the sky seals. It's all true."
He pointed at the stones. "This is the key. This is how it starts. All it needs—" his voice dipped low, almost reverent, "—is a sacrifice."
A few murmurs broke the silence.
There it was.
The word.
"Sacrifice," Qilak echoed, her tone flat. "Of what?"
Unarjuk shrugged. "Nothing much. A finger. A toe. An eye. Blood. It doesn't even have to be fresh—though that would be better."
Tulimaq shook her head. "We're not cutting pieces off ourselves because of some carvings."
"It's not mutilation," Unarjuk said, exasperated. "It's faith."
"It's infection," Miksaq snapped. "If you start chopping off fingers, you'll bleed out or freeze before you find salvation."
Unarjuk stepped forward, eyes gleaming. "The stones demand something real. Something alive. This is not about survival. This is about transcendence."
A long, tense pause followed.
And then, quietly, one of the younger men—barely more than a boy, sharp-faced and ragged—spoke.
"I'll do it."
They turned.
He stood near the edge of the circle, thin as bone, wearing a frayed fox-fur coat, eyes sunken and burning. Across from him stood another boy—bigger, sneering, already reaching for something under his coat.
They'd fought before. Constantly. One had taken food from the other. One had stolen boots. One had spat in the other's bowl. No one remembered the details anymore, but the hatred had fermented.
The thin one took a step forward.
Knife in hand.
"I'll give the stones a real gift."
"Kid," Miksaq began, raising a hand. "Don't—"
The knife flashed.
The bigger boy tried to shout, but it came out as a wet croak as the blade carved through his throat.
He dropped to his knees, gurgling, hands flailing weakly at the wound, blood pumping hot onto the ground in stuttering jets. The circle's center turned red.
The killer screamed, voice cracking with cold, hunger, and madness.
"ISN'T A WHOLE LIFE BETTER THAN FINGERS!?"
The mother of the slain boy lunged, shrieking, teeth bared.
The killer's uncle intercepted her mid-charge and clubbed her with a lantern canister, bursting her lip and knocking her to the moss.
Chaos bloomed like fire catching dry grass.
Screams erupted. People surged.
The dead boy's family rushed forward, roaring for revenge.
The killer's kin rose to meet them, already swinging fists, knives, whatever they had.
One woman shrieked and smashed her wooden bowl over another's head.
Someone picked up a jawbone and swung it like a mace.
A shaman was knocked flat and trampled.
Two cousins tackled each other and rolled into the firepit.
A dog snapped free of its rope and lunged at the nearest moving leg—tearing tendon from bone with a wet crunch.
Another dog joined it.
Then another.
Unarjuk spun in the middle of the chaos, arms raised, eyes wild, laughing.
"This is it!" he shouted over the screams. "This is the price! This is the offering!"
One man bit off a woman's finger and spat it into the fire.
An elder clawed at someone's face with a sharpened bone needle, shrieking in blind rage.
Sulia tried to pull two people apart and was shoved into a stone—her head cracking against it, leaving a trail of blood down its carved depiction of an angel impaling a demon.
A child screamed until a foot crushed his windpipe mid-stampede.
Someone slipped in blood and broke their jaw on a stone slab.
Someone else slipped on that person and collapsed sobbing onto the corpse of a dog.
Old grudges tore free like burst dam walls.
Accusations flew mid-murder.
"You took my daughter's fish!"
"You ate my brother!"
"You stole my wife's boots and her teeth!"
The sounds of chewing.
Someone was eating.
Raw.
Hands slick with gore, dragging hunks of meat from a still-twitching body and stuffing them into their mouth like they were trying to beat the others to the prize.
A man died vomiting his own intestines after being disemboweled by a child with a chipped axe head.
Two women tore each other's eyes out simultaneously, screaming wordlessly until one slumped with her throat half-open.
The air filled with piss, blood, smoke, and screams.
