I. The Knight in the Garden
Lion El'Jonson came to Terra with the hush of a drawn blade. He bowed correctly to the Letters Patent, to Malcador, to the Ten Thousand—yet the bow never reached his eyes. Noble, dutiful, and every inch the knight the Order of Caliban had forged, he walked the Palace like a man indoors only by necessity. Silence suited him. So did distance.
Aurelia tried distance at first, out of courtesy. Then she tried nearness, out of patience. The Lion answered both with the same measured respect: chivalric, exact—and guarded as a keep at midnight. Rank did not dazzle him; it only reminded him to mind the forms. She saw the mistrust plain in him, not the sneer of contempt but the cold habit of survival—a man who planned for the worst because the worst had been reliable company.
"Walk with me," she asked, when duty did not pull him away. She did not push. They took the paths of her gardens, where the air remembered rain and the fountains remembered warmth. He named trees in the old Calibanite tongue—the thorn‑oak, the moon‑yew—then fell quiet, as if guilty of saying too much.
Under leaves, he relaxed by degrees that only a patient eye could tally. He watched the careful beauty she had taught to hedges and water, and some knot within him loosened at the evidence of an order without cruelty. When a Sister of Silence ghosted past, her null‑aura brushing the borders of perception, he inclined his head with a soldier's acknowledgement; distrust he reserved for lies, not for disciplines honestly worn.
Once, at a fork in the path, she chose the shaded way and he the sunlit; both stopped at the same instant and stepped to meet in the middle without a word. Precision recognised precision.
Aurelia spoke softly of grass and light; the Lion answered, when he answered, with hunts and maps. Caliban had not fit around him even when he had mastered it. The beasts that haunted its forests taught him how to fight and how to think; the Order taught him how to lead men who did not always wish to be led. He had known victory more often than not and belonging almost never.
"Not even among your own?" she asked.
"Especially among my own," he said, after a pause long enough to count the veins in a leaf. "A leader stands a pace aside. It is the cost of seeing where the next step must fall."
"You do not need to fit here," she said at last. "You are my brother. That is enough."
His glance weighed the sentiment for traps and found none. A breath later, he offered one of his own.
"I should remember," he said, voice level as a file across steel, "not to plan the hunt you deserve if ever you betrayed the Imperium."
She stopped, startled—and then laughter took her like the sun takes frost. At last, she had found the seam of his humour: dry as Caliban dust and twice as stubborn. "I will remove you from my dead list, then," she said gravely, "and a dozen private schemes."
His eyes widened the smallest measure; the corner of his mouth considered movement and then declined. "As you wish," he said. It sounded like a report on enemy dispositions. She liked him for trying.
They sat a moment on a low wall. He described a forest path that looked safe and was not; she described a corridor that had learned to give back echoes kindly. He listened with the care of a hunter learning a new terrain.
They made a compact. "Keep an eye on me, if you must," she told him. "But walk when I ask, when duty allows. You may bring your suspicions; I will bring the path."
"I cannot promise as often as you will ask," he said. The Great Crusade ate hours and worlds with the same appetite. "But I can step out of the hunt long enough to remember why we hunt."
"Good," she said, and took his hand. They finished the circuit without a word, and he did not let go.
Later, a Custodian observed—only to his own memory—that the Primarch of the I Legion never once stepped on the white line Aurelia had painted into the flagstones to teach young gardeners where not to scuff. The observation pleased him. Precision understood precision. On another day, a courier from the Hexagrammaton delivered sealed orders; the Lion read them without breaking stride, folded them away, and still made time to walk the long way round so the Princess could finish telling a story about a tree that preferred the sound of water.
When duty finally called him outward, he left a phrase behind, placed like a marker stone: "If I do not come, assume I am hunting where the light is sparse." She nodded as if this were the most ordinary of courtesies.