Chapter 33: The Shrine of Ash and Fire
The world of Vordane Tertius lay under a sepia sky, its sun dimmed by the smoke of a hundred years of war. Once a shrine world dedicated to Saint Arastus the Enduring, Vordane had become a bastion contested between Imperial forces and Chaos cults. Now, it was a tomb of broken cathedrals and scorched relics, and into this hell, Captain Lucien Artor Vale marched.
The 76th Vardan Rifles had landed three days prior under heavy shelling. They had been sent to secure the ruined Basilica of the Hollow Martyr—a site rumored to hold a relic of great importance, a weapon of the Age of Apostasy said to glow with holy wrath when wielded by the righteous. Lucien had been tasked with retrieving it.
The enemy was no longer just human.
Warp-tainted monstrosities moved through the ruins, mutated beyond recognition. Men who had once prayed in the shadow of saints now bore horns and clawed limbs, whispering praises to the Dark Gods with mouths no longer human.
Lucien led from the front. As always, his presence shifted the impossible. Where squads should have been wiped out, they were merely maimed. Mortar blasts landed inches from his command staff and left them alive. One guardsman had his laspack detonate in his chest—and yet survived, his armor shredded but his body spared. It wasn't just Lucien anymore. His luck seeped outward, a growing aura that twisted probability around him.
In the center of the ruined city stood the Basilica, half-submerged in collapsed earth and bleeding smoke. As Lucien approached its shattered steps, a wave of wrongness passed over the platoon. Voices spoke in dead languages. The air buzzed with invisible insects. Men retched or fell to their knees in sudden dread. Only Lucien stood tall, his eyes burning with focused fury.
The closer they came to the Basilica, the worse it got.
"Sir, we can't stay here. The men—they're unraveling," said Sergeant Karn, knuckles white on his rifle.
Lucien didn't reply at first. He looked up at the broken spires, then to the great bronze doors half-hanging from their hinges. The whispers clawed at his ears, voices offering him power, salvation, even peace.
Then he heard another voice—his own.
No, not quite. It was a memory.
A time when he was fifteen, staring up at the stars from the roof of his family estate, wondering if peace could ever exist in a galaxy of fire.
The memory anchored him. He turned to Karn, voice like iron:
"We go in. Whatever waits inside, we face it together. And if fate decides to end us here, we'll spit in its eye with our last breath."
They breached the Basilica.
Inside was hell incarnate.
The nave was filled with corpses twisted into grotesque sculptures. Chaos runes pulsed faintly on the walls. At the far end, atop the broken altar, a relic floated in midair—a sword encased in flickering stasis energy. Around it, cultists prayed, their leader a towering figure in cracked power armor, his eyes aflame with daemonic fire.
Lucien felt it the moment he stepped inside: a tug in his chest, as though fate itself had shifted. The ring on his finger burned cold. His luck surged. A cultist raised a plasma gun and it exploded in his hands. Another charged and tripped on the bones of a martyr, breaking his neck.
The leader roared and pointed at Lucien.
"You are not fate's chosen! You are its mistake!"
Lucien drew his blade.
"Then I'll be the mistake that ends you."
What followed was chaos. Fire and blood. Lasbolts became errant sparks. Blades missed by inches. Lucien moved like a ghost in a world gone mad. Every attack aimed at him went awry; every strike he made found flesh. His men followed, emboldened, fighting beyond their limits.
When the enemy leader lunged with his daemonic blade, Lucien's foot slipped—but in doing so, he ducked beneath the strike and drove his own sword into the cultist's exposed flank. The wound ignited with holy flame, the daemon shrieking as it was ripped from its host.
Silence followed.
The relic hovered before Lucien, as if offering itself.
He stepped forward, took it in hand, and the stasis field shattered.
The blade sang.
It was real. It was powerful. And it had chosen him.
When Lucien emerged from the Basilica, smoke swirling behind him and the relic in hand, the 76th dropped to their knees. Word spread fast: the Emperor's Sword walked among them. Luck incarnate. A living saint, some whispered. Others simply called him what the vox-net soon would.
"The Blade of the Emperor."
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