Part I - Aurelia's Exile
Time behaved differently in the Basilica Liminalis. It bent—courteously—toward what Aurelia asked of it; never racing, never stalling, only keeping pace with her need. She had exiled herself there after Terra, into a geometry she had made with careful, hurting hands. She wept; she cursed; she pitied and condemned herself in the same breath. She called herself a coward, a saint, a fool—each name fitting for a while, none of them earning permanence.
She decided it had been her fault. Not the Heresy entire—no single soul owned that apocalypse—but her part in it: the refusal to be more when more had been required; the innocence that had called itself restraint; the terror of losing a self she loved if she used the power that terrified her. Those choices—so painfully human she winced to remember them—had pulled down constellations of consequence. In her rage and the long winter of her depression, the Basilica's quiet had cracked, and chains of possibilities had cascaded—waterfalls of seed‑universes and fledgling galaxies pushed to ruin by gestures made with shaking hands. She had counted the drowned lights, learned their names, and then set herself to restitution. For a long time that could not be measured, she repaired what she had harmed and brought back what she had sent from the ledger, one patient act at a time: re‑threading stellar currents, re‑seating worlds in the beds where they belonged, untying cause from cruelty when it would hold, and, where it would not, planting mercies in the spaces grief had left—until the Basilica stopped sounding like a wound.
Pain and grief became hers in a way that felt honest. She kept them. That was how she knew she still wanted to be human, even if she now knew better than any human ever had what the price could be. The Basilica did not resemble a palace so much as an argument won gently. Cloisters folded into cloisters, perspectives corrected themselves without being asked, and light learned the habit of arriving where it was needed. Pools lay along the nave like dark mirrors laid end to end; each pool held a sky that did not always agree with the others. Statues did not posture; they listened. Chimes rang only when she exhaled.
She rested. She lay beside a long, dark pool where galaxies drifted like pollen, and she watched the Great Crusade again, minute by minute, hour by hour, decision by decision—hers, and others'. She saw how Chaos never arrived as thunder first. It seeped as suggestion: doubt, injury nursed past use, pride rehearsed until it learned words without meaning them. The seeds had been planted early, watered by small slights and unattended aches, and when the storm finally came, they were only doing what seeds did.
"Horus was right," she said at last, voice nearly lost to the water. "My blind hope was a problem by itself. I was naïve."
"Then what were you, if not naïve?" she asked herself, and the pool answered with a ripple that looked like a shrug. She nearly laughed. Nearly.
She traced the Milky Way across the surface with one finger. Sectors and systems burned under her reflection. She did not stop them. She refused the lie of omnipotence. She learned to watch without pretending she could own everything she saw.
For a few thousand years—long enough for minor creeds to be born and die without her noticing—she wandered: other galaxies, other possible universes, anywhere the ache did not know her name. Escape worked until it didn't. Forever had teeth. It waited by the door.
So she studied instead. Thought became meditation; meditation became change. She refused to use time as an accelerant—no shortcuts, no cheats. She used it as a sense. The Basilica slowed to her breath until even the wind learned her discipline. Chaos still lived in her mind and her heart, but the noise learned to stand at attention. Out of that order came resolve.
She chose not to unmake her scars. She named them and learned their uses. "I will not be naïve," she told the dark, "but I will not abandon hope." In a civilisation that had called war its first language, she meant to be the rebuttal, written in a hand that did not shake.
She embraced her power as one picks up a sharp tool: slowly, deliberately, with respect for what it could undo. She refused omniscience. She refused the cheap certainty Tzeentch offered those who were tired of listening.
"A page when needed," she told herself, "never the whole book." She would not pull people by their strings. She would not make souls into diagrams. If an hour demanded it and no other mercy remained, she would look farther than was decent—and she would let the Changer of Ways know what omniscience looked like when it had a conscience.
"Can you see me yet?" she asked the empty air, smiling without heat. "No. You never did."
He could not see her. He never had. She had been made of something older than change; his ledgers did not have a column for her. Numbers that tried to hold her came apart like wet ash.
She considered the others by name and office. Khorne—a noise as old as teeth. He was not unique; he was merely loud. He could not rouse her to murder or thrill her with his arithmetic of slaughter.
"Find another drum," she said, not unkindly.
Nurgle—patient, sentimental, grotesque. Decay did not scandalise her; it belonged to life. She had been present before death existed as a concept and would be present after its usefulness ended.
"Everything that rots returns to soil," she murmured. "Soil is not a failure."
Slaanesh—an orphan of appetites pretending to be a god. She recognised love, joy, beauty; she refused the addiction to their masks.
"You could have been delight," she said to a statue that had once been a mirror. "But you settled for hunger."
She did not pretend independence from origin. She was her father's work—the Emperor's will made into a daughter—and in that she resembled the Dark Gods more than she liked: beings distilled from an idea and then imprisoned by it. That was why she set limits. She left roadblocks for herself. She made rules and obeyed them. In their weakness, the Chaos Powers called her limits luck . In their strength, they might have called it wisdom .
