Terra wept.
Not with rain — no such mercy remained.
But with ash, falling from the cracked sky in fine, silken veils. The spires of the Imperial Palace loomed half-shattered, pocked with the scars of bombardment and daemonic siege. The sky above was a necrotic wound where the Warp still bled through, held back only by ancient engines and the silent fury of the Throne.
Amid this ruin walked a solitary figure.
Clad in armor the color of pale starlight, chased with inlays that shimmered not with light, but with memory, he strode through the Eternity Gate alone. No banners heralded his arrival. No legions followed in his wake. No trumpets cried for the return of the prodigal.
Only silence.
And the whispers of those too afraid to speak aloud.
He was tall — taller even than most gene-forged warriors — but there was no genetic mark that matched him in the gene-seed archives. No number etched on progenoid, no heraldic bloodline. He was not one of them. Not Space Marine. Not Primarch. Not man. Not monster.
He was Caelen Vorran, called by some the Veilborn King, by others the Shard-Sworn, the Anachronaut, the Last Innovatus, the Father of the Fractured Host. He had wielded weapons from timelines that no longer existed. He had built empires in silence and burned them in righteous fire. He had killed daemons and refused sainthood. He had loved — once — and buried her beneath a moon no longer on the star charts.
And now, he stood alone at the foot of the Throne.
It towered above him.
Not just in scale — though it was colossus-made-flesh — but in presence. The Throne was a weight in the Warp, a psychic singularity, a star collapsed into ego and sacrifice. Even the highest Lords of Terra could not look upon it without breaking something essential inside themselves.
Caelen looked. Not with reverence. Not with fear.
With recognition.
And then — he knelt.
One knee, one hand placed upon the marble-veined stone. Not in submission. Not in worship.
It was the bow of a sovereign to another sovereign. A nod between kings, one eternal, the other all too mortal.
"I am not your son," he said. "I was not made from your flesh, nor forged in your vision. I was not meant to exist. And yet I do."
His voice rang clear, not loud. It struck the chamber like a relic hammer upon sanctified steel. Unyielding. Final.
"You tried to make gods. I became something else."
The Throne pulsed — a beat in the Warp, like the flutter of an ancient heart. No reply came. None would.
There was no need.
Caelen stood.
In his hand was no weapon. He had left it behind — a blade forged from the condensed timelines of a dying galaxy, sheathed now in silence atop a world that no longer remembered its name. In its final act, it had carved the soul from a creature that should never have existed.
He placed no tribute. No artifact. No offering.
Only words.
"My war is done. My Circle has returned to the dark. My name will fade — and it should."
A pause.
"But you… you will remain. In victory or in delusion. And that, too, is as it must be."
He turned.
And as he walked from the Throne — his cloak frayed by battle, his steps echoing in that place where no living soul had spoken truth in millennia — the silence did not close
behind him.
It remained.
Vast. Eternal. Expectant.
He bowed once — and only to the Golden Throne.
He was the white angel, one unlike his brothers.
A son not in the making of his own father.
A king of a kingdom no longer needed.
And he was gone.