Ecstacies of Saint Chrisenya the Mad [Warhammer 40k] [Transgender Sororitas] [NSFW]

[dragonsaffron]

It was a very lucky thing that Chrisenya had been allowed to keep her own copies of some of the key texts, a reward granted to her only after years of essentially flawless record at the Academia Ecclesia Gabriellum. Otherwise she would have had to waste the precious hours of free time allotted to her in between training periods, meals, and services walking back and forth to and from the library, instead of curled around the aging flimsy just under the roof of the bunk-room.

The answers which Chrisenya sought in those ten-thousand-year-old words were not easily found. There was much ink spilled on the nature of warriors and the righteousness of war, but although Chrisenya's mental efforts reached out to grasp for meaning, she could not find anything solid to take and hold. Even with Canoness Innogen's guidance, her mind was still unsettled, constantly stirred and mixed by the pressures of uncertainty and bodily stress. There was only one pill of stimm remaining in the vial, and Chrisenya was saving it for when the urge grew so great that she was left with no other choice. In the end, that time never came. It was interrupted by Severn's return to the drill-squad.

There was a ritual to it, the final step in the un-doing of Severn's sin, one not detailed in the Rule Sororitas. Bellara explained it to them all but a few minutes before the time came, in a small huddle outside of the Repentrium. It was simple but laden with meaning, and even Sister Benedicta understood it easily.

A few minutes later, Severn emerged. To Chrisenya, who had seen her since, and to Bellara, who had no doubt been through this before, her appearance came as no great surprise; but the others gasped or recoiled in shock. Severn was more clothed than she had been in the Repentrium itself, with a simple loincloth to grant her a fragment of modesty, and the chains around her fingers had been removed. There were more than enough marks of her penitence on her flesh. She had visibly lost weight, her muscles slightly more visible across her bulky frame as the fat was stripped away. All across her body were dozens of new scars and bruises. She smelled awful, an aura of bodily stench and smoke radiating off of her.

And it was that pathetic thing with whose forgiveness the drill-squad was charged. They all stood in a row, hands clasped, and watched as Severn walked slowly forward. She started at the far left of the line, collapsing onto one knee before Sister Fidelitas. Her eyes were plaintive and sad as she looked up to meet Fidelitas's gaze.

"You have made up for your crime," said Fidelitas. "I accept you back into the fold."

Fidelitas took her by the wrist and helped her up, the assistance given in spite of the fact that Severn did not need it. Sister Severn walked but a step before turning and kneeling before the next in line, that being Sister Gwynette.

And so on and so forth, down the line. Seven were the members of the drill-squad, and so seven were the acceptances Severn would have to be given in order to regain her status as novitiate. Theoretically, any one of them could disrupt the process by denying her; but the firm eye of Sister-Superior Bellara made sure that all went as expected. The last in the line was Sister Chrisenya.

Severn's eyes were soft, and her lips curled microscopically into the shadow of a smile. Chrisenya took her hand before even saying the words, but the words came.

"You have made up for your crime, Severn. I accept you back into the fold."

Severn leaned forward very slightly and kissed Chrisenya on the knuckles, in full view of the entire squad. Chrisenya's skin went red-hot. Instinctually, as Severn rose, Chrisenya glanced to the other end of the row, where Fidelitas stood; though she looked for just a moment, the expression she saw in that moment was one of seething anger.

And then Severn was standing, and the moment was past. Sister-Superior Bellara had a cloak ready to cover Severn's nudity, and she wrapped it around herself tightly, as though she had just been rescued from frigid cold. She and Chrisenya stayed right at each other's sides for the entire duration of the walk back to the room. Chrisenya wasn't sure if she wanted this, but neither was she uncomfortable enough to shoo Severn away.

There were plenty of looks, of course. Fidelitas's rage. Regina's horrified shock. Sister Serra's look of disgust. Gwynette's awful, lewd smirking. The other members of the squad understood the meaning of the gesture, even if they could not comprehend its source.

As they neared the novitiate's hall, Severn leaned over to whisper into Chrisenya's ear. "When I get dressed, I want you in the bathroom with me. We need to talk."

Chrisenya had already reached the upper limit of her embarrassment. Nothing more that Severn did could shame her further, so she nodded. Once Severn had grabbed one of her uniforms, crudely modified so as to remove the sleeves, she slipped into the bathroom adjoining the bunks, and Chrisenya followed.

Severn stripped and started to replace her underthings. Chrisenya felt the faintest glimmer of awe at the kind of support her breasts required, but she could not allow her focus to fall there.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"You, mostly," said Severn. "You've seemed pretty receptive so far, but I wanted to know if we're… on."

"On?"

"Yeah, you know. On." Severn saw Chrisenya's uncomprehending look and rolled her eyes. "When one person allows another to fuck them, that usually implies that their relationship is more than just squad-mates, but I didn't want to assume."

Chrisenya's heart leapt into her throat. She turned around, facing herself in the mirror above the sink. "That sounds… heretical."

"Isn't. It's discouraged, but as long as we don't let it get in the way of our duties it's not disallowed."

Chrisenya processed the statement for a moment. "Did you read the Rule Sororitas explicitly for rules about…"

"Of course I did. Needed to figure out how much I had to hide."

Chrisenya did not understand why it was that Severn had chosen to take the orders. Fidelitas's motivations, loathsome as they were, she at least understood. She looked at the reflection of Severn's face in the bathroom mirror; though she was partway through getting her tunic on, she was still looking at Chrisenya. She expected an answer.

"I… I… I suppose we are on, yes. But don't take that as an excuse for any sort of lewdness, please."

Severn laughed. "I'll restrain myself as much as I can."

Chrisenya whirled around. "I'm serious, Severn. I will not have you tainting my reputation."

"Fine, fine. Maybe I'll take a page out of Sister Regina's book, show my love only through the most chivalrous of means. And speaking of Regina, I need to…" Severn's eyebrows drew together. "Is today an off day?"

Chrisenya shook her head. "We were given an afternoon, thanks to you."

"Well, shit. I have a lot of business to take care of now that I'm out, and absolutely no idea when I'll have the time."

Severn was fully dressed. She stepped forward, placing her hands around Chrisenya's hips. "Kiss me," she said.

Chrisenya did. It was a brief kiss, lasting only as long as it took for Chrisenya's guilt to make itself known once more.

"Did you quit the stimm?" Severn questioned.

Chrisenya shook her head. "I've tried, but… the only reason I haven't taken any recently is because I'm almost out."

Severn grimaced. "Nasty. Bad enough when I run out of lho, I can't imagine how bad it is with stimm."

"Awful," Chrisenya whispered.

"I was going to talk to Gwynette about this anyway, so I might as well bring that up," Severn said. "Make that my first present to you."

"Stop it," Chrisenya said, pushing her away. "I've indulged you enough by letting you kiss me, do not act so romantic that I swear myself to chastity forevermore in the name of the Empress."

"You couldn't do that, I know you too well… But alright. I'll give. I was never much for romance anyway."

"Yes." Chrisenya looked back to the mirror: the kiss had ruined her lip-wax. "Besides. You've already helped me more than I can put into words. Everything I give you, you have earned."

Severn froze for a moment. The bathroom fell so silent that Chrisenya could hear her throat work to swallow her own phlegm. "And everything I give you, you deserve."

Chrisenya could not hold Severn's gaze an instant longer; the feeling had grown too intense. She turned back to the mirror, using her little finger to adjust the lay of the cosmetics on her face as best as she could. As inimical to her ethics as it was, she had no choice but to focus on the aesthetic over the real.

"See you this evening, Chris," Severn said, before smacking Chrisenya directly on the arse. Chrisenya yelped, entire body going stiff for a moment. She forgot where she was and who had struck her, remembering only the impending uncertainty of potential pain. When she did return to herself, she turned, ready to reprimand Severn. But Severn had already left.

Severn hadn't explained what the business was that she had to take care of, but it was clear that the first piece of business had something to do with Regina. Both of them were absent during dinner, only returning to the bunk room well after the mess-hall had closed, barely avoiding curfew. Whatever it was they were doing, it must have been quite intense indeed, judging by Regina's flushed expression and awkward gait, and Severn's leering, overconfident grin.

Severn and Chrisenya talked only briefly that evening, as quietly as possible, Chrisenya barely willing to say anything at all for fear of being overheard. Severn kissed her on the forehead to bid her goodnight. Misty made sure that she got to watch Severn die a hundred times over that night.

Chrisenya was not entirely unused to the concept of sexual and romantic relations. Such things had been heavily frowned upon at the Gabriellum, but like the majority of things which were frowned upon at the Gabriellum, they were also very nearly omnipresent, to the point where even she had been forced to turn a blind eye to such relations in her career as a Prefect. From without, it had always seemed so very strange, to reorient one's life around another person. Once she would have even questioned the need for such things as kisses and tight embraces, but Fidelitas had taught her well enough the benefit of such things.

Still, Chrisenya had seen dozens of her fellow Progena go mad, their common sense totally overwhelmed by infatuation for the person of their choice. A strange and self-inflicted insanity, a monomania of the heart. For the Empress, perhaps, such singleminded devotion might be expected. But for another human being, one who you may no longer be on speaking terms with come the next month? Bizarre.

All that to say that it was remarkably strange when Chrisenya woke up the next morning to find herself having entered into such a compact, and she felt more or less entirely the same. There were little moments, here and there. At breakfast and midday they sat together, and Severn was sure to bother her about finishing her meals. During endurance training, Severn hung back near the back of the group, occasionally giving Chrisenya a word of encouragement before dashing past the threshold of Coriah's whip at the last second. After weeks of almost exclusively sharing her grappling spars with either Gwynette or Liniel, it was an entirely new experience having to fight against Severn's bulky strength.

But Severn was far from the center of Chrisenya's world. The pain of Coriah's whip on Chrisenya's back was just as stinging as it had always been, the desperate hope that she might someday escape it just as sweet. Sparring did not become less frustrating because Chrisenya had been made love to like never before.

Indeed, the primary concern was not Severn and whatever this new on-ness was that she had established with Chrisenya, but the question of stimm. The urge was returning, the exhaustion and hunger and desperate yearning of withdrawal increasing exponentially. Chrisenya was beginning to fall apart, and she knew that the only way to halt that steady degradation was to take the final pill. The knowledge that Severn intended to do something about it buoyed her for a moment, but when yet another evening came and there had been no news, Chrisenya came to a resolution.

She would take the final pill the next morning. Everything after that was up to the Empress's will. There had been no answers yet, no real change. If her ordained fate was to wash out, then so be it. For the first time in months, as Chrisenya drifted off that night, it was not Misty which had her mind preoccupied.

 

[dragonsaffron]

"You know, Chrisenya, that you have already lost," said Misty. She was wearing the face of Fredrika Thannetch again, though she had traded out the fanciful dress for silken trousers, all the better to grind her crotch against the nacreous material of the massive statue of Chrisenya.

"I have not lost until I have given in to you," Chrisenya replied through gritted teeth, struggling to breathe deeply enough to speak at all. "And I will never give in to you."

Misty sucked on her teeth. "You misunderstand. I am not the one to whom you must give in. I am merely the instrument. It is the Queen who will have the honor of filling you body and soul. And you have very much given in to the Queen."

Misty ran her fingers—Fredrika's strong fingers—along the statue's midsection, cupping its carved breasts in her palms. The statue was larger than the real thing, about two and a half meters and steadily growing in size. It must have weighed hundreds of kilograms, and every single gram of that weight was pressing down steadily onto Chrisenya's chest. With every extra centimeter of height the statue gained, the pressure grew stronger; inevitably her ribs would shatter.

"Think about it, Chrisenya. You fuck. You love. You drug yourself to the gills and call it dedication to the Empress. What could one call such things if not devotion to Her?"

Chrisenya struggled to answer. Just to taunt her, Misty kissed the statue on the lips, with a great deal of passion.

"I have not given in!" Chrisenya screamed. "The Empress protects!"

"But for how long? She certainly did not protect your family. Someday you will cross the line, indulge too deeply, and by the time you realize that you have been forsaken, it will already be too late."

"I will not," Chrisenya gasped. "There is a limit, I know it. I rule my pleasure!"

"If you ruled it, then why do you still—"

Misty stopped. The statue's growth suddenly ceased, and all at once its weight seemed to become less real. The mist flowing around her, lapping at the altar to which Chrisenya had been pinned, began to rise up and thicken.

"What…?" Said Chrisenya.

Misty looked up at something, as though she had just noticed a wall clock announcing the end of her appointed hour. "Damn that girl," she said to herself. Then, to Chrisenya, "You've been spared, for now. See you in the next dream, my beloved."

Chrisenya was dropped down into the mist, blinded and deafened, and for a moment she thought this was some new torture. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder gently shaking her, and she realized that in fact she was not blind at all. Her eyes were closed, and she was in bed.

"Chris. Wake up. It's important."

Chrisenya recognized Severn's voice. It was the middle of the night, and she had never been so exhausted; she could not bring herself to open her eyes. Severn could tell that she was awake, of course, especially once she started tossing and turning. There was a sudden sting of pain, and Chrisenya jolted upright. Severn had slapped her again.

"What is it?" Chrisenya hissed.

"Important business," Severn said. She had one leg still on the ladder up to Chrisenya's bunk, the other leg slung over the railing. "I think I've figured out how I can help you survive all this. But it has to happen now, before anybody notices."

Chrisenya rubbed her cheek. "Don't strike me like that."

"I needed to wake you up somehow, without waking anybody else."

"Then hold my eyes open, or tickle the back of my hand, something rational. It was bad enough the first time."

"Are you gonna come with me or not?" Severn said.

Chrisenya had to seriously ponder the question. She was exceedingly tired, and there was more training to be done the next morning. "Do you really believe this will help me?"

"Better to try something than do nothing."

"Fine."

