The warning did not come by vox.
It came in the way the air changed—how it thickened, how the hairs along mortal forearms lifted as if the sky had become a wet pelt dragged the wrong way. It came in the silence of carrion birds that had grown fat on months of stalemate and now took wing as one, an ugly black ribbon fleeing the front. It came in the way the ground itself seemed to draw breath.
Aurelius felt it first as pressure behind the eyes, not pain but a tilt—the battlefield's intent leaning toward murder with purpose. He stood on the east parapet of Bastion Karsis, helm off, rain clouding the gold of his auramite. The mud below was a map of old blood polished by boots. Over the horizon, lightning stitched burned clouds together without thunder, as if sound had decided not to waste itself before what was coming.
"Sir?" The trench captain at his elbow—Rilke, hard through the mouth, compassionate through the eyes—followed Aurelius's gaze into nothing. "Orders?"
"Everyone eats," Aurelius said. "Hot broth if they can manage it without vomiting from nerves. Then sleep in shifts. We rotate by fives. No one gets a full collapse."
Rilke blinked, then jerked a nod. He did not ask how the Custodian knew. Men learn fast when taught by survival.
Aurelius closed his eyes and let Observation out farther than he liked to do at once. It spread like a net pulled through heavy water, snagging on the rough shapes of thousands of choices assembling. Vox-silence on the enemy side—their officers moving by line-of-sight and hand signals to avoid auspex tells. Artillery teams hedging their cradles to pre-sighted marks. Mechanized columns filtering into washouts that had been ditches yesterday and were kill-lanes today. Farther back, somewhere beyond the first three ridgelines, a choir of hostile will warmed its throats—psykers or worse, humming on frequencies that made teeth sweat.
Not a raid. Not a test.
An ending.
"Sound the quiet," Aurelius told the vox. "No alarms. Lanterns down. Everyone who can pray may do so, but don't let the prayers make them stop checking their mags."
The trench went dim. Men dipped heads for breaths and lifted them to tasks. The Mechanicus' crimson robed tech-priests on the bastion turrets traded binharic packets with Navy liaison drones and began to slew the Hydra and Basilisk mounts to where Aurelius's hand had hovered over the map the day before. The line became quiet like a lung holding air.
The first shells landed at moonrise.
They came in on bearings that turned sandbags to steam and timber to bladed confetti. The bass thunder rolled across the front—then rolled again from a slightly different angle as a second battery walked its fire into perceived gaps, then again from a third as if the sky were a beast slapping down paws at random. It was not random. The patterns were made by someone who knew what panic looked like in men and was trying to paint it across a mile of mud.
Aurelius stood with his hand on the parapet and did not extend his will like a blanket over the whole line. Not yet. He counted. He tasted the intervals like a sommelier drinking hate. When the sixth correction hit, he lifted two fingers. "Left guns, pattern three. Now."
The Imperial artillery replied. Not more. Precisely. Basilisks belched their long-throated answers into the dark, bracket-fire closing in on coordinates his Observation had already turned into trajectories in his mind. The first enemy battery went silent halfway through their second stanza, a bellow cut to a throat-clear. The second tried to shift and found its tracks mired in its own shell-churned muck. The third stopped because someone brave and very frightened in the Navy put a lance-beam on a bright pixel that should not have been that bright and turned it into a wound in the night.
"Captain," Aurelius said to Rilke, voice level against the drumfire, "begin the lie."
Rilke bared his teeth. "With pleasure."
From the bastion's west quadrant, cookfires flared—fat, showy blooms of flame like idiots celebrating survival under a bombardment. Anyone sighting from the enemy ridge would think a company had massed there to move. Ten seconds later the enemy shells walked toward those flames as if called. Ten seconds after that, the fires winked into nothing and the shells chewed empty dirt, throwing sparks and shame.
Aurelius felt the rhythm change under his boots. The artillery talk was a prelude. The choir behind the ridges swelled. The air took on that coppered tang that made mortals think of coins on tongues. He breathed through his nose and tasted want: a warband commander's desire to be a story whispered over campfires; a Word Bearer chaplain's hunger for syllables that boiled blood; the deep, dumb joy of World Eaters at the thought of a charge without end.
"Here they come," Aurelius said.
They came like weather given knives.
Cultists first in a brown flood, used the way men use sacks of sand against water. Behind them, dark armor like shark backs knifed through lesser flesh, helmets burning. Heavy weapon crews knelt in their own dead to brace for firing. The Word Bearers advanced in disciplined clusters, banners like infected teeth. Off to the south a pair of daemon engines clambered on gears and vertebrae; their beast-minds howled with guilty pleasure. Above it all, skimming low to avoid skyfire like carrion birds that had learned strafing runs, traitor craft let their guns cough.