And then—
As the last bits of sanity dissolved—
The dogs began to howl.
And the sky cracked open.
A beam of gold.
A column of fire.
The air roared like judgment.
And everything began to burn.
And meanwhile—elsewhere in the Galaxy... Hive Perlia, Lower Hive District Theta-9. The air was thick with soot and static.
Every breath Cain took scraped the inside of his throat like he was sucking on rusted mesh. Vox feedback hissed from ruined comm-arrays, war cries echoed between collapsing hab-towers, and smoke mixed with ash to form a sky that looked like it was bleeding backwards. The smell of promethium, cooked flesh, and wet metal clung to everything. Even his teeth tasted like death.
Hive Perlia had fallen into screaming ruin.
It was no longer a city. It was a mass grave still trying to stand up and fight.
Entire strata of the spire had collapsed inward on themselves—one after another like a dying lung collapsing under the weight of its own filth. Mega-habs broke loose from their scaffold skeletons and thundered down the hive's hollow shaft, crushing everything beneath them in avalanches of steel and screaming. Gun platforms on the upper levels tilted at insane angles. Cathedral domes split open like skulls. The Wall groaned as sections buckled and fell.
Ash choked the lower hive, rolling through hab-blocks in sheets of red and black, clinging to lungs and eyes and minds. The sun was a faded memory. Daylight was replaced with the orange flicker of distant firestorms and the unblinking strobe of muzzle flashes.
The Orks had come in waves.
The first wave had been wild, uncoordinated, and stupidly effective. Hundreds of Boyz pouring through the ruined perimeter like a drunken stampede, trampling sentry teams and throwing Stikkbombs at random.
The second wave had been organized.
They'd come with artillery. Looted tanks. Giant cannons duct-taped to moving buildings. Nobz barking orders. Burna squads fanning out through the corridors, leaving charred screams behind. Cain's men had barely held Sector G—and that was only because a meltagun team had collapsed a walkway right on top of a Kill Rig.
Now the third wave was here.
Warbands with banners of skin.
Mobs big enough to fill whole districts.
Gargants. Stomping metal gods, belching smoke and firing shells bigger than a man's chest. Their footsteps sent tremors up through the hive's foundation.
Battlefortresses mounted on looted Leman Russ treads, their hulls studded with loudspeakers that blasted Ork war anthems like they were trying to kill you with volume. The sound made Cain's ears bleed. He wasn't sure if it was from the music or the subsonic frequency that seemed to vibrate the back of his teeth.
And above it all—rising over the ruin of Basilica District Seven—came a voice.
Deep.
Feral.
Mocking.
Yelling in bastardized Gothic so thick with accent it was like someone had fed a dictionary to a chainsaw:
"DA KOMMISSAR'S 'ERE! KRUMP 'IM GOOD!"
Cain ducked as a lascannon team behind him detonated—not from enemy fire, but from a misfire. Too many coolant failures. Too much pressure.
He crouched behind a twisted support strut from a collapsed maglift station, blackened from fire and warped from pressure.
Lasgun bolts lanced overhead, green tracer rounds dancing just behind them. The Orks roared in reply—deep-chested bellows that turned to laughter the moment a Guardsman screamed.
He turned and bellowed back:
"VALHALLANS! HOLD THAT LINE! KEEP THOSE ROCKET TEAMS FIRING!"
His voice cracked—half from smoke, half from fury.
"IF WE'RE DYING TODAY, WE'LL AT LEAST MAKE THEM NOTICE!"
He didn't wait for cheers.
There weren't any.
There were only nods. Blank stares. Grimy faces behind respirator masks. They were past hope now. This wasn't about survival.
It was about spite.
Artillery screamed in the distance—long, sobbing howls of falling death.
Some were theirs. Most weren't.
A Hydra battery three stories above exploded—its dual barrels corkscrewing through the air like flaming javelins. The blast sent a wave of shrapnel raining down on their heads.