Severn, as it turned out, was quite adept at navigating the Abbey after curfew, though not quite as good at it as Chrisenya was. She knew how to stick to the places where one would be less likely to be seen, and how to check for patrols without exposing herself. More important than any of that was the fact that they were traveling in a direction that Chrisenya had never thought to go before. The novitiate's hall was nearer to the wall of the Abbey than to its center, and the closer to the wall one went, the more the landscape became dominated by the sorts of purely logistical structures which a sister had no reason to engage with.

It was amidst the warrens of ferrocrete, places built more for tech-priests and servitors than for proper human life, that Severn's destination lay. It appeared to be an unremarkable corner, the intersection of a vehicle garage and a defensive emplacement, until Sister Severn dropped onto her hands and knees and crawled into a gap between the ferrocrete and the compacted dirt, one only barely large enough for Severn to fit through. Chrisenya felt no fear, though the eight-meter gap was far too long for her to see to the opposite side, and not long after both of them had emerged into a long-unused chamber strewn with the detritus of abandoned engineering work.

"Well I'll be damned," said Sister Gwynette, leaning against the ruined ceramite shell of a Rhino. "I didn't think you'd actually get her to go along with this."

"I may have had to bend the truth a little bit," Severn said. "I was serious when I said that I thought this would help you, though."

Chrisenya spun around like a dancer, but without any of the finesse. "What is this place? Why are you here?"

"Because the tech-priests still think that the door to this place is welded shut," said Gwynette. "And that misapprehension makes it very useful for anybody in the Abbey who wants to break the little rules. The ones against contraband, to be specific."

Chrisenya felt strangely numb. She had lost the right to be incensed by the concept of illicit activity from the moment she had accepted Gwynette's offer, and lost it once again after what she had done in the Repentrium. Like it or not, Chrisenya was a violator of the laws of the Order.

"You did say you were going to arrange something with Gwynette," she muttered to herself.

Severn folded her arms. "Yes, I did. Do you want to explain the situation, or should I?"

"I'll do it," Gwynette said. "Sister Chrisenya, did you happen to see that macrocannon on the wall near here as you were coming in?"

She had, though it had faded mostly into the background. A vague shape against the night sky, visible only as a gap in the stars. Chrisenya nodded.

"Well, built into the wall directly underneath that macrocannon is one of seventy-two barracks lining the wall of the Abbey, used by the PDF auxiliaries. And some of those PDF auxies really like the idea of sampling those delicious Sororitas-grade rations, or being able to trade misplaced bolter shells for gild whenever they go on leave. Of course, the auxies aren't allowed to set foot inside the Abbey, it's holy ground, so the exchange of goods has to get… complicated."

Chrisenya's jaw fell open. "You want me to be your ollram?"

Gwynette nodded. "Severn here says you managed to sneak into the Repentrium without being caught. That kind of slippyness is worth a hell of a lot. In fact I'm pretty sure, on the net, I'd end up owing you."

Chrisenya was liking this less and less. "And how, exactly, does this help me with anything at all?" she asked Severn.

"Well, first of all, it means you'll never have to worry about running out of stimm again. Or anything else you might happen to need that Gwynette can provide."

Gwynette winked, an act which Chrisenya found utterly galling. But that was besides the point.

"Secondly… well, calling you an 'ollram' isn't actually the worst comparison. That PDF barracks where the exchange happens? It's built about two-thirds up the side of the wall, and the lift requires a key. You'll be climbing about a hundred meters vertically each way."

"…up a sheer wall?"

"It's more of a scaffold," Gwynette said, as though she were embarrassed to even be having the conversation. "Not entirely certain what the intended purpose of it was, but I'm fairly certain by now we're the primary users."

"But that's besides the point, Gwynette," Severn said, giving her a quick glare. "The essential point is this. Gwynette has a bag with the things we're smuggling out. You put that on, climb the scaffold, sneak through the barracks to the exchange point, drop off our end of the trade, pick up the bag with all of the things being smuggled in, put that on, climb back down, and make your way back here." She paused, making sure Chrisenya had no questions. She could already see the whole process in her mind's eye, and it seemed far from easy. "And you'll do that every few nights for the foreseeable future. How does that sound, Chris?"

"Completely mad. I can hardly survive the rigors of our standard training regimen and you think that piling this on will help? And all of that assumes that I even want to be involved with an illegal smuggling operation!"

"'I don't want to be involved in an illegality' says the fucking stimm addict," Gwynette muttered. "You were never going to get this to work, Severn. She's an idealist, she's not going to do this because she's getting something out of it."

"That's not true. She's going to do it exactly because she's getting something out of it." Severn looked Chrisenya directly in the eyes. "And that thing is survival."

"Pardon?"

"Chris, it's no big secret that you aren't handling training well. Everyone can see it. And from what you've told me, it sounds like a matter of time before you either break down and wash out, or literally work yourself to death."

"And in what galaxy does this do anything other than accelerate that process?"

Severn folded her arms. "Not all practice is the same, you know. Nearly six hours gap between when you would be doing this and the rest of training, for one thing. And the verticality puts a totally different sort of strain on the body than anything else we're doing. But neither of those is the most important thing."

Chrisenya giggled. "Oh, yes, I'd almost forgotten. More exertion and less sleep, exactly what I need."

Gwynette shot Severn a glare, as though begging her to give up, but Severn was entirely undaunted. "The most important thing of all is that, unlike what we do out on the training field? This has a purpose. It's not exactly a higher calling, I know, but it's still something to believe in, even if that something is just getting Gwynette's glowing approval for a job well done."

"She's right, you know. I'm a kind and benevolent boss, that's me."

Chrisenya felt uncomfortably visible. She had mentioned her purposelessness to Severn, once, in a moment of weakness. It was a typically Severn-ish method of solving her problems; that was to say, entirely orthogonal to any sensible approach.

"There's no chance that I'll be able to keep up the pace during the day while still doing this at night," said Chrisenya, giving Severn a glare of her own.

"Then don't. Slow down. Be shit. You'll have a chance to excel once your head's above water."

"I can't do that!" said Chrisenya. "It may sound easy to say, but you're actually doing quite well at this. You can afford to not give your all. I can't."

"Really?" Severn raised an eyebrow. "It looks to me like you still get the business end of the whip whether you give your all or not. If you need to spare your energy in order to make actual progress as opposed to just showing that you're the biggest martyr in the room, then spare the damned energy."

Chrisenya stepped forward, close enough that she could be certain her words would still be understood even at a low hiss. "You and I swore the same oath when we took the orders. An oath to give everything we had to the Adepta Sororitas. I will not violate that oath."

"Do you want to be a battle-sister or not, Chris? You can either achieve that goal or you can stick to all the rules. You can't do both."

Severn reached out, cupping Chrisenya's cheek. It was a dirty trick, and one that worked flawlessly, as the balm of skin contact melted all of Chrisenya's wrath.

"What is the point in attempting to become a soldier of the Empress if I can only achieve it through disobedience?" Chrisenya said, an even softer whisper that she desperately hoped Sister Gwynette could not hear.

"Sometimes you have to achieve perfection through imperfection. That's just a mystery of existence. How many saints can you name who got that way because they were nearly executed for some crime, or coming too close to the temptations of chaos and nearly giving in?"

Chrisenya could name eight off the top of her head. Her namesake was not one of them; indeed it was her absolute refusal to give in, even for a moment, to the xenos that made her famous. What an unfortunate coincidence, she thought to herself, as she gently pushed Severn's hand away from her face.

"Alright. I'll do it."

One fear was resolved almost immediately. The pack containing the anonymous materials being traded out of the Abbey appeared quite heavy, and was about the same size as the bolter that had regularly threatened to rip both of her arms off every morning. But as Gwynette showed her how to secure the plasflex straps around her torso, it soon became clear that this was a much easier load.

After that came the lengthy briefing about how she would navigate the barracks. The PDF soldiers making up the other half of the operation had apparently left marks in the walls to indicate direction, but Gwynette spoke from experience when she said that they were easy to miss in the dark. Gwynette didn't let Chrisenya leave until she could recite a list of over a dozen turns in order. Sister Severn and Sister Gwynette both bid her goodbye, and the Empress's luck. They would be waiting for her back in the underground garage.

It was a short walk to the foot of the wall, and a yet shorter walk to find the start of the scaffold that Gwynette had described. Looking up from its base made it seem as though the wall extended all the way up into the clouds, a journey without end and without respite. Chrisenya put her hands on the rungs of what was no doubt merely the first of many, many ladders to come, and hauled herself aloft.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Halfway up the side of the scaffold, beset by a hundred thousand renewed aches, Chrisenya was forced to admit to herself that Severn was right. This was, after all, quite different from the training field.
It was much more staccato, for one thing: there were brief bursts of activity as she hauled herself over another ledge or up another ladder, followed by a few seconds of simple walking across the plasteel lattice platforms that made up the majority of the scaffold. If she ever felt like it, the option was even fully open to simply collapse against the wall itself and take a breather. She rarely gave herself that opportunity, of course, but it was very much there.
Every repetition of that process brought her higher. One by one, the roofs of the nearest Abbey structures fell away as she surpassed them, and more and more Chrisenya was exposed to the cool nighttime wind of Roctaln III. It looked about to rain again, the heady glow of the planet mostly obscured by threatening clouds. The finish, the top, was a fixed position, not the ever-shifting target that was the approval or disapproval of a Sister-Superior armed with a whip. For all that Chrisenya was sore and slow and burdened by the weight on her back, smuggling illegally-stolen materials out of the Abbey was a strangely calming process.
Chrisenya was rapidly losing track of why she was doing this. Of why she was doing anything, for that matter. All the calm had sapped her sense of purpose entirely and replaced it with layers of self-referential absurdity. Why was she doing this? Because she was doing it. She was absolutely riddled with sleeplessness, and her body was a network of pains.

A prayer to the Empress formed on Chrisenya's lips, but only a few scattered words emerged before crumbling away. The Empress's light formed a brief glimmer at the edge of her thoughts, invoking only the faintest consciousness of their existence before drifting away just as the prayer did. An old fear began to re-emerge: was this all merely a nightmare? Every time she levered herself up another level, every time her eyes drifted shut and had to be forced to re-open, Chrisenya expected to see her mother's face before her, with Misty's brilliantly purple eyes peering out from behind it.

But that moment never came. Against all odds, Chrisenya carried herself up to where the scaffold ended, and silently slipped in through the window of the PDF barracks. The next stage would be difficult as well, but in an entirely different fashion. Technically speaking, the punishment for smuggling, combined with curfew-breaking and entering into disallowed areas, was a lengthy stay in the Repentrium. But the PDF had much greater authority over their own barracks: they were well within their rights to shoot her dead on the spot, and their lasguns were more than up to the task.

Turn by turn Chrisenya crept through the barracks. She valued silence over speed, and so moved mostly on her hands and knees, looking up only to check for the presence of the marks on the walls. In the dark of night, the bare ferrocrete shell of the barracks appeared almost entirely empty and abandoned. Chrisenya could hear the sound of patrolling auxins in the distance, boots stomping on ferrocrete as they muttered to each other.

And then, on the floor, so close that Chrisenya very nearly crushed it under the heel of her hand, a strawberry. Chrisenya had never seen a strawberry, and she hadn't the faintest idea how she knew that the thing sitting on the floor before her was a strawberry, but there it was. The strawberry was the breaking point. All logic immediately fled Chrisenya's mind, all memory and sense overwhelmed by the constant crushing monotony of first the climb and then the lengthy sneaking through an endless labyrinth. It all seemed so pointless, so meaningless, and the absurdity of a fresh strawberry sitting on a ferrocrete floor brought it all into such sharp relief that Chrisenya had to clap a hand over her mouth to stop from laughing aloud.

What am I doing here, Chrisenya thought. What am I doing anywhere? Had she been doing anything at all, she wondered, or was this all just the unending extension of the days of torment seven years before? She had never managed to find the answer to why she had taken the orders, if obligation was a fool's game and her life had meaning after all.

Suddenly, footsteps came steadily down the hall, accompanied by muttering, the first male voice Chrisenya had heard in easily fifty days. He was too quiet to be heard clearly, but as Chrisenya scrambled across the floor to find a hiding spot, she was fairly sure she made out "sneak" and "blast," neither of which were good words to be hearing. A hiding spot proved easy to find: a small ventilation duct, just barely sized such that Chrisenya and her cargo could be jammed inside of it while the patrolling soldier passed them by. That gentle sense of pressure, the overriding fear, stained Chrisenya's ennui and existential dread like ink injected into gelatin; and somehow, an old memory was jostled loose.

...
​

The door to the holding cell creaked softly as it opened, the aging flakboard scraping against the floor with a sound that was quickly overpowered by the thunking of Sororitas battle-armor against deck-plate. Celestian-Superior Innogen scanned the chamber with two quick flicks of her head, right then left, and saw it empty.

"Saint? Where are you?"

She wasn't called Saint back then. But she wasn't called Chrisenya either, and with each day that passed she could attach what she was called then back to herself less and less.

"I'm right here," said the Saint.

Innogen briefly put on a confused face as she narrowly avoiding bumping her hip against the cell's small table. When she saw who she was looking for, her expression of confusion grew. She knelt down in front of the bed.

"What are you doing under there?"

"I started hearing…" The Saint flinched; she wasn't supposed to talk about that. "I'm praying. This is the quietest place in the room."

"Under the bed?"

The Saint nodded.

Celestian-Superior Innogen shook her head. "Would you mind coming out of there? We need to talk about something important."

"'Empress protect and Empress guide this pitiful vessel, grant strength beyond this mere shell of humanity by the exertion of thine will. Thou art the supreme of all mortal creatures, and only by thine light may I be guided. Forgive this fallible vessel…'"

"We'll have this conversation down here, then. We're about to dock with the Academia Ecclesia Gabriellum. Do you know what that is?"

"No."

"It's a school, for people like you whose families aren't around for them anymore. You're going to be staying there, at least a little while, until one of your aunts or uncles finds you and takes you in."