"Hold," Aurelius said into the trench's long ear. Not loud. Not for the enemy. For his.
The first rush hit the wire. Lasguns cracked in measured beats, and the wire sang like harps built by criminals. The bastion's flamer nests turned a section of the flood to orange glass. Men died, loudly and then not at all, because even death loses patience after the first thousand.
Aurelius walked the parapet as it shook. Now. He let Conqueror's Haki out.
Not the hammer. The sheet. It unrolled over the trenchline like a cold tide, not battering but settling, turning frantic breath to something paced, turning the jitter in fingers to the weight of a trigger squeeze that knew it would be where it meant to be. He felt a hundred minds hit it like falling into a deep pool and kick once and find depth under their feet instead of the drowning they expected.
For the enemy it was the opposite. Where his will washed out, lesser cultists hit it and remembered they were men who had to convince themselves to kill, not the other way around. They slowed a hair; in that hair's width of time, las-beams and stub rounds and autocannons learned their names and roll-called them to the dirt. A World Eater took a step and found it cost two, and in that second step someone who had never killed an Astartes shot him in the mouth until he did not have one.
"Left," Rilke barked, and guns slewed left, and the wall did not bend.
The daemon engines hit the southern glacis an hour into the push. Aurelius turned his face toward them and felt the wrongness of their spirits like a metal taste after lightning. He dropped from the parapet and hit the churned slope with both boots, sending up fans of black mud. The closer engine whistled as if getting a joke and scissored forward.
Armament climbed his arms to the shoulder, a black-gold film across auramite that made sparks choose to die on contact. The engine's claw—theology hammered into geometry—carved a trench through air where his head had been. He went in, not away, under the arm, into the stink of burned meat inside, and put the spear's blade into the joint where function hid. He refused with his fist, pressing the mountain inside him into the creature's will, and the thing that had called itself alive just long enough to be cruel convinced itself to be a machine again, albeit a broken one. It folded like a sinner into prayer.
The second engine tried to flank with the subtlety of a thunderhead. Aurelius turned; Observation showed him the next three motions as a grayed sketch in his mind. He stepped into the right one and made it the only one. The spear's butt found purchase in a socket that was not supposed to be a socket. The engine did a long, surprised note and died as if embarrassed to have been noticed.
Back on the parapet, the Word Bearers began to speak.
Not sermons. Instructions for the air. The sound pushed at eardrums and fingertips. Men's eyes unfocused as if someone had put a thumb on their thoughts. Aurelius felt it try to pick him up and pry, the way a bored child tries to peel paint. He answered with No.
He did not shout it. He held it. He let Conqueror's harden from a sheet to a pane to a slab of something that remembers being mountain. The Word Bearer leading the litany took a half-step like a drunk finding a stair that was not where it had been promised. He blinked. That was enough. A sniper whose hands had not stopped shaking since he was twelve kissed a trigger and sent a bright thought through the chaplain's eye.
The litany came apart like cheap rope.
"Right breach!" someone screamed over vox. "They have it—"
"No," Aurelius said.
He ran. The world did him the courtesy of slowing when he needed it. Future-sight flickered, dim at the edges and bright where it mattered—boot treads in mud, a flamer coughing before it stuttered, a traitor sergeant lifting his chainsword the way men do when they think the next second has already decided their title. Aurelius arrived at the breach a heartbeat before despair did. He planted his spear in the earth and the breach stopped being a hole and became a place.
He did not kill everything there. He killed enough, and more importantly, he made standing contagious. The boy with the melted pauldron saw a giant refuse and decided he could try it too. The flamer coughed and caught and made the entrance to the breach a noun few wished to visit. The men who had thought they would die badly decided to die well if needed and found, to their surprise, that living was allowed when conception of it had been decent.
Hours turned into a dare. Dawn slid under a cloudbank like a thief. The warband commander, somewhere behind the third ridge, shifted his weight from one leg to the other and decided he liked the feel of spite more than victory. He threw his last toys.
Drop-pods screamed slate-gray contrails as they fell. They were few—this was not a full Legion's generosity—but they were enough. They cratered the rear lines and burst open with brass and teeth. World Eaters again, but not froth now—hard, grim killers who had learned not to waste energy on screaming. They went for the ammo lines and the gun pits and the medicae tents the way wolves go for hamstrings.
Aurelius was already moving when the first pod hit. He had poured Conqueror's over the line like night, and now he drew it back to a knife and cut with it.