A piece of it punched into the shoulder of a nearby trooper.
Private Ledorv.
He dropped to a knee, vomited from the shock, then stood up again and returned to the firing line. Didn't even wipe his chin.
Cain looked at him and nodded.
That was the kind of insanity that got remembered in memoirs.
Assuming anyone lived to write one.
His vox crackled again—more static than speech. The command channel was gone. The emergency fallback channel too. Either jammed by the Orks or buried under the collapsing data towers higher up the spire.
The upper Hive was evacuating—he knew that. Ships were launching every minute. Officers screaming over the din. Lines of civilians pressed into boarding tunnels, fighting over crates of food and oxygen like beasts.
But the mid-Hive? This district?
It was already dead. It just didn't know it yet.
And he was here to keep it twitching long enough to matter.
He turned back toward the corridor and barked through cracked lips:
"If we hold the barricade, we hold the corridor! If we hold the corridor, we stop them from pushing into the transit shaft! And if we hold the shaft—"
Something behind the wall growled.
Not an Ork's laughter.
Not a machine.
Not a tank.
Something lower.
Bigger.
The concrete panel to his left flexed. Just slightly. A hairline crack danced across the surface like a spiderweb forming in fast-motion.
The growl deepened.
A thud followed.
Another.
Then—metal tore.
And Cain knew exactly what was coming.
The crack across the wall spread with a brittle snap, spidering outward, a fine white fracture cutting through blackened ferrocrete like a knife through bone. Cain's gut twisted—not from fear exactly, but from the recognition of a sound he'd heard before. In a mining collapse. In a collapsing hab dome. In the instant before something huge made a mess.
Another growl. Closer this time. Low and hungry. Wet.
Miksaq—one of the grizzled Valhallans posted on the left flank—swallowed hard. His lasgun trembled just slightly in his frostbitten hands.
"Commissar…" he said, not even finishing the question.
Cain didn't answer. He just nodded once and whispered, "Brace."
Another thud. This one louder. Heavier. The entire wall shook.
Valhallans along the barricade glanced at each other. Some adjusted their grips. One crossed himself. Another muttered a prayer to the Emperor between clenched teeth.
Behind them, the last working Leman Russ tank in the district powered up its main cannon. The barrel lowered. The gunner inside—a Cadian with burn scars across half his face—clenched his jaw and murmured, "Come on then. Let's see what size craters you lot bleed."
The wall cracked again, and this time exploded.
Not collapsed. Not fell.
Exploded.
A shockwave of concrete, steel, fire, and sheer impact force ripped through the forward position like a detonation.
Three Valhallans were instantly pulped, thrown back against a cargo hauler with enough force to break bones on impact.
Cain flinched, ducking low as shrapnel sheared past his head and a chunk of steel tore through the man beside him, carving a hole where his torso had been a second earlier.
The Leman Russ fired—once. A booming cannon blast so loud it cracked nearby windows and left Cain's ears ringing.
The shell hit the hole in the wall just as something stepped through.
And it kept stepping.
The shell's impact blossomed in smoke and flame—but it wasn't enough.
Through the dust and ruin, the silhouette emerged.
The Warboss.
He was enormous. Almost three meters tall, and broader than the tank that had fired at him. His mega-armor was hammered together from looted plates, daemon-skulled pauldrons, and entire tank hatches welded into a chestplate. Red glyphs glowed faintly across the surface—Orkish runes daubed in what might have been blood, or paint, or both.
His klaw, a grotesque fusion of piston-driven steel and teeth-like blades, whirred as he flexed it open and closed. Sparks flew from its joints. The other arm bore a crude cannon fused to the armor at the elbow—its barrel still smoking.
A scorched Valhallan screamed, firing wildly.
The Warboss raised the klaw and swatted the man aside.
He didn't cut him.
He smashed him.
The sound was wet. Final.
The Ork laughed.
A deep, warbling, stomach-rattling sound that echoed off the ruin around them.