"I thank thee, my Empress, for all the blessings that thou hast foisted upon me, though I do not deserve them."

Her hands were so much fatter back then. They clasped together tightly as though they might lose grip on themselves while she prayed with pitter-patter words.

"Are you sure you want to stay down there? There's going to be food coming in a couple of minutes."

The Saint looked up at Innogen's weary eyes. Wonder and horror danced across her features. "Will you stay with me? Just for a little bit?"

"Of course I will. I've stayed with you this far, haven't I?"

The Saint crawled forward. In truth, she had stopped hearing things she wasn't supposed to hear minutes ago, but she was still afraid that any second now they might come back. They didn't.

"Atta boy," Celestian-Superior Innogen said, picking her up off the floor. "You're being very brave, I hope you know that."

...
​

There was no Innogen to help her up as Chrisenya crawled out of the air vent, certain that the patrolling auxiliary had gone. She dusted herself off as best as she could before continuing to where the exchange was to be made, but moved much more quickly than she had before. She was energized by the power of revelation.

What was the bravest thing Chrisenya had ever done? Innogen had called her brave all those years ago, but had she ever actually done anything brave? Was it bravery merely to do what was expected, to receive an order and follow it, or did bravery require something more, something active? Was it possible that climbing the wall, that breaking the rules, that what Chrisenya was doing at that very moment as she slipped through the hallways of the PDF barracks was, in fact, the bravest thing that she had ever done? Chrisenya's thoughts had been muddled for so long, ever since her fall on the training field, that the crystalizing clarity felt like the touch of the Empress.

The second bag, identical in structure to the first but stuffed to the gills with material, was jammed into another ventilation duct and hidden from view by a piece of stray flakboard. It took a few strong tugs to unstick it from the hiding place, at which point Chrisenya set to the process of undoing every buckle on the bag she presently had strapped to her. There was an odd fragrance to the new bag, something spiced. Memories continued to pour forth unbidden.

...
​

The food wasn't very good. All it was was a bit of dense baked bread-or-something-like-it, a dollop of unnameable processed fruit, and a slab of chewy meat. There was no richness to it, no spice, and hardly any salt. The Saint picked away at it with a fork and knife, barely interested.

It was pretty typical by the standards of the food she'd end up eating on the Gabriellum, or in the Abbey for that matter. Chrisenya hardly even remembered the taste of what she used to have for every meal on Aktranis, and she wasn't sure she'd want to remember if given the choice.

"You need to eat more," Innogen said. "I know it's probably hard under the circumstances, Empress knows I've lost my appetite before, but you've still got growing to do."

The Saint didn't want to talk about food. Between the long days of starvation and the gorge that followed, she didn't like thinking about food.

"You lose your appetite?"

"Of course. There are things you see out here, when you're fighting the good fight, that make your stomach turn."

The Saint shoved a forkful of food into her mouth, then looked up into Innogen's eyes, examining every contour of her greasy, broad features. Then she swallowed. "What's that thing you're wearing?"

"What do you mean? My armor?" Innogen tapped on her bicep, creating the dull clank of ceramite against ceramite.

"Yes, that. It doesn't look like normal armor."

"It's power armor," Innogen explained. "The outer layers are protective, but under that there's a layer of artificial muscle. I'm twice as strong in this armor as I am out of it, and it feels weightless even though it's actually about sixty kilos."

"Does the chest help with that?"

Innogen made a very strange face. "No, the chest is… aesthetic. There's a law, you see, called the Decree Passive, says that only women are allowed to serve in the military arm of the Ecclesiarchy."

It hadn't hurt too much at the time. More of a challenge to be overcome than a proper barrier, or at least that was how Chrisenya had processed it. Still, she wasn't unaware of her perceived gender, and even after so many years she could still remember the sting, no matter how minute.

Celestian-Superior Innogen smirked. "Sorry. If you want to fight for the faith, you're going to have to settle for second best."

"Which is?"

"Well, chances are you're going to end up doing the same thing your father did, ruling House Thannetch and all its affairs, and don't get me wrong, rulership's an honorable thing. But if you want to spread the faith, the rest of the Ecclesiarchy's open to both sexes."

Spreading the faith was good. The Saint shuddered to imagine that there were other people out there who needed it as much as she had and didn't have a Lord Thannetch around to teach it to them. "But you don't just spread the faith."

"No, you're right. But our making war is just as holy as preaching. We bring the light of the Empress wherever we go, and one cannot bring light without banishing the darkness. So long as the Imperium exists, there will be those who wish to destroy it."

Bringing light. The Saint's eyes lit up as she imagined it. Bringing light to a dark galaxy, with boltgun and flamer in hand.

...
​

The new bag, the goods being smuggled into the Abbey instead of the other way, was substantially heavier with supplies. But even if it had been three times the weight, Chrisenya would not have been slowed down. She was pregnant with glorious purpose, the manic delight of understanding all upon her as she slipped piscine through the enclosure of the barracks.
Chrisenya had been blind for years. Thoughts had been hidden in the back of her mind, suppressed by foreign words, and at last they were being dislodged. There was no happiness in this revelation, mania was not glee, but there was something beyond primitive joy in the grim purpose which had begun to infect Sister Chrisenya. She almost hurled herself out of the window that led back to the top of the scaffold, and she drank in the chill night wind with her hands so tight around the railing that they threatened to crush it like clay.
Gravity was on her side, and for the first time in so very long, the Empress was as well. She had thrust her mind back in time, to those crucial moments when Innogen had steered her life, and through the clarity of experience she had seen something that her younger self had missed. She took the ladder two rungs at a time.

...
​

There had been a woman named Thebe, who Chrisenya had been quite fond of when she was younger. She worked in the Thannetch spire, for her voice was the most beautiful in all of Aktranis they said. Often, when there were parties, she would sing songs in a long-forgotten tongue that would make the whole air thrum with emotion, be it sombre reflection or lust for life. Chrisenya had watched her often, indulging in the sin of envy as she drew every eye in the chamber.

But despite her beauty, when the tallies had hit the floor, she had made the wrong choice. It wasn't her fault; none could make any complaint about her character, other than that she had made the wrong decision and chosen heresy over loyalty. And it was for that reason that Chrisenya had had the pleasure of watching her die.

It had been during the rescue, towards the end of it, when fighting had turned to dying. Chrisenya herself had been half-conscious at the time, and the half of her that was awake at all was focused on different matters, what with Misty almost entirely out of the nightmare and into reality pushing endlessly against the inside of her skull. And yet, somehow, in the midst of all that chaos, Chrisenya's eyes had opened just a crack, and focused on Thebe's face. She was carrying a jagged knife in one hand and a laspistol in the other, but unlike the rest she hadn't flown into a fury just yet. She was waiting, waiting for the line of battle to shift over her way, when for a brief moment she had made eye contact with Chrisenya. She had looked concerned, as though worried that the stress of the battle would prove too much for the little girl.

And then the first bolter shell had gone right through the middle of her chest, under the ribcage, punching a puckered hole in her torso and leaving a spray of blood that hovered in the air for only a camera-flash moment before the shell burst behind her, throwing her to the floor with an awful crack. Thebe had lived on for just a little while longer, air wheezing through her wound, clawing against the floor, until the second bolt shell had come. It took off her head, her neck, and part of her shoulder, sending one arm spinning madly across the floor. Celestian-Superior Innogen had walked right over her corpse as she led the charge across the chamber, smoke still dripping from the barrel of her bolt pistol.

...
​

Death was death. It wasn't spreading light or banishing darkness, it wasn't spreading the faith, firing a bolt pistol into a heretic's head was just killing. To dress it up in fanciful language was to obscure the truth, to muddy it and deny the brilliant clarity that was the power to preserve a life or end it. Innogen, wise and skilled though she was, had gotten it entirely wrong.

The Sororitas were holy, yes. Ordained in the name of the Empress, they performed slaughter with an efficiency otherwise unmatched within the Imperium, and Chrisenya was not going to deny her role any longer. She was a holy warrior, and to be a holy warrior meant not merely to fight while having faith, not merely to hold faith in the depths of battle, but to be executioner in the Empress's name. And an executioner must be sharp. She must be cool, she must be hard, and she must understand precisely who and what she is.

Which meant that by acknowledging herself as an executioner, Chrisenya reasoned, she had already achieved more than many battle-sisters did in their entire lives. She allowed herself only a flicker of pride at this accomplishment, before drowning it under the tide of strength that was true purpose. That tide carried her all the way down the wall, through the outskirts of the Abbey, even crawling through the dirty tunnel under the ferrocrete wall. When she stood up in the underground garage on the other side, Sisters Severn and Gwynette greeted her fondly.

"Well would you look at that," said Gwynette. "I'd almost thought you wouldn't make it."

Severn smiled. "Good work, Chris."

Chrisenya crossed the room, feverish with want. She did not even bother to unbuckle her load at first, and instead walked right up into Severn's personal space, grabbed her tunic by the collar, and pulled her down to her level before kissing her firmly on the mouth.

"That was terrifying," Chrisenya admitted while Severn blushed and mumbled to herself. "Incredible, but terrifying. Now help me get this thing off of me, I want to get to sleep as soon as I can. I think tomorrow's going to be different."

 

[dragonsaffron]

Six years. That's how long it had been since last there was a Fidelitas without a Chrisenya. One-third of her life, nearly the entirety of her life since she had been cut free from the fetters of home and kin, had been spent with the little white-haired disaster by her side. Now she was gone.

It had felt almost cathartic, at first, to let loose her frustrations with Chrisenya's staunch moralism, with her absolute refusal to disclose whatever fault of body, mind, or soul had been causing her to act with such utter derangement. Fidelitas had expected a hurried apology, a few rounds of begging for forgiveness, and an apologetic explanation. If she had realized what she was going to get instead she might have taken a different route. Or perhaps she wouldn't have; perhaps some things were worth this pain.

And what pain it was. Chrisenya's absence was a phantom limb of the mind. Throughout the day, Fidelitas would reflexively think to tell Chrisenya about some event, or flinch in the direction of aiding her with some difficulty, only for her to remember a moment later that they were not on speaking terms. There were countless little conversations throughout the day that Fidelitas found herself missing more and more sorely.

And then it had become much, much worse, when that absolute bastard Severn managed to connive her way up Chrisenya's skirt. Damned unfair was what it was; one rescue, one microscopic act of kindness, and Chrisenya crawled into her lap. As though Fidelitas would not have done the same thing a hundred times over if given the opportunity! In some senses it almost validated Fidelitas's decision to cut off contact, if Chrisenya's favor could be bought so easily as with a single positive interaction. But it didn't matter how little it had taken: the fact remained that it was Severn, not Fidelitas, who enjoyed the fruits of Chrisenya's company.

Loathe to admit it though she might have been, Fidelitas even found herself missing the sex. They'd only ever done it a couple of times, and yet every time she saw Chrisenya and Severn holding hands or pressing forehead to forehead whilst nobody else was looking, she found herself burning with desire for Chrisenya's skin. But of course it was Severn who got to enjoy that contact now. And, based on her observations of Chrisenya, likely far more than Fidelitas ever had.

There were several times when Fidelitas seriously considered doing something about the situation. Perhaps she would find a time when she could find Severn alone and give her a what-for, really stake her claim over Chrisenya. Maybe she would get Chrisenya alone and beg for her to take her back, maybe get down on her hands and knees while she was at it. Fidelitas might have even tried demanding an apology on the strength of the bond that had existed between the two of them, hoping that Chrisenya was as upset by the separation as she was. But all of these options ran into the same barrier, that of Fidelitas's pride. To give in, to take action, would be to admit defeat, to prove that Chrisenya hadn't actually upset her that much and this whole thing had just been an act of petulance.

And so the ache grew worse and worse, and there was so very little that Fidelitas could do but suffer. She threw herself into training, dedicating herself utterly to the skills of blade and bolt, and really studying the liturgy for the first time in years. Her dedication was for nothing, of course, nothing besides her own edification, which felt so very shallow without Chrisenya to share it with.

Then came the note, a bit of flimsy crudely slipped under her breakfast tray and marked with ink in Chrisenya's handwriting. All that was written on it was a location: a specific room in the chapel near the novitiate's hall. Fidelitas choked down the thick, milky gruel that was her morning meal that day—a free day, with nothing else to stop her—and raced away at once. This little communication, small as it was, was the first real interaction that she had had with Chrisenya in almost forty days, and she was not going to let it go to waste. The room was a small prayer nook, quiet and out of the way, decorated with a huge gilded icon of the Empress on the wall and just barely big enough for two.

And it needed to be, because Chrisenya was right there waiting for her. But a different Chrisenya from the one she had known before. She was still so very short, with her naturally-white hair in a rigid bob and her grey eyes like a bird's, peering through Fidelitas with keen interest. It almost looked as though Chrisenya had gained a handful of centimeters. She wasn't shrinking herself as much as she had previously, not slouching quite as much. And she was wearing a different uniform as well, one with a longer skirt and dark red lines starting at the hips and running up to the shoulders.

For several seconds, they shared the same room together, both novitiates unable to rupture the silence. Eventually, the tension grew so great that Fidelitas had no choice but to say something, anything at all. She said something insipid.

"Your lips and your eyes swapped colors," she said.

This was, technically, somewhat true. Chrisenya's lips were painted black, and her eyes possessed a halo of pale red coloration instead of the black-ink angel-wing design she had used ever since she was introduced to the concept of cosmetics.

"Indeed they have," Chrisenya said with a smile. It made Fidelitas's heart seize.

"Why'd you call me here?" Fidelitas said.

Chrisenya hesitated, casting her eyes downward and smoothing out the edge of her skirt. "To make amends," she said. "To… apologize."

Fidelitas's legs grew weak as a maelstrom of color fell in front of her eyes. She stumbled a step closer, hands almost ready to grab Chrisenya and pull her into a hug there and then. But Chrisenya leaned back.