She did not underestimate them. They were very powerful and very practised. They were also roles. She did not hate them—not really. She understood them, and in seeing them as precisely what they were, she gained a steadier hand over them. Could they be killed? Possibly , she thought. But another mask would come to wear the same hunger. That seemed, at best, a tireless waste. Besides, the other option was to kill all sapient beings. That was not an option.
"Killing you is not the work," she said into the Basilica's quiet. "Changing the weather that feeds you is."
Her finger drifted over a star and paused. "Never become more. Do not drown in it," She drew the faintest line through the pool. In real space, a tendril of Hive Fleet movement strayed—pure coincidence, if anyone asked—and fed itself into a swollen sun. A world earned hours: enough to run or to breathe, because coincidence had manners for once.
"They are endless," she sighed. "Like Orks, only less funny." She could have done that all day for a century, and it would not have mattered enough.
Once, she had turned a tendril towards a black hole, where they couldn't eat what cannot be eaten. Another time, she held a door, during the scattering savageries of the Second Tyrannic War, fragments of Kraken fanned to envelop the doomed and the faithful alike. She did not cleave the swarm. She did not pretend that she could. But for thirteen minutes along two different fronts, she let gravity speak a dialect the Tyranids did not prefer.
"Only minutes," she told the pool. "And still, enough."
Near one black‑star shoal, a corridor opened for a battered flotilla that would be remembered—if at all—only for having carried refugees who later became farmers. Rimward, the Lamenters unknotted from a trap no tactician should have escaped. Far spinward, the Scythes of the Empero r —bloody from Sotha—found a way between singularities that should not have aligned. Pieces of Kraken went where hunger always goes when it is not watched: into bigger mouths. The galaxy called it a chance. Chapels called it gratitude.
She accepted neither praise nor blame. She had turned a page. The book went on. But dealing with the Tyranids was an endless and fruitless endeavour. There were better employments for mercy than wrestling swarms.
She turned her study to deeper history. The War in Heaven unfolded below her like liturgy: Old Ones improvising genius and their collapse, Necrontyr making a bargain they thought they understood, the C'tan learning hunger and wearing it with pride into their demise. She watched slavery become science, revolt become ritual, victory become a prison with very clean lines. And a war that scarred the Warp forever. It taught her what not to be.
"You were heard, my dear Og'dríada," she said, and the Basilica accepted the name without complaint. She had taken that shard from its cage and set it in its own pool, where it shone as a small green star and muttered in very elegant glow and shapes. Two others had joined him: Vesh‑Kael, a fragment she had found almost unmade in the deep void, and Hsiagn'la, who could only scream at first and did not know why. She kept each in a separate basin. In the Basilica, even gods learned good fencing.
They wanted, immediately, to consume one another. She did not permit it. She remembered the old Necron myths that called the Outsider by a dozen names— the Stranger, the Great Hunger —and in one desert dialect Tsara'noga. She would not breed that story here.
"Thank you," she told them, bowing her head as if to equals. "For your memories. For your first‑hand recollections. For hearing me complain across millennia."
The shards replied according to their natures: one in crisp angles that made her see new colours, one in soft dicta about what it had once been, one in ragged, painful light. They were calm in her keeping, and safe from the lords who would have caged them again in tesseract labyrinths.
"Shall I ask you for counsel?" she wondered aloud. The pools brightened, dimmed, flared. "No," she decided. "Advice from hunger is still hunger." And yet she listened—to their pasts, not their appetites.
She knew the Necrons woke and that they were as grave a threat as any. She could not stop that awakening. She could, however, take some of the toys away and make the board less certain while she thought. She saw a page; it lay on a path that led somewhere decent. She chose it.
She sat again by the pool, and the Basilica adjusted its clocks to match her pulse. She thought of Valerian without summoning his name: a man in gold learning to prefer devotion to duty. She thought of a garden on Terra that had refused to learn despair.
"Hope is a practice," she said. "Not a mood."
Aurelia rose. "I still hoped," she said at last. "I had matured. I had learned. But I was still myself. That was the first victory."
The pool went on reflecting what it chose. She looked once more at Terra, at a tower where machines told the truth, and then she turned toward the door she had built for returning. The hinge did not squeak. The dark beyond carried, very faintly, the smell of leaves.
Part II - When the Beacon Went Blind
Cadia did not merely fall; it was taken apart and used as a hinge. The last blackstone pylons flared and failed, and the Eye of Terror unrolled into a continent of night the cartographers named the Cicatrix Maledictum. The old scars—the War in Heaven's memory, the birth‑cry of Slaanesh—opened like a mouth and kept speaking. Warp weather became climate; storms learned to sit. Half an empire woke on the far side of a locked door and discovered that even prayer needed navigation.
From the Basilica Liminalis, Aurelia watched it as pressure rather than light. The pool before her showed the galaxy not in stars but in burdens. Currents tore sideways. Choirs went hoarse. Vox‑ghosts carried prayers that ended mid‑amen, their echoes returning as if embarrassed to arrive alone.
"The beacon will gutter," she said, and then it did. The Astronomican failed. Bells in the Basilica rang flat in sympathy and would not be persuaded otherwise until she laid a palm to the water.
