The rain turned metallic.
It fell through the broken roof in sheets, drumming on emptied vats and the flensed ribs of gantries. Aurelius watched it bead and run across auramite like quicksilver, then lose itself in the mud where the dead were already sinking. The mortal captain made the sign of the aquila and didn't look at the faces. Jovan stood a little apart, helm tilted, listening to the quiet the way only the Ten Thousand did—measuring it for lies.
"Signal spike," Jovan said over the link. "Deep in the sub-levels. Not vox. Something trying to wake something."
Aurelius felt it too—not sound, not light. A wanting, hard and narrow, tunneling up through rock. He set his spear across his shoulder and stepped toward the freight lift that had jammed halfway down its track.
"Below," he said. "Now."
They dropped into the dark on cables that burned their palms through ceramite, boots hitting ferrocrete hard enough to make the floor remember when it had been new. The air here was colder, wet with old heat. The wanting got louder.
Aurelius closed his eyes for a breath.
The Voice opened like a door he knew by hand. Old machines hissed their grievances and their pride. Broken rails pined for straightness. A containment casket—sealed, sanctified, scarred—throbbed beneath the far catwalk with the insistent plea of a heart that should have been cut out long ago. And braided through it all, a hiccuping pulse of human will: terrified, determined, already fraying.
He had stood in quiet like this before. On Terra. Far below all this light and grime, atop a slab that wanted nothing so much it made the world honest.
The memory rose like a tide and took him under.
They called it the Kept. A square of blackstone wider than a parade ground and polished to a sheen that ate reflections, sunk into a vault whose geometry refused to count to the same number twice. Monolithic wards slept in the walls; no incense burned here. Even the air was sparse by design, as if breath were a privilege to be weighed.
The Sister waited for him barefoot, the pale of her soles startling against the absolute black. She had the same soft-hard eyes as the first day, but lines gathered at their corners now, writ by long observation. Her scarlet tabard fell like a cut of blood over ash.
Two Custodians stood at the edges, statues in everything but the way their gauntlets flexed. The crimson-sashed one inclined his head to her and then to the boy who had once been Theta-Seven. "Do as she says," he told the boy, which in the Palace was permission enough to trust anyone.
The Sister lifted a hand. Come.
Theta stepped onto the slab. The world forgot itself. The hum that had always been his foundation—the hinge-pride, the pipe's simple contentment, the mountain's careful dream—thinned until it was a single, taut filament running from somewhere behind his breastbone to the far wall.
He swallowed. Even the sound was smaller.
She spoke without words. Hear now what is left when the river is dammed.
He listened. Silence answered.
Not the absence of sound. The presence of a decision.
"What does it want?" the Custodian's voice asked from the perimeter, louder than it had any right to be.
Theta looked down as if he could see through his own soles into the slab's patient night. "Nothing," he said, because anything else would have been a lie. "It wants nothing so hard it keeps wanting itself."
The Sister's hand tilted. Good.
She took another step. He felt the tide of her null swell—quiet turning into vacuum, will into cold wind. The filament in his chest tightened until it was a string about to sing itself apart. He fought the urge to flinch.
Now hear within this. Her eyes were steady as a level horizon.
He let his breath out. He closed his eyes and opened his other ones—the ones that had learned to feel decisions blooming before motion, to read intent before the world had time to catch up. The river was dammed. The banks were bare. Somewhere under the blackstone, a gnat scuffed its legs. Somewhere along the vault wall, a hairline seep in a conduit prayed to keep its drip. He listened past both for the thing that had always been the point: wanting.
It came, faint as frost. The slab wanted its vow. The Sister wanted him to succeed and refused to let that want become a crutch. The crimson-sashed Custodian by the pillar wanted nothing personal at all—only the work done right. And inside himself, a smaller want, curiously stubborn: Do not shame the gift.
He named it. Gift. The word made a shape around the thing he carried.
The Sister stepped closer until the world was almost only her. The wire quivered. His spine ached with holding.
Speak to what keeps faith, she said without saying.
He bent his knees until his ankles would hold forever or not at all, and set his palm flat to the Kept. Armament would not help him here; clenching turned brittle under this silence. So he did the opposite. He opened. He let the skin of refusal go transparent and became a membrane instead—thin, permeable, attentive. He let what was left pass through.
I hear you, he thought to the nothing that was also a promise. I will keep what you keep.
The slab said nothing, and in saying nothing acknowledged him. His shoulders eased by a hair.
"Again," the Custodian's voice said from the edge. The Sister's thumb moved a fraction. The null pressed harder. His teeth hummed.
He did it again. And again. Until the kept silence became less a knife against the ear and more a cold river he could swim, numb but awake.
When she finally stepped back, the world-wires slackened in a rush that left him swaying. Hands he hadn't heard move caught his elbows—not the Sister's; she never took him off his feet—and set him right. The crimson sash. Up close he smelled like sanctified oil and cold iron. "Control is duty," the Custodian said. "What you felt is yours. Do not spend it to prove you have it."