"I should not have been so judgmental about your motives," Chrisenya continued. "It was… hubristic of me to do so. As it turned out, my own motives were not so sacrosanct either, and I should not have blamed you and insulted you as I did. You are, in the end, your own person, and ill understanding is no sin."

Fidelitas blinked at her for a moment, processing the meaning behind her words. "You still think I'm wrong, then?"

"Yes! Well, perhaps. I still think about it sometimes. But that is besides the point, the point is that I shouldn't have allowed it to get between us. I am sorry, Fidelitas."

The dam burst, and Fidelitas did pull Chrisenya into that hug, which was gladly reciprocated. An ache in her heart was soothed by the warmth of Chrisenya's tiny body pressed against hers, and the slight relief was so all-encompassing that for a little while she forgot the entire galaxy, even the second reason why she and Chrisenya had had their falling-out in the first place. Only for a little while.

"Do you want to talk about what was happening, why you were acting so strange?" Fidelitas said. "You've gotten better since then, I can see it, but you never explained…?"

Chrisenya extricated her head from Fidelitas's chest, giving her a look of profound embarrassment. "Stimm. I was… I was using stimm. Two, sometimes three pills a day."

Fidelitas was shocked, first that Chrisenya of all people would crack such a crude joke, and then a few moments later that she was being entirely serious. "Stimm?! What in the warp got into you, Chris?" Upon seeing the flash of terror in Chrisenya's features, she added, "I'm not upset, I've known stimm addicts, I'm just bloody confused!"

Chrisenya pulled away, her shame growing. "You saw how much I was struggling. How much I still am. It was the only way I could think to push through it."

Fidelitas nodded. It scared her, seeing Chrisenya of all people pushed to such extremes, but she wasn't going to judge. "You got better though, right? You're not taking it anymore?"

"No, not anymore," Chrisenya said. "I haven't taken any in, er, ages."

To Fidelitas's ears, she sounded like she was lying. But Chrisenya wouldn't lie, not about this. Regardless, she went on to change the topic.

"You really have no idea how much Sister Severn's been helping me with, just, everything. She's one of the better things to have ever happened to me, really."

Instantly, Fidelitas went cold, letting go of Chrisenya and leaving a respectable hand's-length gap between the two of them. Sister Severn. Of course she was still involved, of course Chrisenya hadn't come here to beg Fidelitas take her back, no Bolaran in the last fifty generations had been that lucky.

"Really?" Fidelitas said, not letting a single droplet of emotion touch her face or voice.

Chrisenya nodded. "She's not who I thought she was. Severn is a woman possessed of a deep faith and profoundly unusual perspective, I've never… I've never met anyone who understands things the way she does. I wouldn't have been able to survive without her."

Fidelitas wanted to ask if Chrisenya thought she would have been able to survive without her, but she bit back her tongue. "So, what, she your girlfriend or something?"

Chrisenya clasped her hands in front of her chest, and for a moment Fidelitas thought she might be about to start praying aloud. Instead she only nodded.

"I would not put it so… crudely, but our relationship is unique in a similar sense, yes." Chrisenya couldn't seem to meet Fidelitas's eyes.

"Are you…?"

"Yes."

"Didn't expect to get that answer so easily," Fidelitas said. "Most people are more private about that sort of thing."

"You and I have very little privacy," Chrisenya said. "Not now that we are no longer apart. I didn't want to have to ignore what we did, even if it wasn't quite the same, I don't want to pretend it didn't happen."

Fidelitas folded her arms. "What do you mean it 'wasn't quite the same'?"

"We're friends, Fidelitas. You comforted me in dark moments, and I you. We were never on, to use the phrasing which Sister Severn insists upon."

"So, what, you love her or something? I didn't realize you were so sentimental."

"No! Er, yes! But I love you too! It's just… different. She understands me."

"She understands you? Chrisenya, she's known you for barely a sixth of a year, and I've known you for six. How can she possibly understand you better than I do?"

Chrisenya threw up her arms, wheeling around to pace only to run into the edge of the room a moment later. "She just does. Some things you can't explain, you just can't."

The tight room, not really meant to accommodate two, was already starting to warm up, and the heavy beat of the anger in Fidelitas's chest was only making it worse. She couldn't wrap her head around it, how this handsome stranger had come in and stolen Chrisenya's heart so easily. Eventually, Chrisenya looked back over her shoulder, eyes shiny with tears.

"I don't want to start fighting with you again. Please. Can we let it go?"

"Of course," Fidelitas said. "Let's change the topic. What's with your new look?"

"New look?" Chrisenya looked down. "Oh, you mean the tunic? I never particularly liked the way you could see my knees in the old one, my legs are too thin and Maryllis helped me realize I was self-conscious of them."

"Maryllis? Who's that?"

Chrisenya raised an eyebrow. "Palatine Maryllis. Do you not know her?"

Fidelitas shook her head, then said, "Wait, actually, I remember that name from the recruitment office. That her?"

"She's the Palatine to Canoness-Commander Innogen, the lead recruiter for this year, or I suppose now it would be the last year. She's a very brilliant woman, but also uncommonly vain about her appearance. She's the one who's been keeping me supplied with all the cosmetic and the special uniforms that make it look like I have b— You know what I mean."

"And she, what, hooked you up with a more attractive design?" Fidelitas said, doubtfully. None of that sounded like Chrisenya at all.

"Yes. The Rule Sororitas dictates that all novitiates wear an identical uniform, but generally discipline will look the other way on code violations so long as they meet the rough qualifications and you've had good behavior. Red is the official color of the Order, besides, so red accents are considered to be…"

And just like that, things were back to normal. Chrisenya and Fidelitas left the chapel hand in hand, like they had always done, babbling back and forth about the affairs of the day. But there was a white hot flare in Fidelitas's heart, smothered under all that normality, a flare that would not forget.

 

[dragonsaffron]

It was no great surprise to anyone, really, that out of the members of Bellara's drill-squad, the first to receive the privilege of augmetic enhancement was Sister Regina. Not that any of them were told about it before it happened, of course. One afternoon, Regina simply didn't return from lunch break, with even the Sister-Superior not being entirely sure where she had gone. The entire rest of the weekend, a pall of anxiety hung over the squad, Regina's absence more noticeable even than her presence had been.

And then she came back. It happened early in the morning, just before breakfast on the day they all had to return to training. There were lots of questions, lots of shocked gasps and happy hugs—fewer than there might have been on account of the way Regina winced whenever they happened, but there were a few regardless—and the reunion climaxed with Regina fully whipping her shirt off to show everyone what she'd had done to herself.

The technical term was a Dorsal Reinforcement, but everybody just thought of it as "Regina's new spine", even after she explained that the old spine was very much still in the same place as it had always been. The main external sign of it was plasteel plating, segmented like some strange centipede, bonded to the middle of her back, surrounded on both sides by bands of swollen, reddened skin. Sister Fidelitas was the only one allowed to touch, Regina exhorting her to feel out the reinforcing fibers throughout the tissue of the various large muscles of the upper and lower back. Chrisenya vaguely remembered having it explained to her that the bulk of physical strength came from the back, so she supposed that reinforcing it made perfect sense.

The second member of the squad to come back augmented was, if anything, even less of a surprise. Sister Serra did not receive augmentation via reward, nor even by choice. Hers was an entirely mandatory and necessary part of Hospitaller training. The attachment points for the medicae field harness looked almost like a collar, a thumb-thickness cable circling the upper edge of Serra's ribcage. There was no babble of questions when Serra returned after her augmentation: the dour look on her face made her feelings clear.

What was a surprise was Sister Gwynette's augmentation. Apparently, while nobody else was looking, she had been commended for both physical acuity and volunteer work helping the training sergeants clean up in the afternoons. She explained this only after she returned to the bunk-room with two augmetic eyes. One, the left one, was an identical black marble to Bellara's, and was apparently designed for sensitivity in low-light conditions. The other one more closely resembled an ordinary human eye, though the iris was brilliantly red and shaped like a cross. That one was for combat, enhancing the ability to aim down a boltgun's sights.

"To be honest," Gwynette said, "I'm more excited about the night-vision than the combat sight. I'll never stub my toes trying to take a piss again!"

Gwynette's strange machine-eyes glanced in Chrisenya's direction in a way that indicated that she had other reasons to be excited about her night vision. Chrisenya felt that was a very dirty reason to pluck out one's own eyes, but she certainly wasn't going to say anything about it. Sister Gwynette and her had an arrangement, after all.

But not even Gwynette's augmentation was as surprising as when Chrisenya was approached by Hospitaller-Superior Doloria and told that she had been selected for an augmetic.

"What have I done to deserve such a thing?" Chrisenya said.

"Piety, apparently. Your knowledge of the liturgy is second to none, I am told, and you pray more consistently than almost any other girl in your entire commandery."

"Oh. I… I suppose that is true, yes." Piety had faded into the background of Chrisenya's life so long ago that she had almost forgotten she was in any way exceptional. In a better galaxy, perhaps, she wouldn't be.

So, like Regina and Serra and Gwynette before her, Chrisenya was taken to the sanatorium, placed in a grox-leather chair, and given a list of potential options. Hers was, unfortunately, rather limited. Though she had certainly grown less infirm over the course of the first twelve weeks of her training, it still remained the case that Sister Chrisenya had only a minimum of the sort of physical acuity necessary for recovering from augmentation in the span of only three days.

Most of that list of Quaternius-grade augmetics which were allowed to Chrisenya were of absolutely no benefit to her; she skimmed past the listings of replacement limbs and stopgap repair internals suited more for the dying and maimed than the merely pathetic. Others seemed almost self-sacrificing: replacing a hand with an ultra-strong claw, removing two fingers to be replaced with a glow-rod, or implanting a device which would reinforce her faith by causing her to hallucinate holy chanting for ten hours out of every day.

For a brief while, Chrisenya wondered if she might be allowed to turn down the gift, or defer it into the vague future where she might be allowed to access Tertius-grade augmetics. But then she found an interesting one, one that she remembered Hospitaller-Superior Doloria mentioning in the past.

The exact mechanism of Therapeutic Tatooing was, of course, a kept secret of the Abbey's techpriests, but the essence of it was entirely medical. A black liquid artifact of technology would be implanted under Chrisenya's skin in certain holy patterns. Once they had had a few days to soak in, the liquid would come alive, driven by programmed instructions, and begin making enhancements.

The exact details were the subject of over an hour of conversation between Sister Chrisenya and Doloria. This was Chrisenya's reward, after all. Therapeutic tattoos came in sets, so the location of each individual mark had to be selected carefully, as did their shapes, in order to ensure that the tiny machine spirits imbued into the liquid ink would follow instructions correctly. It took a while for it to sink in that Chrisenya was permanently changing her appearance. The holy marks of technology would remain a part of her skin for the remainder of her life, however long that turned out to be.

And then it was done, and Chrisenya was shuffled off to prep. The first stage of that were the drugs; awful drugs that numbed the body and mind, followed by the even worse drugs that slackened the digestive tract. Even if she would be conscious throughout the whole procedure, it was still preferable that she not be disturbed by such bodily functions.

Next came the shaving. Chrisenya had never been particularly hairy, a fact which she considered an Empress-granted blessing, but she was nonetheless possessed of some bodily hair, some of it even possessed of color, unlike that on her head. Either way, it all had to go. Once the awful purgation of the drugs had passed, a pair of nurses stripped Chrisenya nude, then with a guttering, buzzing machine they ran over every single part of her body, stripping it down to bare, soft flesh. It was rather more efficient than Chrisenya's straight razor, though at least the use of that one left the room smelling faintly of flowers and not stinking of promethium.

Chrisenya was led, naked, into an operating room, though this time bare of most of the accoutrements of proper surgery. There were only three others there present besides herself: Sister-Superior Doloria, an anonymous skull-masked nurse, and a clicking, hissing techpriest. The techpriest held in its arms a tank, approximately the size of a bolter, full of black liquid, and decorated all along its glass surface with dials and readout monitors. Extending from the bottom of the tank was a long plasflex pipe, bending down low to the ground before terminating in a mess of plasteel and ceramite that resembled for all the world the claw of some great and vicious bird.

Chrisenya lay down on the central slab, aimed up at a shallow angle such that her feet were just above knee height, and her head just below the shoulder. Each limb had its own side platform splitting off from the main. The techpriest mumbled something inscrutable before handing off the bird's foot device to Sister Doloria. The tank remained firmly in its possession.

At the same time, the nurse stepped in, taking from Doloria's grasp an auto-syringe full of clear fluid. With one hand she took hold of Chrisenya's head, holding it perfectly still with a surprising amount of strength as she sank the needle into the side of Chrisenya's neck. The drug took effect almost at once. Suddenly Chrisenya could only partially feel her own weight pressing her down against the hard surface of the slab, and no longer even thought to resist as her arms and legs were each strapped down.

"Now, we've drugged you up as much as we can," said Doloria. "But you'll still have to hold very still if you want for this to work. Can you?"

Chrisenya grinned, with teeth. "Yes, of course. I can do anything you need me to. I am the chosen executioner of the Empress."

"Good," said Doloria. "We'll start with the easier ones."

Doloria moved to Chrisenya's right side, and with a snap of her fingers commanded the nurse to do the same. The nurse held Chrisenya down, one hand on her wrist and the other one on the lower part of her stomach. Doloria stood by her shoulder, pinning her down with the free hand while very carefully moving the claws of the machine towards the flesh of Chrisenya's bicep. Somehow, the lifeless plasteel seemed able to sense the proximity of bare skin, and twitched as she moved it, a thin spike flicking into the fore while an array of humming coils encircled it. Then the spike entered Chrisenya's flesh, and the rest was all sensation.

Almost instantly Chrisenya became reminded of her dreams. The pain was intense, worsened by her total inability to do anything about it, the forced stillness that robbed her of all escape. And yet in her drugged fugue, Chrisenya was not overcome by the pain, but instead allowed her mind to wander. There were hands on her body, Doloria's worn gloves and the nurse's smooth plasflex bodysuit pinning her down with expert dexterity.