"DA KOMMISSAR! I SMELLZ 'IM!"
Cain stared, heart hammering.
Two more Guardsmen charged forward, bayonets raised.
The Warboss's cannon fired once—blew them into meat.
Another tried to retreat—too slow. The klaw snapped out like a viper and closed around his head. With a flick of the wrist, it crushed him like fruit.
Blood sprayed.
Screams followed.
A rocket team fired from a makeshift scaffold—two of the three troopers died instantly as the Warboss returned fire with his cannon, turning the structure into a molten ruin.
The tank reversed, trying to get distance.
The Warboss turned.
Charged.
Cain didn't think.
He ran.
Straight toward the Ork.
He didn't do it to be brave.
He did it because if someone didn't pull that monster away, everyone was going to die in under a minute.
He vaulted over a slab of collapsed hab-floor, chainsword screaming to life in his hand. It spat sparks and coughed like a dying saw, but it still had teeth.
He screamed.
The Warboss turned to meet him.
Their blades clashed in a burst of sparks and blood.
Cain ducked under a swing that would have cut a Sentinel in half. His chainsword bit into the Warboss's flank—not deep, but enough to bleed. Black ichor hissed on impact.
The Ork howled in rage.
"GOT YERSELF A FANCY TOOTHPICK, KOMMISSAR!"
Cain didn't respond.
He just moved.
One step at a time.
Back and left.
Back and left.
Dodging the klaw. Slipping past the cannon. Looking for a weak spot. Waiting for something—anything—to give him a chance to survive.
There were no more Valhallans now.
Just him.
Just the Ork.
And the sound of the sky beginning to scream.
The klaw came down again—hard.
Cain barely dodged, the serrated pincers missing his face by less than a hair's breadth. The ground where he had been split open like a cracked ribcage, ferrocrete chunks flying. His boots skidded across wet rubble, one sole nearly giving out as he twisted around behind the Ork.
He gritted his teeth and slashed.
His chainsword shrieked as it scraped across the Warboss's lower back—a glancing hit, but enough to cut through a rivet and spray a gout of black blood.
The Ork screamed, not in pain—but in glee.
"YER A SCRAPPY LITTLE NOB, AIN'TCHA! GOOD! I'Z GONNA SPLIT YA NICE!"
The klaw swung again—this time it caught Cain's shoulderplate and ripped it away in a shower of sparks and shredded fabric. The follow-up backhand from the cannon arm sent Cain flying.
He smashed into a rusted rebar strut, bounced off, and landed hard, coughing blood, one arm numb. The chainsword was still in his hand—somehow—but it was flickering, the teeth clogged with grime and gore. Barely spinning.
The Warboss stomped forward.
Each step shook the ground.
A crushed Leman Russ burned behind them.
Smoke curled around broken shrine statues and the bodies of the dead.
Cain rolled onto his knees.
Staggered upright.
He was limping now. Rib cracked. Shoulder screaming.
But he held the chainsword.
Because that's what Commissars did.
Even when it didn't make sense.
Even when it wouldn't matter.
The Warboss raised the klaw, roaring into the haze, voice cracking the very air:
"DIIIIEEEEEEE!!!"
And Cain screamed back—not with words.
Just a sound.
A final charge.
He raised the sword, stumbling forward—
—and the sky split open.
Everything paused.
Even the Ork's klaw.
A silence fell that wasn't silence.
The clouds tore.
A beam descended.
Not from orbit.
Not from any weapon made by man, Ork, or machine.
From somewhere else.
It struck the Warboss first.
He didn't die.
He just stopped existing.
There was no explosion. No scorch mark.
Just obliteration.
Cain blinked, stumbling to a stop mid-stride.
His chainsword dipped.
"…What the fu—"
The light hit him.
He didn't scream.
There wasn't time.