Theta nodded, because the chiming behind his eyes wouldn't let words form cleanly. He wanted to thank the slab. He settled for a breath held and released on its surface.
They did not praise him. They scheduled him for more.
The days that followed were a doctrine of denial. The Sister walked him to the Kept and bled her null over him until he could read the moment of choice in a struck match across the room and tell, by scent and the way the flame leaned, what the striker intended to burn. She brought in a Magos one day, whose mechadendrites made neat, economical patterns; he was permitted to feel the machine-priest's wants and to refuse to touch them. She set a bowl of water on the slab's edge and had him hold his hand above it until he could sense, through absence, the quiver of the surface when a dust-mote fell.
"Do you hear the Imperium?" the Custodian asked once after a session that had shaken black tears from the corners of Theta's eyes.
Theta blinked the salt away. "It wants to survive," he said, and then, because the Kept had taught him to be honest where it mattered, "It wants to survive more than it wants to be good."
The Custodian did not answer. The Sister's mouth moved, almost a smile, almost not.
Sometimes they took the practice to other rooms—into the Hall of Swords, where the blades shouted in their sleep and the kept silence seemed a blasphemy; into the Ossuary of Names, where little spirits of ancient ink clung to stone and begged not to be rearranged. There, under the weight of recorded duty, he learned to lower his Conqueror's voice until it was no more than a suggestion along the bones of the air: steadier, quieter, now. He learned to target it so the boy next to him did not fall when the danger ahead needed to.
When he failed—and he failed—he catalogued the cost. Shaking hands. Buzzing teeth. A taste like old copper. Each paid on purpose. Each noted and folded into the longer shape of himself.
At the end of a month that might have been a year, the Sister did something she had never done. She touched his shoulder. No null. Just the weight of a hand that had broken many things cleanly.
Enough for today.
He should have bowed. He nearly did. Instead he looked past her to the slab and thought thank you with the steadiness the Kept had lent him.
The slab gave him nothing, and that nothing filled him.
The sub-level smelled like damp textiles and electroplated rust. The wanting tunneled up from the dark and struck the underside of Aurelius's skull like a down-hammer.
He stepped off the cable, boots splashing. Jovan landed beside him, spear ready. The mortal squad made their descent clumsy but alive, wide-eyed in a dark that seemed to look back.
"Casket's ahead," Jovan said, visor tags painting a ghost over the shadows. "Signums read…incoherent."
Aurelius didn't need signums. The casket under the catwalk wanted to open the way an infected wound wanted to burst. The machine-spirit welded to its clasps wanted to obey the last order it had ever been given—do not—but it was tired, and the man at the control plinth wanted salvation enough to be cruel.
"Hold," Aurelius told the mortals, and they held because men hold when the world speaks with gold in its voice.
He dropped from the catwalk and hit the deck like a verdict. The tech-adept spun, lenses flaring. Behind him, sanctity seals blistered and peeled as if licked by an invisible fire. Under the seals, something listened back—not a spirit, not a machine, something worse, something that wanted its wanting to eat whole rooms.
"Do not open it," Aurelius said.
The adept's mouth worked. "My lord—within is a weapon. The heretics—if we arm it—"
"You arm it by waking it," Aurelius said. "Then it arms itself."
He could have crossed the distance and broken the plinth with a backhand. He did not. He stepped closer and let the Kept fill his head.
Not the thrill of breaking wills. The quiet of kept vows. He lowered his Conqueror's voice until it was only a cold wind down the corridor of the adept's spine. Steadier. Quieter. Now.
The man's hands paused over the rune-keys. Aurelius felt, granular and exact, the decision begin to form again—fear arguing with duty, hope with truth. He pressed a fraction harder, lidless and unmoving, and let Armament skin his words so they left no bruise.
"Look at the seals," he said. "Listen to the metal. It is telling you it cannot hold what you think it can. Your cleverness is not stronger than what it was asked to bind."
The adept shuddered. The wanting in him changed shape, not gone, redirected. Obeisance replacing terror. He stepped back, hands rising. "As you will, lord."
Aurelius let the pressure slip away piece by piece, careful not to drop it like a stone. The casket moaned softly through its welds. He set his fist against the clasp and refused with the weight of a mountain that had learned to sleep without anger. Metal remembered its duty and cooled. The want-to-open receded like a fever breaking.
Jovan thumped down beside him, the mortal squad crowding the catwalk above, whispering prayers they didn't admit to knowing. "You heard it," Jovan said quietly.
"Yes," Aurelius said. "And it heard me."
He looked up into the black and imagined, far beyond roofs and rain and dying factories, the Golden Throne pushing light like a lighthouse through a storm it hadn't chosen. The Gift hummed within him, not loud, not triumphant. Kept.
He turned his visor toward the mortals. "Mark this vault for the Shadowkeepers. No one touches it until we build a cell that wants nothing so hard it makes everything honest."
They did not understand the words. They understood the tone. Men understand when a thing is decided.
Aurelius lifted his spear and the fist that had blackened a hundred battlefields. "Advance," he said.
They went deeper into the dark, and the dark, for once, gave ground.