Colors flashed in front of Chrisenya's vision, and out of the corner of her eye she occasionally saw her mother, though never speaking and only present for the briefest of instants. A few times, as the pain became so monotonous that it turned inevitably into a sideshow, she could focus on other sensations, sensations of her skin being twisted and torn from within wherever the burning secondary effect of the claw could be felt, or the tingling sensitivity issued to her by the cool air. Other times her heart raced with panic, as for seconds at a time she would forget that this was definitely not a dream, that the black marks left permanently upon her skin were real, and holy, and something that Misty would never have allowed her.

The three instruments of Chrisenya's modification—Hospitaller-Superior Doloria, the nurse, and the claw-end of the machine—all worked with great swiftness and efficiency. The first mark, on her upper arm, was completed quickly, and it was then time to move on to the chest. Then, from there, the other arm. Then the hip. Then the leg. Each place burned exquisitely, as though Chrisenya were being branded with a hot iron rather than carefully and precisely marked with a strange and irreplaceable ink.

Doloria was always certain to make the experience as comfortable as possible, though there was little to be done when her work involved a huge needle and rows of coils that burned flesh without making contact. Her medical expertise showed repeatedly throughout the process in a keen ability to know exactly when Chrisenya was about to reach her limit just a moment before it happened. Every time that she was about to have no choice but to scream, Chrisenya suddenly found the needle had already been retracted and the coils deactivated, even if the mark was still only a blurred and indistinct mass. Inevitably, of course, Doloria would be forced to finish what she had begun, but she did so only with the gentlest of hands.

"You're doing such a good job, girl. You understand that? This must be very painful, but you're being an excellent soldier of the Empress for me today."

The procedure continued for quite some time, waxing and waning as it did. Sometimes Doloria would be at work on Chrisenya's thigh or her arm, and she could shudder and fidget almost as she pleased. Other times the needle was jabbed into her abdomen, below the navel, or Chrisenya had been rolled over onto her side so as to ensure coverage of her back as well, and any movement at all risked fouling the process. Two things steadily increased throughout: the first was the full-body soreness, residual after-effects of the ink leaving a mild sting. The second, more subtle and yet far more entrancing, was the growing awareness of the tiny machine-spirits living under her skin. They did not speak to her, and it was doubtful that they would be loud enough even if they could speak, but she could sense them working busily away.

When it was all done, before Chrisenya was sent back to her drill-squad, she was given an opportunity to examine her new skin. It was… strange. Unsettling. Thrilling. She had been marked almost everywhere, little points on a map. Here, a fleur-de-lis decorated her chest, just above and inward from her left nipple. There, the mark of the sword, symbol of her order on her lower calf. A fragment of liturgy, the phrase "The Empress is all humanity" written in High Gothic across her upper arm. On her cheek, another sword, on her back between her shoulder blades another fleur-de-lis. And right between the navel and the crotch, the centerpiece of it all: a grand Imperial Aquila, wings spread, two heads eternally vigilant.

Her very flesh now bore the signs of her faith, and she knew with a growing sense of certainty that this had been the correct choice. Chrisenya held no delusions that this would fend Misty off, not even the presence of true holy relics did, but it was a new anchor against the never-ending terror of the night. Sister Severn would no doubt enjoy it as well.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Today was a special day. It was that thought which carried Sister Chrisenya through yet another day of bone-breaking training, through the exhaustion and the soreness, through the nagging feeling that all of this was to no avail. Today was a special day, which meant that Chrisenya could not possibly give up.

When afternoon squad drills came to an end, instead of her usual schedule of prayer and cleaning, Chrisenya returned to the bunk-room and took a brief nap. She would need her strength for what was to come, and the sleep would no doubt improve her appearance, especially once she followed it up with a quick shower. Her heart was beating, for once, not with exhaustion or the reckless acceleration of stimm—she'd foregone stimm that day, because it was so special—but with genuine excitement and not a small portion of affection.

Once she was ready, and once the fourth bell had rung to signal it was about time, Chrisenya set off to the ordained location. In this case, the location was the same long-abandoned garage that had been the staging area for so many smuggling runs. She slipped through the shadows of the Abbey, then crawled through the dirt as daintily as she could, which was to say not very daintily at all.

Once Chrisenya was through the worn-out passage, and once she had stood up, she instantly found that the garage didn't look quite the same as it had previously. Everything was in the right place, more or less; the Rhino shell still stood there, the gravestone of a fallen colossus. The stairway up was just as decrepit as it always had been, the workbenches just as strewn with abandoned tools. But nearly every surface was clean. Not spotlessly clean, not polished to a perfect shine, but the absence of dust and dirt was so notable that it made the garage appear to be a new chamber entirely.

And, of course, Severn was there waiting for her. She grinned as she saw Chrisenya's look of surprise, then swaggered across the garage.

"Like what I did with the place?"

"How?" Chrisenya asked absurdly.

"Borrowed some supplies from storage yesterday, then popped down here as soon as training was over. I figured it would be nice for once to meet in someplace that wasn't a complete trash heap, y'know? Miracle of the Empress neither of us have come down with an infection."

Severn took Chrisenya's hips in her hands and pulled her in close. Instinct drove Chrisenya to press her head into the chest offered to her, to place her hands on the soft stomach, to allow herself to be overcome by strength.

"It's been too long," Chrisenya muttered. "I'd almost started to forget your touch."

"Don't think like that, Chris. Overfamiliarity renders what we have too mundane. That we sacrifice our hours to the Empress only proves the strength of our bond."

"Don't poetize at me!" Chrisenya whined, slapping Severn on the sternum. "I know why it is. That it is justified does not make it any less painful."

"Would you rather I be kissing you instead?"

"Yes."

Chrisenya was smothered under Severn's warmth, her powerful hands groping softly along her lower back as the larger girl bent over to bring herself into contact. Her skin, rendered by a miracle of science so much softer and more sensitive than ever before, thrummed with delight at the contact, the soft pressure and curious roaming touch. Controlling her own limbs was a distant second priority for Chrisenya, but she nonetheless did manage it, groping awkwardly at Severn's substantial breasts. Severn moaned into Chrisenya's mouth, and the feeling of that moan on her lips made her throb.

"Feeling assertive today, are we?" Severn purred. "Here, let me make it easier for you."

It took a moment for Chrisenya to realize what Severn was doing when she reached down, but once her lust-addled mind comprehended that Severn was removing her own tunic, she immediately moved to help. Four fumbling hands pulled the tunic up and over Severn's head, leaving her heavy breasts to hang openly in the air, at least until Chrisenya took hold of them.

Chrisenya's narrow fingers kneaded and pinched at Severn's breasts, her lips pressing kisses into their tops and leaving behind marks of red wax. Severn moaned, an unusually feminine sound coming from her mouth, eyes shut and face averted. They stumbled back, back, back, until Severn was up against the spotlessly-clean wall and the hard bulge in her uniform's leggings had nowhere to go but into Chrisenya's stomach. As much as she was enjoying using Severn's body like that—and she was enjoying it more than she had thought she would—it was that hard, hot, throbbing pressure that caused Chrisenya to pull away.

"Did you bring the fricgel?" she whispered.

"Of course. Did you bring a pretty arsehole?"

Chrisenya had no other reaction besides to start giggling like an idiot as she stepped aside and allowed Severn to prepare. Her eyes remained firmly locked on the muscles bunching around Severn's shoulder blades as she stripped out of her own uniform.

"I thought we might try something different today." Severn leaned against one of the workbenches, one that had a large blanket thrown over the side of it to drape down to the ground, pulled down her leggings to allow her cock to bounce free, and started applying fricgel. "This way you won't have to bend quite as much, and your legs'll look… Fuck, I'm never going to get used to that."

This was only the second time that Severn had been able to see Chrisenya naked since she'd acquired her tattoos; the first had been the day after it happened, during a very exciting half of an hour spent in the shower stall attached to the bunk-room.

"Do you not like them?"

"Of course I like them," Severn said. "You're just not the type of girl I expected to ever go for something like that. Where I come from, the girls who had tats were always the ones who were one bad day away from getting a heresy charge, y'know?"

"These are holy symbols of my devotion to the Empress!" Chrisenya said shrilly. "My piety is written into my very flesh."

"I know that," Severn replied. "But nobody ever thought of it that way back on Notidal, y'know? Plus it looks, erm. Spicy? It's so much more daring than I'd come to expect from you."

Chrisenya grinned, stalking her way across the room. "Well, I suppose I have you to thank for that. It was you who taught me how to stand up for myself. And once I knew how to do that, it became obvious that I wanted a more persistent mark of my faith. Even when you have stripped me bare, I am still holy."

Chrisenya found her way once more to Severn's lips. For all that she had come to enjoy the more aggressive forms of lovemaking, there was still something about the soft, warm wetness of the play between lips that she hungered for. Severn's erect member pressed against Chrisenya's stomach, smearing it with fricgel.

"You're getting better at that," Severn whispered.

"Training and practice," Chrisenya purred.

"Of course. Now put your chest on the blanket."

There was a limit to Chrisenya's defiance. She did as she was told, bending at the waist to press her torso into the soft, plush synthcloth, spreading her ankles apart ever so slightly as she did. Severn had been right: it was oddly comfortable, settled, with her cheek down and her back open to the cool garage air. If Chrisenya could have gotten away with sleeping like this in the bunkroom, naked and face-down, she would have.

And then all thoughts of calm left Chrisenya's mind as Severn's hands found their way to her arse, squeezing it firmly. She gasped, a gasp which faded rapidly into a groan of contentment as the rush of electric desire flashed across her skin. Severn enjoyed the touch as much as Chrisenya did, judging by the way her hands groped down towards her upper thighs then back up before spreading her cheeks just a touch. The very tip of her, soaking wet, flirted for the briefest instant with Chrisenya's hole.

"You've bulked up," Severn said.

"What are you talking about?"

Severn pressed the heels of both palms into Chrisenya's rear end. "It's not much, but you definitely have more muscle than you did the first time I saw you naked. Especially back here."

"Thank you," Chrisenya said.

"Don't mention it," Severn said while she applied yet more fricgel onto two of her fingers.

A moment later, both of those fingers took the plunge, spreading Chrisenya open so terribly wide. Their chances for private time were so few and far between that Chrisenya never had the chance to get fully used to it, which meant each act of sexual congress that she and Severn shared was an exercise in exceeding that which she thought possible. Severn did not give her much time to luxuriate, stroking swiftly around Chrisenya's circumference in order to spread the fricgel properly. Chrisenya gasped, paralyzed with bliss, both arms twitching from the sudden stimulation. For a brief moment, Severn's fingers stroked over the spongy center of Chrisenya's pleasure, a brief moment that caused her legs to shudder as arousal dripped from her tip.

Then Severn's fingers retracted, leaving Chrisenya gasping.

"Sensitive, are we?"

"It's been too long," Chrisenya whimpered. "And you aren't usually so rough."

"I'll be sure to go easy on you, then," said Severn as she started to slip forward.

Chrisenya gritted her teeth, then slowly allowed herself to relax around Severn. The overabundance of fricgel made the movement smooth, though the slick liquid dripping down the insides of Chrisenya's thighs caused her to shiver. Severn moved steadily, far more quickly than she could be going but far more slowly than she was able to, until at last Chrisenya could feel the soft pressure of Severn being sheathed up to the hilt. It was a painful pressure, sore like had become almost her body's default state, but as the moments passed the pain faded, and she came to fully encompass Severn's warmth.

And then Severn retracted, grunting as she did, and the movement was yet another shock to Chrisenya's system. There was no time to become used to anything, no time to find familiarity. This time as Severn pressed in she leaned herself forward, shifting the pressure of her length into the soft core of her pleasure. Chrisenya nearly screamed.

Severn quickly gave up on restraining herself, and Chrisenya rapidly found herself reminded of how utterly she was outmatched in terms of sheer physical power. Each thrust of Severn's broad hips left a streak of pleasure in its wake as Chrisenya's entire body was rocked forward, forcing her to brace herself with her arms. Everything from the navel downward was a single solid mass of warm, glowing pleasure and limp, shuddering weakness. Apparently, though, this was not enough for Severn. As she bottomed out inside Chrisenya, Severn quickly and without warning gave her a firm slap on the arse, relishing the sudden tightening that followed with a pleased gasp. A brief flicker of rage rose up in Chrisenya's stomach at the poor treatment, but was extinguished just as quickly the very next time that Severn's length pressed against her core. She knew what she enjoyed.

Without even realizing it, Chrisenya slipped into nonexistence, riding the wave of Severn's movement and the coursing pleasure throughout her body as thought the blanket below her were a raft set to drift upon a vast sea. She couldn't abide by it. It reminded her much too much of her dreams, and of the half-bright state that came so easily and so naturally during them. Chrisenya's nails clawed at the cloth below her, and Severn suddenly found herself dealing with much greater resistance.

"Want me to slow down?" Severn asked.

"No, no, I love what you're doing, don't you dare stop. You feel amazing in me."

Chrisenya had a goal, and she was going to achieve it. Finding the right way to twist her spine around that wouldn't disrupt their activity was a challenge, especially so when her brain was full of fuzz, but she did it. As she had expected, Severn looked absolutely beautiful from that angle. Her breasts bounced and swayed with each thrust, and the muscles in her arms were visibly straining even through the generous layers of fat. Severn, alas, had her eyes closed, concentrating intensely on something.

What that something was became clear before long. Severn's pace, fast already, accelerated to something feverish. Her thighs clenched and her grip on Chrisenya's rear end tightened, nails digging into soft and sensitive skin. She had remembered too late that this was supposed to be a gift for Chrisenya, not herself, and was pushing her willpower to its very limit to keep that the case. Alas, it was not enough. Chrisenya shuddered, her own arousal swelling to the point of pain as she realized seconds before Severn did that the moment of climax had come too early. Warm wetness buried itself deep within her, filling her up and spilling out.

