The sky was the wrong color for war.
It hung over the broken manufactorum like a bruised lens, swallowing the sun and bleeding pale light across a city that had forgotten it was ever alive. The air was grit and promethium smoke. Every breath tasted like the dying.
Aurelius Vox — Custodian of the Shadowkeepers, Auric Praetorian of the Emperor's Will — strode through the ruin as if the ground itself had sworn to hold him up. His guardian spear rested in one hand, its auramite shaft dull with ash. In the other, his gauntleted fist was blackened, heat shimmering faintly off it as if the air itself was bowing away.
To the mortal guards trailing behind, that fist meant safety.
To the enemy, it meant the end.
"Contact," came the vox-click from Brother-Protector Jovan ahead. No nerves in his voice, just fact.
Aurelius closed his eyes for the briefest breath.
Observation poured outward, invisible, a tide no psyker could sense. Intent bloomed in his mind like ripples on black water — shapes of thought before they became motion. Feral, jagged minds. Dozens. Close. Waiting for the shot they thought would matter.
"They think they will flank us in twenty heartbeats," Aurelius said.
The mortal captain to his left stared up. "You can…?"
"I hear," Aurelius replied simply. His brothers knew better than to call it anything else in public. In the Palace, in the deep vaults, they called it the Emperor's Gift.
Jovan chuckled through the link. "Then let us spoil the gift they think they're bringing."
The first bolt shells screamed in from the east.
Aurelius didn't block. He was already moving before the shooters had even twitched their fingers. Armament bled up his arms, turning gold to deeper gold, harder than the plates could ever be alone. The spear moved in a blur — catching one round mid-flight, angling it into another, letting the detonation shatter in the empty air above.
The mortal guards gasped, but Aurelius was somewhere else already. His Voice of All Things was open, wide and deep — the distant hum of an autocannon's machine-spirit, angry at being overworked; the stubborn whine of a cracked wall section that wanted to stay upright; the slow, furious pulse of the enemy commander's will.
That last one felt close.
He stepped through fire like it was weather. In the corner of his mind, the Voice dipped lower, to something older — a memory, unbidden.
He was smaller, then. No armor, no spear. Just the training square and the eyes of the red-sashed Custodian who would not let him look away.
"Name the goal," the man had said.
"Close distance."
"Action."
He'd moved — too slow, too narrow. The baton had kissed his ribs hard enough to steal air. On his knees, he'd heard the man's calm voice as if from a great height: Listen faster. The decision is the strike.
The manufactorum's ruined archway split as Aurelius passed through. The enemy commander stood at its heart — a Traitor Astartes, plate in the colors of some warband that hadn't mattered in ten thousand years. The Heretic lifted a chain-axe heavy with blood.
Aurelius lifted his fist.
Conqueror's Haki burst out in a cold crown. The Heretic's stride faltered; the lesser cultists behind him collapsed outright, choking on air that had become weight. The chain-axe's teeth slowed, whined.
"On your knees," Aurelius said. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried. The Emperor's Will was never a shout.
The Heretic snarled something about gods. Aurelius stepped in and let Armament wrap the spear's blade. One thrust. One sound — metal, bone, and defiance all breaking together.
The battlefield seemed to breathe again. The mortal guards dared to stand straighter. The other Custodians came up beside him, silent, eyes forward.
"Clear," Jovan said.
Aurelius looked past the bodies to the grey horizon. The Gift still hummed in him, steady and endless as the mountain under Terra.
Somewhere ahead, more minds waited. Somewhere behind, the boy who had been told to listen faster stood a little taller in memory.
"Advance," Aurelius said, and the gold tide rolled on.
The Square
The square was smaller than the world, but to the boy it was the world.
Four walls of blank stone. Floor gridded with faded paint where generations of feet had worn the edges thin. Light came from somewhere above the haze, not warm, not cold, just there. The air smelled faintly of oil and something sharper — the scent of weapons cleaned too often.
He stood in the middle, barefoot, plain white tunic clinging with sweat.
Around the edge, children his age and older held stances until their knees trembled. Silent Sisters watched from the shadows like empty statues, null-fields lapping at the edges of thought. A single Custodian stood in front of him, draped in the crimson sash of the Shadowkeepers, helm cradled under one arm.
"Name the goal," the Custodian said.
The boy swallowed. "Close distance."
"Action."
The baton blurred toward his ribs.
He moved — too slow, too narrow. The strike slammed home. Breath left him in a grunt; his vision fuzzed at the edges.
On his knees, he heard the man's voice, calm as stone. "Listen faster. The decision is the strike."
The boy didn't understand at first. He had always heard — the hum of doors, the whisper of old hinges, the murmur of weapons at rest. But this wasn't about that. This was about the breath before motion, the space where the mind committed and the body followed.
They did it again.
And again.
By the seventh blow, he was no longer waiting for the baton to move. He felt the Custodian's choice — a shift of weight, a tightening of the shoulder — and slipped aside. The baton hissed past.
"Better," the man said.
They drilled until his tunic clung like second skin and his arms shook. Water came — cold, metallic — handed to him by a Silent Sister whose field made the world fall away to a single wire-hum in his skull. He drank without spilling a drop.
When he returned to the square, the Custodian was waiting with something new: a staff of plain wood, smooth from use.
"Again," the man said.
The wood was lighter than it looked. It wanted to be swung, but he forced himself to hold steady, to feel the balance. They moved — strike, block, step, counter. The staff became an extension, the hum of the world flowing through it.
On the last exchange, he caught the baton between wood and forearm. He didn't think. Armament just…bloomed. A thin, invisible skin over flesh and grain. The baton skidded away.
The Custodian's head tilted. Not a smile, but close.
"Again," he said.
And the world in the square kept turning, one strike, one decision, at a time.