Chapter 12: The Eye That Watches
The battlefield was silent now, save for the crackling of dying fires and the distant groans of the wounded. Lucien Artor Vale—Cassian to his men—stood amid the smoldering wreckage of what had once been a T'au forward operating post. Blue-skinned bodies lay strewn beside shattered drones and half-melted pulse rifles. It had been a rout. A miracle, some said. Another stroke of impossible fortune, others whispered.
Cassian didn't feel lucky.
He knelt to clean his blade, the movements mechanical, his expression unreadable. His hands were still trembling, not from fear, but from something deeper—an unease he couldn't shake. The ambush had been perfect. Too perfect. Their route through the canyon had been laced with trip mines and automated defense turrets. By all logic, they should have been slaughtered.
But the mines had misfired. The turrets had short-circuited. The T'au commander had stepped into the open seconds before an orbital bombardment landed like the Emperor's fist.
None of it should have happened.
Yet it had.
And Lucien, once again, had walked out of a bloodbath barely scratched.
The others celebrated him, slapped his shoulders, called him the "Lucky Dog of Calth" and "Cassian the Fortunate." The name stuck like burrs to his uniform. They laughed, toasted his name over recycled amasec. But behind those grins lurked something else. Awe. Unease. The beginning embers of myth.
And far away, something watched.
---
"He shouldn't have survived," the astropath murmured, her voice echoing in the shadowed chamber aboard the orbiting command ship Crucible. Her blind eyes glowed faintly with psychic residue, the warp shimmering around her like heat off a sun-baked hull.
"No," replied the tall man in the long coat of an Imperial observer. His sigil was hidden, but his bearing made it plain: Inquisition. Or something very close. "Third time in as many campaigns. Always in the center. Always walking away."
The astropath tilted her head. "He's a knot. A tangle in the threads. Where probability coils and snaps."
"A psyker?"
She shook her head. "No. Something else. Not warp-born. Not Chaos. It's... clean. Like reality bending, not breaking."
"I want him watched. From a distance."
---
Cassian felt it again that night—the pulse in the back of his skull. Like a heartbeat that wasn't his. The ring on his finger, once dull iron, glimmered faintly in the dark. Not enough to be seen. Just enough to be felt.
He held it up, watching the faint etchings shift. They changed sometimes, when he was in danger. Or when others were.
Once, when he had been cornered by a cultist with a plasma knife, the floor beneath the man had collapsed. Random fault in the plating, the tech-priest had said. Cassian wasn't so sure.
He had stopped believing in coincidence months ago.
---
The next campaign came quickly. The T'au regrouped with a precision only their kind could muster. Cassian's unit was sent into the thick of it, pushing into ruined manufactorums riddled with enemy tech.
That's when it began again.
A pulse carbine overloaded in a T'au soldier's hands, killing three of his own. A stealth suit's cloaking device flickered and failed in the middle of a flank, exposing it seconds before it could assassinate Cassian. A drone's guidance system crashed into a wall instead of detonating in the command trench.
Every stroke of luck was a blade, carving paths through chaos. And behind each misfire, each fumbled attack, stood Lucien Artor Vale—grim, focused, unknowingly divine.
His men began to believe.
"He's not just lucky," Sergeant Dorrin muttered once. "The Emperor watches him. He's meant for something. You see how the enemy falls apart when he walks by? Like they forget how to fight."
Even the veterans stopped scoffing.
Cassian hated it.
He didn't want to be a symbol. He just wanted to survive.
And yet, each victory pulled him deeper into something vast and unseen. The ring hummed at night now, like a heart whispering secrets. Sometimes, he dreamt of threads—gold and black—twisting across a great map of stars.
And always, always, he stood in the center.