"Damn it," Severn said through gritted teeth.

She tried a few thrusts more but they were awkward, unsustainable. Once it was clear that wasn't going to work, Severn pulled out, letting seed stain the leggings that she had never actually removed through this whole process, instantly switching to the same two fingers she had used to open Chrisenya up at first.

"You like it rough, right?"

Chrisenya moaned in a way that she hoped came across as affirmative. Her hopes were met when Severn slipped the two fingers fiercely inside of her, pressing their wrinkled pads directly to the most sensitive spot. With a single press, Chrisenya was sent down a long, winding, and inevitable path. She matched the tempo of Severn's fingers as they stroked circles around her insides, grinding against the table as much as she could manage given her state. Chrisenya hadn't been fingered before, not by Severn at least, and as she clenched for the grand finale she could feel every ridge on her fellow novitiate's fingertips.

The room suddenly felt very cold. In the far corner, one of the lights finally gave out for good, collapsing into a shower of sparks.

And then it was over. Severn made sure to give her a few more seconds of apologetic stroking, but it was obvious they were both tired. Severn bent over, further ruining her leggings as she placed her arms carefully on either side of Chrisenya's shoulders and let her naked breasts press down on her back. Her nipples had hardened. Chrisenya pulled in a deep breath, the first one she'd had in what felt like several minutes, and delighted in the pressure of Severn's weight.

For a little while, no words were shared. They communed in touches, in the secret lover's code of where Severn's lips left their tingling afterimages on Chrisenya's skin. After leaving one on Chrisenya's cheek, Severn whispered into Chrisenya's ear.

"Nineteen years alive. May the Empress bless your twentieth."

 

[dragonsaffron]

"Today's training is going to be different than what you have come to experience over these last eighteen weeks!" Sister-Superior Coriah announced, pacing back and forth in front of the Commandery. "It may, indeed, be a day that some of you have been looking forward to! Today is the day that you girls will, at long last, be given the privilege of using a real, unmodified boltgun."

Immediately, the energy of the assembled novitiates changed. They had all known something was different when the drills had taken place at a different part of the field, nearer to the firing range and its massive ferrocrete wall, but it was not until that moment that suspicions had been confirmed. Nobody dared to speak, but there were noises and looks exchanged from one end of the crowd to the other. Even Chrisenya, restrained as she was, could not help but feel the slightest thrill at the prospect of sending a shell downrange.

"If I've trained you well, you should be able to use this weapon already, without the need for further instruction. Treat it exactly as you have been treating the passivated boltguns, even up to the moment you pull the trigger, and you will do well. Now, everybody take a weapon and form a line just behind the edge of the grass, leaving one shoulder-width between each of you."

The first part of the process was much as it always had been, the shoving rush to grab a boltgun from the rack. It had only grown very slightly more orderly over the months of practice. Aside from the buzz of excitement, the greatest difference between this day and all the ones before it was that Chrisenya could hear quite a few more voices emanating from the weapon rack than usual. Apparently, the machine spirits of functioning boltguns were far more talkative.

"I may be old," hissed one boltgun, "but I'm in tip-top condition. Very smooth recoil, as well, my springs got plenty of attention from the techpriest."

Chrisenya shoved her way past another novitiate, snatching that particular boltgun off of the rack without looking its direction, so as to seem disinterested. It was still heavy, incredibly heavy, but time had caused Chrisenya to become used to the weight, and no longer felt as though carrying one around was actively damaging her. She walked along the line with her back as straight as she could, then turned sharply and took up position, with Sister Severn on her left and Sister Serra on her right.

Between the line of novitiates and the wall was an entire field of targets, each one man-sized but only vaguely formed. It was an entire skirmish formation of targets, steadily advancing into the waiting wall of the Sororitas bolter fire. Coriah, standing behind the firing line, gave a remarkably brief lecture about the proper stance for firing a boltgun. Most of the relevant information, how to reload, the location of the safety, had already been drilled into the brains of the novitiates.

"And that's all you'll need for now, we'll refine the technique over time," Sister-Superior Coriah continued. "Take aim at any target you like, though if you all pick the closest ones you're sure to run out of rockcrete before you run out of shells. And, while these bolters are more than capable of emptying out a magazine in five seconds, don't be tempted. Without a power armor, they're more likely to bring ruin to all the bones in your shoulder than the enemy, so take it slow for now."

Chrisenya raised the boltgun to her shoulder, remembering the images she'd seen painted into the margins of holy manuscripts. She selected the second-closest target, perhaps fifteen meters distant, and let the pockmarked statue fall between the iron sights of the boltgun. Her front arm, gripping tightly onto the ridged thermoplas, would be able to hold the weight steady for only a generous handful of seconds. Contented focus boiled off of the gun's machine-spirit as Chrisenya's finger coiled around the trigger, waiting for the order.

"Fire at your pleasure."

The whole field was consumed by the roar of over a hundred boltguns firing at once, such that even when Chrisenya did pull the trigger, the sound of her weapon was subsumed into the whole. It sounded almost like a gunship taking off, the constant hiss of exhaust gasses magnified into an all-consuming sound. Chrisenya's boltgun rocked back in her hands, and she wrestled it back into position in time for the second shot, then the third, then the fourth. Two of those shots spiraled off into the grass, where they couldn't be followed; two struck home, spalling hand-sized chunks of rockcrete off of the target.

And then Chrisenya's arms gave out. She pinned the boltgun against her chest to regain her strength, allow the un-tested tendons in her arms to recover.

"Don't fight me," hissed the boltgun. "I'm your weapon, not your wrestling partner."

Chrisenya raised the boltgun again, relaxing her arms as much as she could while still keeping the sights on-target. She let her breath slow, despite the constant roar of bolt-fire all around her, and pressed her finger to the trigger. The kick of a boltgun was a steady thing, brought about by the acceleration of the bolt engine as it rocketed down the barrel.

"If you're wrong about this I'm smashing you," she said to the gun.

Sister Serra glanced over at her, frowning in mild confusion. Chrisenya hardly noticed, the totality of her thoughts instead being on the topic of firing the next shell onto target. This time, when Chrisenya pressed down on the trigger, she did not fight it, but let the weapon go where it wished to.

Her first attempt, the nine kilograms of plasteel moving swiftly up and back nearly knocked her over, but she adjusted her footing and tried again. This time it worked perfectly. Like a machine cycling, the bolter moved in an up-down motion, landing precisely back where it had started just in time for the next pull of the trigger. Even firing as slowly as Coriah had ordered her to, it was almost no time at all before Chrisenya's magazine ran empty, and an entirely automatic movement drove her to press the button that sent the empty mag tumbling to the grass.

As though it had known, Coriah's techpriest assistant appeared behind Chrisenya, offering up a new magazine. "Four remaining," it intoned. Chrisenya had hardly taken the magazine when it moved on to the next girl in need.

There was something very bloodless about bolter fire, something that rendered it artificial when compared to sword spars and wrestling. Perhaps it was merely that the targets did not fire back. Regardless, Chrisenya focused as best as she could; if she was going to be the Empress's executioner, then a mastery of all of Her chosen means of death would be necessary. With each shell sent forth to do the Empress's bidding, Chrisenya could feel her skill sharpening.

She set herself a simple goal, to strike the same spot twice, digging into the bottom of the crater she'd already left. It proved to be more difficult than one might suppose. Her muscles said that the boltgun was returning to the same position after each shot, as did the steel sights, and yet the evidence of the rockcrete proved that something had gone wrong. With each shell fired, Chrisenya grew more frustrated, and her limbs more exhausted by the weapon's weight. In the end, it was luck more than proper skill that allowed her to finish out her first experience with the boltgun in success rather than failure. Consciously, she had no awareness of any difference between that shot and the ones that came before and after it, but sure enough, the crater in the rockcrete target suddenly deepened, shards of grey material rocketing out of the depression where the shell had struck home.

Chrisenya had a few minutes to rest while the most frugal of her sisters ran down the last of their allotted ammunition, before they moved on to the next phase. That would be the heavy bolter, the most destructive form of the general principle, and one which Chrisenya soon found she would never, ever be able to use. Even in power armor the heavy bolter was large and difficult to use, to the point where Chrisenya heard the phrase "back-breaker" used more than once. As such, a large hip-frame had been developed, allowing the strength of the entire body to be utilized in supporting the weapon's bulk.

But it didn't matter how much strength Chrisenya had, or how well she might have been able to hold up the plasteel construction of the weapon. Some elements of physics could not be overcome so easily; among them, the tendency of a body to tip forward when it has been attached to an object of equal or even greater weight.

"Well, you'll never be a Retributor," Sister-Superior Bellara said. "There are other ways of progressing. You can sit this next one out."

Which was just fine by Chrisenya, considering the state of her arms. She was more than content to do squats and the occasional curl-up while watching Sister Severn become used to the heavy bolter. She took to it like an avian to the sky, rapidly turning rockcrete targets into showers of flying stone shrapnel, the unceasing roar of the weapon occasionally interrupted by explosive cries of "For the Empress!" It was beautiful to watch Severn be transformed so thoroughly into an instrument of holy devastation; a vision appeared before Chrisenya's eyes of the same woman, in the same posture, standing upon some alien battlefield, mowing down mutated servants of chaos while clad in a red suit of armored plate.

The day's lessons finished off with a round of bolt pistol training. Many of the operating principles were similar, but there were enough differences that, unlike with the boltgun, Coriah did have to go over the mechanisms with the group before they could get to shooting. Chrisenya did not do quite as well with the bolt pistol as she had with the boltgun, a fact which she pinned on two causes: firstly, the bolt pistol's machine spirit was not nearly so verbose as the boltgun's had been, mostly limiting itself to brief bursts of emotional thrill during firing. Secondly, Chrisenya's arms were already tired, and the one-handed firing stance did them absolutely no favors. Supporting the bolt pistol with the opposite hand was strictly forbidden, on the grounds that said hand would, in real combat, be carrying a sword.

The next few days of training were more of the same, for the most part; better to grind the use of the weapon into every sinew before allowing a break. Eventually, though, the day did come when Chrisenya and the others arrived on the training field to find that the boltguns being handed out contained no ammunition and had been fully passivated. It was time for the rodent race again, that endless sprinting back and forth across the field, interrupted in Chrisenya's case only by bursts of pain.

And, indeed, the first eight repetitions of the process went by in much the same way as they always had. Chrisenya allowed herself, gracefully, naturally, to fall to the very back of the pack, to conserve her strength as much as possible, and with all the composure of a Saint she took her strokes from Coriah's whip. It was only on the ninth lap that something inscrutable changed.

As was to be expected from the ninth turn sprinting back and forth across a grass field with a nine-kilogram mass of plasteel clutched in one's arms, the tempo of the commandery had significantly slowed from the first lap. Even those overachievers at the front of the pack, lightning-quick Sister Gwynette and long-legged Sister Regina and all the others who were of their ilk, had had the sharp edge of their swiftness worn down to a nub. Those girls in the back, those who had to burn themselves alive for a chance at avoiding the whip, had been reduced to shambles.

Except for Chrisenya. Certainly, she was quite tired, but she could still feel within herself some hint of remaining vitality, and certainly more than was in evidence in the others. The weight in her arms was almost familiar, draining as it may have been. One of the other novitiates fell behind her, even at her lax pace, and Chrisenya finally decided to make a go for it.

There was about a third the distance yet to go when Chrisenya lurched forward, putting all of her speed into her legs, exhaustion be damned. It was such a subtle difference, still not nearly enough to put her on par with the girls at the front, but one by one the other exhausted weaklings began to fall behind her. The thrill of conquest surged through her bloodstream, even as her lungs and heart and arms burned from the sudden, extra exertion. It was a brilliant reminder that Chrisenya was still a warrior, could still truly push herself rather than merely trying to survive.

When Chrisenya crossed the finish line, she dropped the boltgun at once, panting for breath. It wasn't the best finish she'd ever had, but considering she wasn't vomiting, it was also far from the worst. Eventually the sound of running ceased, and she could breathe again for long enough to pick the boltgun off the ground. She didn't even have to turn around to know that there were more than ten novitiates who had crossed the finishing line after she did, but it wasn't until after she had the boltgun in her hands again that she became cognizant of what that actually meant. It had taken so many months, but for the first time, Chrisenya had avoided Coriah's whip.

The Sister-Superior gave her the slightest grin before going to dispense her discipline. "For the Empress," Chrisenya hissed in between panting breaths.

 

[dragonsaffron]

"That's it, Sister Chrisenya, your twenty-fourth week physical is complete," Hospitaller-Superior Doloria said, cheer audible even under her mask.

Chrisenya hopped off of the platform of moving rods that served as combination exam-table and medical auspex, and promptly took back her clothes from the awaiting nurse. While she dressed herself, Doloria examined the outputs of the bulky harness on her back.

"The therapeutic tattoos are functioning at full capacity. You've probably noticed the salient effects, but this will be a blessing for any small injuries, not to mention preventing… well, if you serve in the Hospitallers for as long as I have you learn to dread the sorts of things that happen to a body which is confined too long to power armor!"

Chrisenya knew that the tattoos were working, of course. She could hear the hum of their tiny machine spirits harmonizing with each other all across her body. But it was good to get a second opinion, she supposed.

"As for broader physical fitness…" Doloria glared at the data-slate readout, tutting under her breath for a moment before returning to her normal cheeriness. "You've gained weight, almost five kilograms, mostly muscle and some fat. I think I can say with some confidence that you're well on track to be up to standard."

"You don't need to measure my muscle mass percentage to know that," Chrisenya said. "There are spots on my back where you can see my normal skin color, can't you? That tells you everything you need to know."

"I'll be sure to add 'grew a sense of humor' to your medical record," Doloria said. "Sister Severn is a terrible influence on you."

Chrisenya finished putting on her tunic, and spent a few seconds adjusting her uniform before asking, "How do you know about myself and Severn?"