He ran through the rear like weather given purpose. He did not sprint. He arrived where he needed to be when he needed to be there because his Observation had already marked the when. A World Eater raised a chainblade over a medic bending over a boy named North; Aurelius's hand found the blade mid-swing and closed, Armament turning teeth to dust. He broke the Marine's elbow because elbows are how arms remember civility, and then he put the spear through the place that had once been a heart.
At the ammo lines, he met a champion with trophy rings along his vambrace. The man had killed enough to think death was an old friend who would let him cheat on debts. Aurelius let him try three tricks, then took the hand and the head and left the trophies for carrion that had better uses.
After the third pod went silent, something in the enemy's resolve finally unwove. It did not snap—not the dramatic, satisfying break that poets like. It frayed, and once you learn the sound of threads going slack, you hear it everywhere.
Orders to withdraw chased one another like frightened dogs. The Word Bearers tried to turn it into an organized retreat and were trampled by men suddenly aware they did not enjoy being managed. The skyguns, which had three hours earlier been bored to the point of inaccuracy, woke fully and began to swat at climbing craft with the interest of a cat given string.
By noon, the field in front of Myrridian's bastions was a sullen, smoking plain. The dead did what dead do best and remained where they had earned the right to be chores. The living did what living do when given a minute: they sat. Some cried in a way that was less about sorrow than about establishing they could still leak. Some slept with their foreheads against their rifles. Some cleaned and stacked and checked and made lines neat because neatness is how men assert themselves against entropy.
Aurelius stood on the parapet, helm back on now because the sun had decided to try generosity and he had no wish to look like a statue. His spear's tip was dull with blood he had not had time to wipe. Now he let Conqueror's drain away in careful inches until the trench had its own legs under it again. He kept Observation up in thin pulses, not because he expected an immediate insult but because men are easier to keep alive when you treat victory like a prank the universe might confess and take back.
Rilke came to him with a canteen in one hand and a slate in the other. "Losses tallied, lord. Heavy." His mouth worked. "But… sir, we're still here."
"Yes," Aurelius said, and took the canteen. He drank mechanically—it was water and iron and something floral some tired cook had put in on purpose—and handed it back. "Mark the graves. Write the names. The living will walk among them. The dead will be counted correctly."
Rilke nodded. "Aye."
A shadow crossed the parapet. Not a bird. A shuttle—long, lean, with the aristocrat lines of an agent who had never done a day of honest mud-walking. It circled once and came down behind the bastion, arrogantly graceful.
Aurelius did not sigh. He walked toward the landing pad with the slow, measured step that meant he would not change for whomever stepped out. The ramp kissed ground. Robes, black with silver aquilae, and armor painted the grey of bureaucrat stormclouds. The rosette at the throat was small and old and did not need to be large. An Inquisitor. Two acolytes like swords pretending to be men. A Mechanicus Magos in tow, his mechadendrites reading the dirt like a book he'd have preferred never to open.
"Inquisitor," Aurelius said.
"Custodian," the man replied. His smile was the learned kind, the one people practice in mirrors. "On behalf of the Senatorum Imperialis, commendations for today's… perseverance." His eyes flicked to the distant plain and back. "We will, of course, require a debrief on certain anomalies reported by your officers. Effects on morale. Occurrences not catalogued in Ordo data."
"Of course," Aurelius said, with the same tone one uses to say the weather exists.
The Inquisitor's smile did not move. "And perhaps a demonstration, if you are… amenable."
Aurelius looked past him to the line, to the men sitting on the floor of the world because it had allowed them to, to the smoke twisting up like letters badly written. He felt the ache in his bones not from exertion but from expenditure. He thought of the Kept Silence beneath Terra and the Emperor's gaze that had pressed until his insides tried to invent new bracing.
"Not today," he said. "Today, the Imperium stands."
The Inquisitor lowered his eyes in the way cultured men do when told no by something that cannot be contradicted elegantly. "Very well. Tomorrow, then."
"Perhaps," Aurelius said, which is High Gothic for you will take what is offered.
He walked away. Behind his visor, he let himself close his eyes for two heartbeats. He felt the line breathe. He felt the enemy lick its wounds and learn wrong lessons. He felt, far beyond this world, orders assembling into shapes that looked like Cadia. He did not see the future. He saw the work—and the edge of himself nearer than it had ever been.
"Rotate the watch," he told Rilke without turning. "Two on, two off, no heroics. Have the cooks burn whatever tastes good. The smell matters."
Rilke grinned. "Yes, lord."
The flag over Bastion Karsis cracked in a steadier wind. The sky was still wrong, but a little less wrong than it had been at moonrise. The night they had tried to end Myrridian had ended itself instead, and dawn, as rude and necessary as always, was already making a list.
Aurelius put his hand to the stone, and the stone wanted to hold. He let it.