"Father."
She tasted the word the way soldiers taste iron. The Golden Throne throbbed at a distance like an organ with a cracked stop. She did not find a sovereign mind waiting for rescue. Aurelia leaned into the pool and found facets: the General grinding plans through pain; the Builder stacking cause upon cause; the Judge refusing to close the ledger; and the Father, a warmth flickering like a hearth bullied by wind. They lay scattered along old circuits and in the beam of the dying light, each stubbornly refusing to quit its appointed task. She allowed herself a small smile; only he would be so relentless in the keeping of his will.
"You are everywhere but together," she murmured. "Stand closer."
She had waited for this opening. Not a miracle window—only a page. Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and the Changer of Ways feasted on a sundered galaxy, joy‑blind at the Great Game's new chapter, mistaking nuance for silence. She knew that if she stepped openly into the Warp, they would notice—and to face the Four in their own dominion was a ruinous idea. So she kept to the edges and moved as a burglar in a cathedral storm, taking only what had always belonged to her.
"Not cured," she told the dark. "Contour."
She braided the garden pulse of Terra into the Throne's rhythm by remote art, lent a Null‑maidens ' clean absence as counterweight, and let the oaths of men in gold act as splints. She bled the worst spikes of agony into the choir's lattice—not to harm astropaths, but to smooth the jagged places into the song they already sang. The beacon steadied for bursts: seconds that felt like minutes, minutes that felt like breath, perhaps days went by. Around Sol, ships that should have misjumped did not. Instruments forgot how to lie.
"You're not you, but there's still enough of you."
A voice answered—hurt, distant, more weather than speech.
"Be still," she said. "I cannot make you whole. I can make you hurt less and still be you."
Fragments drew nearer. Heat returned to embers; none of them pretended to be a blaze. The Basilica's bells learned their notes again.
She searched along the Astronomican's old beam and in the palace machinery that had learned to carry him. She found stubbornness before she found a name—the habit of purpose that had outlived memory. His mind lay broken and sorted by function, each fragment working without permission to stop.
"I will not drag you together," she said. "You will walk closer because you decide to."
She stitched what could be stitched and left what must be earned. She aligned pulses, set counterweights, and unsharpened some of the Throne's cruelties into tolerable edges. She would not force him. She would not turn a will she loved into a diagram.
"Purpose," she said. "Begin with that. Painless where it can be spared."
An answer came in pieces: a tableau, a notation, a remembered corridor in a palace that no longer existed. A single word arrived late and shy— sorrow —and then, astonishingly, forgive .
"I already did," she said with tenderness and sorrow of her own. "A long time ago."
If there had been weight in that place, it would have lifted. The fragments did not become a man. They became quieter together.
She refused to call it a victory. It was a decent outcome. A page turned in the right direction.
Aurelia touched and withdrew from there. She kept the interventions small enough that no god felt mocked and no daemon felt invited. The page method held. Her mission was completed. The Emperor was more than he used to be, not like he was, never that, but enough.
"How long will blindness last?" she asked the pool. It refused prophecy and offered topology instead. She accepted the refusal.
"Then I will check home," she said. "If there is rot, it begins at the roots." She turned her sight toward Terra and tasted the faint, familiar tang of Chaos hiding in human breath.
The Sanctum appeared to her as an orchestra that had forgotten its conductor but remembered the piece. Custodes stood like notes that refused to slip. A Null‑adept's quiet carved air into angles. On the Tower, instruments went honest and stayed that way out of respect. In the Senatorum, men argued by candlelight and pretended darkness was a choice. She smiled once, without kindness, and braided garden‑pulse to Throne‑rhythm again, holding a breath that would have rattled itself apart.
"Walk it off, old man," she said into the pool, not unkindly. She said it to make herself braver.
"One page at a time," she told herself, and the Basilica adjusted its clocks to her pulse. "If mercy had a gait, it would be this."
Chaos would try more; Aurelia could feel the board being set for cruelties with longer teeth. The page she had been reading turned itself and pointed—quietly—at the next line. It was time to go back. Then, Aurelia closed it. No more. For now.
"Enough whispers," she said to the Basilica. "A sign, then the rest."
She did not stride the Warp; that would have drawn every hungry eye. She took the path she had laid for herself long ago—thin as a hair, clean as a prayer—skirting where the Four were joy‑blind with their new Game. She kept herself page‑small and crossed.
She aimed for flesh: for the body in its cradle beneath Terra, for the patient machine that had learned to wait. She did not wake. She arrived.
In the Sanctum, a single monitor caught a pattern and pretended not to. In the Golden Tower, the stasis hum aligned to a human cadence for one heartbeat and let it pass. Vigil flames leaned, obedient as spears. A Sister signed no warp and then, after a long pause, presence. A Custodian found his gauntlet warm when he faced the east and said nothing.
"Only a sign," she whispered. "The rest soon."
The Basilica dimmed its bells as if to listen to another room. Aurelia set her hand to the unseen hinge between exile and return and felt it move without sound. She would show the living what the living needed: not a miracle, not yet—only proof that hope still breathed.