"I know everything," Doloria said. "And besides, I've had to give Severn a lecture or two about infectious diseases."

Doloria moved around the room, handing off her data-slate to the waiting nurse. "I'm giving you clearance for Tertius-grade augmetic procedures. That include ones related to the matter of your gendering."

"Oh," said Chrisenya. "When will that begin, then?"

"Shouldn't be longer than a few weeks, availability is complicated. But more important is to discuss the kinds of procedures available. At your size and shape, most of the more extreme operations will be unnecessary. But, aside from your passivation, I could also recommend a basic vocal augmetic, a few sessions of lymphatic modulation, and of course regular access to the anointing chamber. You understand to what I am referring?"

Chrisenya did, of course. She'd read those particular sections of the data-slate at least a dozen times, always with the strangest mix of fear and desire. It was too similar to what Misty had offered her so many times in the past, and not even Severn's repeated admonishments to treat her body with a modicum of respect had fully overcome that particular fear.

"Do I have to take the vocal augmetic?" Chrisenya asked, cringing away from eye contact with Doloria. "I think I should prefer to keep my voice as it is."

"Of course not," Doloria said warmly. "Passivation is the only procedure that's mandatory, in conjunction with use of the anointing chamber, though you'll struggle to fit into your armor without lymphatic modulation."

"I see," said Chrisenya. "Then, in that case, you may schedule me for those three."

Doloria fell silent, shuffling over to the on-duty nurse. The two engaged in a brief burst of whispered conversation while Chrisenya stood at attention. Eventually, Chrisenya concluded that she had been nonverbally dismissed, and went for the door to the examination room. She stopped when it was half-open, standing in the doorway until Hospitaller-Superior Doloria spoke up.

"When you get to the waiting room, could you send in Sister Serra next? Thank you."

Chrisenya left the room with a fraction more energy in her steps than she had had when she entered it. All her thoughts were abuzz with anxious anticipation of what was to come, so much so that she entirely ignored the shiver of sinister foreboding that passed through her as she stepped down the corridor.

A minute later, Sister Serra briskly entered the room, beginning to disrobe herself for examination before the door had even fully clicked shut. With an imperious gesture of her hand, Hospitaller-Superior Doloria ordered her to stop.

"This isn't an examination, I'm afraid. There will be countless opportunities to catch up on your medical status at a future date."

Serra hesitantly returned her mantle to her shoulders. "Sister-Superior?"

"I'm not here to speak to you as doctor and patient, but as Sister and novitiate. I have an important mission for you."

Serra's posture became somehow even more rigid. "Yes, Sister-Superior. What do you require of me?"

Doloria sighed, her shoulders sagging under the weight of her medicae harness. "Sister Chrisenya has been abusing stimm since not long after the beginning of her training. The medical signs are clearly obvious."

"Oh," Serra said. Her eyelashes flickered as she rapidly re-evaluated all of the interactions she had had with the smallest and strangest of her squad-mates. "I had dismissed those signs as more of her… strangenesses."

"Indeed," Doloria said fondly.

"Why have you not reported this to anyone? If you've known for so long, then you should have—"

"Sister Chrisenya is my patient," Doloria said. "The punishment for illicit stimm usage is… severe. I thought that it might be best to attempt to dissuade her through other means rather than to subject her to that, but not even having to undergo pelvic surgery while the stimm partially counteracted the anesthesia was enough to break the addiction. Which means that I'll need your help."

Serra didn't agree with the soft touch. Chrisenya was breaking the rules of the Abbey, so why go soft? But it was not her place to question the orders of a superior. "How may I be of assistance?"

"I need you to find the location of Chrisenya's stash. Every stimm addict has one, a place to keep their supply where it won't be found by sweeps. That may entail you having to stalk Chrisenya while she is sneaking about, asking around about her movements, but I promise that I can vouch for you if any questions are raised."
Serra remained very still as she considered what little she knew of Chrisenya's movements. "How important is it that I remain surreptitious? I assume very?"
"Yes. Once you find the stash, your orders are to steal the stimm and deliver it to me. If Chrisenya is able to make the connection between that theft and you, she may become violent, so secrecy may prove crucial."
"Of course. I will carry out this mission as soon as possible." Serra was not one easily brought to emotion, but as she realized the trust that had been placed in her, the smallest swelling of pride came forth in her chest. "In the name of the Order of the Silver Suture, and of our glorious Empress."
"May she guide your way, Sister Serra. That will be all." Doloria paused a moment, quirking her head to one side. "Though if we wish to make it seem to the remainder of your squad that I have been examining you, it may be best to waste a few more minutes. How go your studies?"

…

Tracking the movements of Sister Chrisenya proved to be more difficult than Serra could have possibly anticipated. She had never previously paid much more attention to the girl than their proximity had necessitated, though even that amount had given her the impression that this was someone who she wished to have little connection to. Chrisenya was an eccentric, a strong argument in favor of the position that there was such a thing as too much piety, and she was deeply unsettling to look at or converse to; but what Serra hadn't known until it had suddenly become her business to know about was the fact that Chrisenya was monstrously busy.

Serra was busy too, of course. Exempt though she may have been from most chores, her scheduled activities of military training, hospitaller training, and prayer took up quite a lot of time. But Chrisenya took it one step further, as she did with most things, filling even her non-scheduled time with a constant whirr of activity. Far too often Serra would return to the bunk room for a nap or some quiet, non-strenuous study of her medical reference texts only to discover that nobody knew where Chrisenya was.

But she had been given an order from Sister-Superior Doloria, her first true mission in the name of the Adepta Sororitas, and Serra Sanguinius-Died-So-You-Could-Be-Saved was not going to be dissuaded so easily. So, like all things, she took it systematically.

The first step was to work out those parts of Chrisenya's schedule which were the same most days, things like when she habitually took meals, when she prayed, which chores she had taken it upon herself to do and at what times, and so on. These where the hours about which Serra did not have to worry, given that Chrisenya's location was well-accounted during them. Once those were eliminated, Serra was able to shift her own schedule to allow for as much stalking as possible.

And then came the madness. Nobody ever seemed to know where she had vanished off to, which meant that Serra's only chance was to be at the room when Chrisenya was there, and leave just behind her when she left. The end of every lecture or prayer session became a mad dash to return to the bunkroom, a race which Serra would often find herself winning by a matter of minutes, if she won it at all. After a few days of this Serra was even forced to begin wiggling her way out of training, an act which she justified with the understanding that it was, after all, for the mission.

Even still, tracking Chrisenya was a great challenge. Serra knew for a fact that Chrisenya suspected nothing, and yet her movements, both in terms of when she went out on her little excursions and the paths she took once she did, were almost as if she knew she were being followed. She would stop and look back with great frequency, forcing Serra to rush into cover or pull the hood of her mantle over her face and look anonymous, and when she was moving it was a lengthy and erratic path. Many times Chrisenya would manage to lose Serra before she made it to wherever she was going.

When Chrisenya did arrive, it never seemed to be the place that Serra was hoping for. Too often she would come to some shadowy, abandoned nook which appeared to be the exact sort of place an addict would hide their stash, only for the noises emanating from within to make it quite clear that this was an engagement with Sister Severn, which while disgusting was sadly not reportable. Other times there would be no explanation for why it was that Chrisenya went to some strange location, but not even a thorough search would reveal evidence of any sort of stash. Over a week passed, and Sister Serra found herself having gotten absolutely nowhere.

It was an unusually warm evening, the day everything changed. Serra had been intending to wait for Chrisenya to leave once again, but with the white-haired girl busy praying and the whole business having steadily sapped her strength, Serra's will failed and she ended up taking a nap; a nap which soon became filled with strange, upsetting dreams. There were hands all across her body, disgusting, pawing hands that she couldn't seem to fight off no matter how much she struggled.

Chrisenya was there as well, taunting Serra even in the escape of unconsciousness. She leaned in close and said, "You've been barking up the wrong tree for too long. It's time to make things interesting and wake up."

Serra jolted awake, her heart thumping in her chest and a stinging pain rapidly fading from the front part of her skull. This damned mission had been destroying her mentally just as much as it was physically. It took her several seconds to calm her breaths, clear her mind of those heretical doubts, and realize that there was a noise in the bunk room. She turned over just in time to see the door to the room crack open. She could not see the figure, so quickly did they flit out through the crack in the door, but a quick count of heads in the room revealed that it was Sister Chrisenya.

Serra gave it a thirty count, long enough that Chrisenya hopefully wouldn't hear a thing, before slipping out from under her covers and rushing to follow. Keeping up was a mad race. It was as though the entire Abbey had turned against Serra, every stone flooring slab and tree root tripping at her feet, every wandering servitor attempting to cross her path. At the same time, though, it soon became obvious that Chrisenya was heading off in a direction that Serra had never seen her go: the center of the Abbey.

Exhausted, nerves severely frazzled, Sister Serra arrived at a large structure, one she didn't recognize. She'd never had any reason to go to the Hall of Mementos, what with her mind much more focused on faith of the mind and the technical aspects of healing the sacred human body. She had little value for relics. But Chrisenya had entered the building, and if this was the location of her stimm stash then Serra was obligated to follow. The guards at the entrance quizzed her about why she was there, forcing Serra to come up with a story about researching Order history for one of her lectures. By the time that affair was done, Chrisenya had vanished into the stacks.

Serra searched them row by row. The building was nearly empty, the only sounds a distant creaking and the steady clicking of the servitors. How long had the Orders been protecting the Gabrielle system, Serra wondered, that they had managed to accumulate this much?

And then, at last, she found Sister Chrisenya. The target of her search was roughly in the middle of the row, and she was… praying. Serra felt, for a moment, as though she were about to be struck dead from sheer disappointment. Hiding around the edge of the massive shelf, Serra watched on as minute after minute passed and Chrisenya hardly moved, kneeling before some nameless relic with her hands clasped. If this was the site of her stash, Chrisenya showed no signs, and after some time she rose to her feet and started walking towards Serra's hiding spot, forcing her to quickly duck out of the way.

There was one last chance to get something out of this. Once Chrisenya was gone, Serra hurried down the row, looking for the place where she had been; fortunately, the floors were quite dusty, and the knee-prints quite clearly marked where she had been. Serra searched around, looking for any possible places where Chrisenya might have been able to hide something away. She found nothing, but while she searched her eyes fell onto the label of the object Chrisenya had been praying to.

"Divinatory device of unknown providence. Possibly tool of chaos."

And suddenly it all clicked into place. The strange feeling that Serra felt whenever she was in Chrisenya's presence, the extreme emphasis on her own piety, the strange vanishings that Serra could not always follow. Chrisenya was not merely a stimm addict. Chrisenya was a heretic, corrupted, a servant of chaos that had somehow made it all the way to infiltrate the Adepta Sororitas.

Doloria had said that this was all to be kept a secret, but she would not have said the same if she had known what was at stake. Serra rushed out of the Hall of Mementos, no longer even bothering to hide her presence. She was going to have to report this to someone, and do it immediately. And in the case of something as severe as chaos corruption, there was only one possible option: going directly to the top.

 

[dragonsaffron]

One benefit to having been promoted to the rank of Canoness was that, unlike the Sister-Superiors whose chambers were all scattered about with their units, all of the higher officers had quarters in and around the central spire of the Abbey. This meant that when Innogen found herself in possession of a cherub-delivered note summoning her to the deliberation hall, it was but a short walk to make the journey. Just long enough of a walk to stretch her legs and ponder what minor bit of bureaucracy she was being summoned over this time.

All that changed when she opened the chamber doors and saw, for the first time in a very long time, the Tribunal. Seventy-seven of the Abbey's Canonesses, fifty-one from the Order of the Silver Scar and twenty-six from the Order of the Silver Suture, elected for their stalwart wills and keen intellects to serve for life as the Abbey's main court. The meeting of all seventy-seven members of the Tribunal typically took place on a rigid schedule, once every two hundredth day; that more than a handful of them had come together at once could mean only that there had been a serious accusation of wrongdoing. Sure enough, as Innogen stepped into the room she saw that the small platform in the center of the room, normally bedecked in purity seals for the use of a speech-maker, had instead been surrounded with holy runes of truth-telling. She had been called forth to deliver testimony.

Innogen dutifully stepped forward, onto the platform. The Tribunal members were arranged above her, silhouetted by the harsh glow-globes mounted in the chamber's ceiling, seventy-seven pairs of eyes glaring down into the pit. One of them was seated apart from the rest, with a vox. She was Canoness-Preceptor Selina St. Celestine, a gaunt and fierce tactician, Innogen's superior but by no means her commanding officer, and she was going to be in charge of questioning.

"Is it correct," Selina began, "that you, Canoness-Commander Innogen Gorevacht, were some eight years ago engaged in a search-and-destroy mission inside the Thannetch Spire on the planet Aktranis?"

"'Tis. I was a Celestian-Superior at the time; the commanding officer on that mission was Canoness Jesmaria Kemtrazimer."

Innogen's heart, already hammering from the natural stress of being questioned by the entirety of the Tribunal, accelerated farther. It had been a very long time since she had felt consciously aware of the need to control her breathing to maintain calm; but it was going to take more than questioning about a sensitive topic to break her down.

"This mission, despite its stated objective, returned to base with a rescued captive. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Would you, for the Tribunal, please tell us, in your own words, the events of that mission as best as you can recall?"

"I'll do so," Innogen said, moving slowly in order to find the most tactful phrasing, "but as it has been eight years, I do believe that the after-action report I gave in the immediate aftermath of the mission would be far more accurate and informative."

"We would like to hear it in your own words," Canoness Selina said coolly. "If you would be so kind."

"Permission to ask a question?" Innogen said.

Selina let out a breath of annoyance, one which was just barely caught by the vox at her lips. "Permission granted."

"What's the purpose of all this? I'd like to hope I'm not being dragged up here to recite a story that you all already know merely out of your whims. I'm a Canoness, just the same as you. That makes my time valuable."