The light didn't hurt—at least, not in a way Cain could describe. There was no fire, no sensation of burning or tearing, no pain in the conventional sense. Just an overwhelming presence, a command etched into the bones of the universe that said: You will come.
His body rose—limbs limp, chainsword falling from his grip, boots dangling like a puppet cut from the strings of war.
The light swallowed the battlefield. Or maybe the battlefield just ceased to matter. One heartbeat he was standing on burning ferrocrete, surrounded by the ruins of men and machines.
The next, there was nothing.
No weight. No sound. No war.
Only motion.
He was being pulled.
Through space.
Through something beyond space.
He could feel it—not with his skin, but deeper. His thoughts stretched thin, unraveling into long lines of memory and instinct. His mind throbbed. His identity peeled back like old paint in a furnace.
And in that silence—something moved.
A shape.
No… three.
Three lights.
One red. One gold. One white.
They spiraled toward him, distant and impossibly close at once, orbiting a center that did not exist. He reached for them. Or maybe they reached for him. It didn't matter.
The moment they touched him, they entered.
Not like a possession.
Like a fusion.
Like they had always been waiting inside him, simply forgotten.
The red light roared down his spine, curling into his muscles with a crackle of fire and fury.
The gold light burned into his bones, anchoring into marrow, straightening his spine, filling him with weight and presence.
And the white…
The white seeped into everything else.
Heart. Brain. Soul.
It hummed.
Not power.
Not rage.
Just clarity.
Cain wanted to scream. Not from pain—but from understanding.
And then his body shrieked.
He felt himself changing.
Shrinking.
His fingers curled inward.
His limbs drew closer.
Muscle didn't vanish—it compacted, compressed into something leaner, denser, wrong in all the right ways.
He could feel skin tighten. Bones restructure. His height drop with terrifying speed.
"Wait—wait wait wait, oh no. Nononono—"
He looked down.
He had feet the size of a ration biscuit.
His legs were short. Thick. Powerful.
His arms looked like they belonged to a toddler version of a bodybuilder.
And his abs… by the Throne, he still had his abs.
"I have an eight-pack. As a fucking baby."
And then—through the haze of reshaped flesh and spiraling light—he saw it.
Earth.
Blue.
Green.
White.
He plummeted toward it—fast, faster, fire beginning to rise along the edges of the light tunnel. The cores inside him pulsed like suns stuffed into the ribcage of a monster child.
Meanwhile.
The bloodbath at the stone circle raged on.
Teeth tore flesh. Bones cracked. Screams rose into the frozen sky.
The stones were soaked. Black moss steamed red.
Sulia was dead. Miksaq was dying. Unarjuk was howling to gods that didn't exist, teeth blood-slick, arms painted in the fluid of men he barely knew.
And then the clouds opened.
No warning.
No prophecy.
Just light.
A beam descended like the breath of a sun focused through a god's magnifying glass.
It didn't strike.
It erased.
The entire stone circle—stones, people, snow, dogs, blood, screaming sky—was obliterated in a column of gold fire so hot it melted the crust of the island.
The ice caps cracked.
The ocean hissed.
The circle ceased to exist.
Ash and steam burst out in a ring nearly a mile wide.
Trees turned to black splinters. Snow boiled into mist. Bones were gone. Not shattered—gone.
And from the heart of that light—
A shape fell.
Small.
Glowing.
Muscles cut like marble.
And furious.
Ciaphas Cain slammed into the steaming crater with all the grace of a newborn god punching his way out of divine afterbirth.
Smoke curled off his back.
His face was calm.
His brow furrowed.
He stood.
Looked around.
Then scowled.
"Scheiße... I'm a jacked baby in the middle of a murder sauna."
"Typical."
And somewhere beneath the earth, the stone roots of that shattered circle shifted.
Waiting.
Welcoming.
Preparing.
Because what had fallen from the sky wasn't just a man reborn.
It was a problem—sentenced to the wrong world, with the right amount of violence left in him.
And now?
Now Cain was awake.