Chapter 24: Veins of Fire
The skies of Vrax Minor had bled for days.
Ash drifted down like a soft snowfall, staining uniforms gray and choking the breath of every soldier who dared to inhale. The air itself trembled from the thunder of distant artillery, shaking the cracked ferrocrete bunkers Lucien now called shelter. The siege had entered its seventh week, and the land was a graveyard of broken war machines, shattered fortifications, and the twisted bodies of men and xenos alike.
Lucien Artor Vale—Cassian to those few who knew him before the war—moved like a shadow between burning ruins. His uniform was caked in soot and blood, but his eyes burned brighter than ever. The ring on his finger—once a mysterious relic, now a silent companion—tingled faintly, always awakening in the presence of peril. His luck was no longer just a rumor. It was a whispered legend.
He should've died a dozen times by now.
The sniper's bullet that ricocheted harmlessly off a helmet he'd found moments before. The malfunctioning plasma cell that exploded—just after he stepped out of cover. The enemy commander's power sword missing his throat by a whisper, only to get caught in a servo-cable as Lucien stumbled backward.
None of it made sense. But it didn't need to. In this galaxy, sense was a luxury. Survival was a miracle.
---
His current assignment had brought him to the central manufactorum—a strategic point now held by a desperate coalition of Guardsmen, penal conscripts, and a handful of surviving Astartes from the Iron Vultures Chapter. It was a meat grinder, churning through lives by the hour.
"Lieutenant Vale," rasped Sergeant Makron, a grizzled brute whose left side had been replaced by augmetics after the Tarsis cleanse, "we've got T'au coming from the west corridor. Drones, Crisis suits, and godsdamned stealth units. You still breathing, or should I start carving your tombstone from promethium?"
Lucien gave a tired smile. "Only if you can spell 'Vale the Unlucky Bastard' correctly."
Makron barked a laugh, then stopped as the ground shook again.
They moved.
---
The western corridor was a nightmare—industrial machinery twisted into makeshift barricades, gunmetal shadows flickering under pulsing emergency lights. The T'au came silently, gracefully, their rifles glowing with cold, clinical death.
Lucien's breath steadied.
The ring pulsed.
Time slowed—no, not truly, but his awareness sharpened. He shouted an order, and a flak drone detonation missed their position by inches. A stealth suit uncloaked mid-charge, but slipped on a loose cable and took a las-bolt to the face from a conscript who hadn't even aimed.
His squad moved like dancers in a void.
Where death should've claimed them, it misstepped. Where traps should've sprung, they misfired.
Where Lucien stepped, fate rewrote itself.
---
By nightfall, they held the corridor.
Corpses lay strewn in heaps, blue and red and black. Smoke hung thick in the air. Makron leaned against a bulkhead, wheezing through his filters.
"You're a damn ghost, Vale. Everyone else dies around you, but you keep going. I seen it with my own eyes. You're blessed—or cursed. I don't know which."
Lucien didn't answer. His gaze drifted upward, toward the cracked dome above. A sliver of the stars peeked through. Somewhere out there, the rest of the Imperium waged its endless war. But here, in this suffocating hole, Lucien realized something:
He wasn't just lucky.
He was chosen.
Not by the Emperor. Not by faith.
By something older.
And darker.
The ring pulsed again, stronger this time.
---
Later that night, as his men rested and the dead were dragged to pyres, Lucien sat alone with a dataslate. On it, he began to write.
Not a report.
Not a prayer.
But a journal.
For the first time, he needed to remember. Not just for himself—but for the legend being born.
His hand moved slowly as he etched the first words:
They call me lucky. But luck has teeth. And soon, the galaxy will feel its bite.