Maybe it was an illusion of the bright lights, but Innogen could have sworn that she saw Selina's eyes narrowing even from the pit. The vox was moved away from her mouth, and Selina turned to the other members of the Tribunal to confer for a brief while. Eventually, some conclusion was reached.

"Sister Chrisenya Thannetch, the girl who you rescued in the course of this mission, has been credibly accused before this Tribunal of chaos corruption and worship," said Canoness Selina. "As part of this investigation, it is necessary to learn as much as possible about her past. Now, Canoness-Commander Innogen, if you would please begin your testimony."

Canoness Innogen needed a moment to compose herself. Not too many moments, not too long that it would be obvious what the news had done to her, but just a split-second spent staring down at her own boots. Long enough for the self-doubt and fear to bloom into existence, then be shoved aside by the iron of duty. Then she fixed her gaze firmly on the eyes of the Tribunal, and began.

"It was in the later parts of the war on Aktranis. After the second directive had come out and changed the calculus entirely. I'm sure all of you were involved in that war, in one way or another, so no doubt you remember that part of the conflict well, but the context felt necessary. What you all probably know better about than I do is the source of the intelligence. Maybe it came from captives, maybe it came from moles in the enemy organization, stolen vox signals, divine inspiration, I don't know. It must have been considered quite reliable indeed, considering what we did with it.

"Regardless of where it might have come from, the intel pointed in one direction: there was a major presence of chaos at Thannetch Spire. And I don't just mean your typical renegade PDF or the rebellious rabble, this was… this was real sorcery. The intelligence was unambiguous about that, and the mission itself bore it out. From what I saw, it was the kind of sorcery that could have changed the fate of the entire Aktranis system, left unchecked. The exact kind of sorcery that it is our mission to eliminate.

"Thannetch Spire, being one of the largest strongholds on all of Aktranis, was already well-defended, and the cultists had acquired enough anti-air weaponry from the planetary armories to make an approach rather problematic. The eventual mission profile relied upon heavy support from the surviving PDF, Valkyries running distractions and counter-fire so that a single Thunderhawk could slip through and land on one of the spire's pads. It was a full complement of twenty-seven Celestians, plus the Canoness and an attached Hospitaller. Six flamers, the rest standard armaments, seeing as this was going to be close-quarters fighting. The mission was simple enough: find the heart of the ritual, disrupt it, and optionally, get out alive afterwards.

"The insertion was smooth, though 'smooth' is rather something of a relative term…"

…

Celestian-Superior Innogen clasped her hands together and let the unceasing roar of the autocannon deafen her. The Thunderhawk jolted with each near-miss, sending every single one of the sisters packed within rocking. No other situation could have so perfectly recreated the feeling that one was descending into the darkest fathoms of the warp: all was noise and red light, balance was impossible to find, and every heart in the transport was heavy with the knowledge that her death was almost certainly soon at hand.

But the strength of the Empress held Innogen aloft. Every word of prayer was charged with a palpable divinity, and though she had been awake for hours and hardly slept the night before, strength still coursed through Innogen's sinews. The Empress would do all she could to ensure Innogen's survival, and even were she to die, she would be welcomed home at the Empress's bosom. There was no fear in Innogen's flesh, only the grim certainty that it would be a great challenge indeed which lay ahead. As her lips formed the words, all thought was cast aside but the thought of victory and death.

It took several seconds for her to notice the slight weight on the shoulder of her armor. Innogen looked up. It was Celestian-Superior Pella. Innogen smiled softly, momentarily distracted from the horrors without by the soft curve of Pella's lips and the warmth in her eyes. Innogen clasped her hand around Pella's arm-guard, making sure to memorize that expression in case she didn't get a second chance.

Then Pella moved on, and Innogen found herself once more submerged in impending doom. She had no more mind for prayer, and instead took up her combi-flamer. She had gone through the process of checking it for any errors twice already, once just after waking and once upon embarking in the Thunderhawk, but a third time wouldn't do any bad. She had finished with the combi-flamer and her bolt pistol, and was halfway through checking her power sword for errors, when the Thunderhawk's intercom crackled to life.

"Helmets on and weapons loaded, ladies, we're landing in five," said the pilot. That was the end of it; Innogen couldn't imagine it was easy to say even that, with all the AA fire that needed evading.

Innogen picked up her helmet and pressed it into place over her head, the locking mechanisms securing it in place with a single heavy click. A second quick motion just under her chin secured the throat armor in place. While the helmet's machine spirit roused from sleep, whispering status data into Innogen's ear, she clipped her sword, her pistol, and two braces of grenades into place on her thighs, hefted her combi-flamer onto her shoulder, and rose from the Thunderhawk's bench.

There were eight women under Innogen's responsibility. Not her command; they were in the end, Celestians, hardened warriors all, women who had proven through service that they could be entrusted with the most dangerous missions, far from the command lines. Innogen's job was not to enforce discipline, nor to direct her subordinates, for each Celestian enforced such things within herself; her job was to keep the squad working as one, which meant keeping them all safe and fighting at peak capacity until the very moment that the enemies of the Empress stole their lives.

Innogen moved up and down the Thunderhawk, observing her sisters prepare themselves. She made sure that Celestian Ingenia had taken proper care of her old hip injury, that Celestian Orfica had tried the new spirit-taming method given to her by the preceptory tech-priests, and that Celestian Liviana knew aggression was not the alpha and the omega of combat, no matter what her time with the Repentia had taught her. All were well-prepared, or as well-prepared as it was possible to be. Innogen was proud.

"Sixty seconds," came the distorted voice from the bow of the gunship. "Elle-zed is white hot."

1st squad marched their way to the back of the Thunderhawk, and Innogen watched them go by. The loading ramp of the Thunderhawk wasn't wide enough for two squads to pass down it at once without distorting their formations, which meant it fell to 1st to punch a hole in whatever resistance awaited them. Pella was at the lead of that squad; but any concern Innogen may have felt in the moment was muted down to a distant echo.

And then the whole gunship rattled, forcing armored hands to find whatever purchase they could. Almost instantly, the machine spirit of Innogen's helmet announced that it was initiating noise suppression, as the whole world outside of the Thunderhawk was consumed by automatic fire. The red inner lighting turned bright as the landing ramp opened. Moments later, the sound of bolter fire grew even louder as 1st made contact with the enemy.

In the end, "white-hot" turned out to be somewhat of an exaggeration, though considering the pilot was only somewhat a combatant, it was to be expected. Theoretically, the platoon of renegade PDF who had been assigned to guard the landing pad had a two-to-one numerical superiority over the Sororitas. But they were PDF in flak armor, men who had likely never seen service before the uprising; their opponents were Adepta Sororitas, and the most experienced cream of that blessed crop besides. Las-fire send up plumes of sparks and smoke against holy ceramite and did no harm, while bolts turned flesh into paste.

The Thunderhawk's eight heavy bolters also worked miracles to even the playing field. The renegades were slaughtered, the survivors promptly executed for heresy, and only one Sororitas was wounded, sentenced by Sister-Excelsior Palatea to spend the rest of the mission recuperating with the Thunderhawk's pilots. The mission had a minute to collect themselves and plan ahead before they would need to delve into the bulk of the spire.

And bulk was the correct term. Thannetch Spire was far from the largest structure that Innogen had ever laid eyes on—Aktranis was no hive planet, after all—but nonetheless it boggled the mind, especially from as close as the landing pad. From where she was standing, it looked about as large as the great bell tower back on Roctaln III, except that there was about another kilometer of structure below the landing pad hidden from view. Finding the heart of the ritual through normal means would have taken weeks; it was for that reason, after the battle was over, that a small flock of flapping, squalling auspex cherubs were released from the Thunderhawk to begin their endless scan of the surroundings. The real-time map of the spire in the helmets of each one of the sisters contained only a fraction of the whole layout.

It would be a mad race against time. The powers of chaos were accumulating, and Innogen could feel it on the air, even at distance and through uncounted layers of ferrocrete and plasteel. She was sensitive in that way, not enough to know the direction of the unhallowed force, but just enough to feel as an unaccountable tingling buzz in the back of her head the presence of chaos. It was growing stronger with each passing second.

Canoness Jesmaria was the first to pass through the heavy double doors connecting the landing pad to the main body of the spire, the gilded spike of her condemnor boltgun aimed squarely forward. Like any good Canoness, she preferred to lead from the front. Even with Aktranis's star blotted out by heavy smoke, the inside of the spire was so dark by comparison with the landing pad that Jesmaria, and the brave vanguard who followed moments after, vanished into the shadow. Row by row, walking two or three per rank, the mission followed her example.

Then the doors finally shut behind them, and the Sororitas were cut off. Swallowed alive. Twenty-eight chosen warriors of the Empress, alone and unsupported in the very stronghold of heresy.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Canoness-Preceptor Selina motioned for Innogen to pause her recollection. "I would like you to turn your memory specifically on the degree and nature of the effect of chaos within the Aktranis spire. How severe was it?"

Innogen nodded at the command, and after a while spent in silence, replied, "You must understand that I have fought chaos, true chaos, few enough times in my years that I could count it on my fingers. But Aktranis spire was the most severe chaos corruption I have ever encountered. It's hardly worth making the comparison."

"In what way?"

"Because I'd never known a building to become afflicted with mutation before. You could tell that it had been built along Imperial lines, but everything had changed, shifted. It had become… svelte. There's no other word for it."

"If the presence of chaos was so strong upon this building," Selina said coolly, "did it have any effect upon you?"

Innogen had to choose her response carefully. To deny everything would be just as incriminating as to admit everything. "It did place a strain upon my will," she said, "but no more than a strain. I held fast. I hope my record of service indicates why that was the case."

…


Celestian-Superior Innogen could feel her nipples rub against the soft inner surface of her combat sheath, and she knew that her heart was pounding from more than the exertion of battle. The whole chamber stank. Bolt-powder and the ineffable sourness of power blades turned into a strange musky perfume, and the charred flesh of the heretics reminded her more of food than of death. When she looked down at her most recent victory, a heretic who had fallen before her bolt pistol, Innogen's eyes tended more towards the woman's breasts than to the red mess where her torso was supposed to connect to her hips.

The entire mission was experiencing this chaos influence rather severely. Hardened Celestians leaned up against the walls of the chamber, sucking down breaths, or else clinging to their companions with lingering touches and long-held gazes. What Innogen would have given for the infiltration to be over, and she and Pella could…

Novitiates might have given in. Ordinary battle-sisters, even. But Celestians were made of sterner stuff, as they had proven in the preceding battle. The cultists had been caught off-guard in the midst of an orgiastic party, gorged on food, glutted on sex, and drugged up to the gills. And yet from the very first bolter shell fired, they rushed into battle with a frenzied fervor that shocked even the Sororitas. They fought with table knives and whips, candelabras pried off the walls and gilded plates used as shields, and met their deaths with moans of pleasure. Though the cultists were destroyed, they managed to take two Celestians with them, members of Pella's squad who were borne to the ground and subjected to mutilations so horrific it was deemed preferable to give them the Empress's Mercy.

That chamber had been one which was immediately singled out on the auspex scans. It was a large open space absolutely stuffed full of movement, and the patrols of renegade guards, recognizable by their rapid progress from one chamber to the next, seemed to center around it. Even with an objective, pushing through the defenders had proven to be a nightmarishly difficult task. The individual squads of renegades were easy enough to take down, though the tight quarters made it nigh-impossible to leverage the Sororitas's greater numbers. The issue was that there were so many, and their attacks so frequent, that it wore upon the mind and soul. Even most warzones did not require one be ready and prepared for so long.

Worst was the barricade. Lasguns, sniper rifles, flamers, even plasma were all relatively easy to take down. But one of the heretics had apparently got his hands on a missile launcher. The first woman to enter its line of sight was struck directly and reduced to shrapnel, the thunderous detonation causing Innogen's ears to ring. The rest of the battle had been a torturous advance up the long, narrow hallway to avoid her fate while getting close enough to burn the heretics to the ground.

And then it had all come to nothing. Though a deplorable sign of heretical excess, the huge feast was no true magic. The purple haze which hung in the air was merely an exotic psychedelic drug, according to Sister-Excelsior Palatea, albeit one which had a nasty tendency of slipping in through any gaps created in one's power armor by poor maintenance or improper donning.

The only reaction left, at least once the overpowering lust had reduced to a mere buzz of sensuality, was to search the room for anything of potential use or value. And to execute any surviving heretics, of course. It was torture, like a week in the Repentrium condensed down to a generous handful of minutes. Temptation to partake in the generous food and drink nipped at Innogen's mind, as did the growing fear that more threats would surely come to avenge their fallen comrades. What should have been the slow, regenerative moment of down-time in between the rush of violence and the strain of the advance was instead a nightmare of the mind.

A distant fourth behind the fear of temptation, the hatred and terror of the cultists, and the mental stress of sifting through all the detritus of the party, was concern for the innocent victims. It was almost difficult, at first, to tell that there even were innocent victims. At first it had seemed that the bodies in the room who had been subjected to things more awful than flame and bolter fire were cut from the same cloth, having many of the same lascivious modifications to the chest and genitals as did the frenzied servants of chaos. It was only as Innogen's keen eyes began to take note of certain patterns, irregularities in the scar markings and patterns in the positions in which the bodies had fallen, that a new theory presented itself. The cultists had been making their captives into more of the same, whether they liked to or not.

Some of the innocents were even still alive. The travesties to which they had been subjected, having no status within the cult and thus no protection from the whims of its members, were so awful as to defy thought. One might describe what had taken place as "rape" or "torture", but such small, simple words failed before the horror. There were flesh nightmares on display in that room that had no business still being alive.

And then a cry came out from another part of the room. Adrenaline spiked, and Innogen rushed to follow the noise, the words spoken being drowned out by the heavy thudding of her own armor. She arrived at the edge of the crowd of Celestians with her combi-flamer at the ready, only to realize, as the others must already have, that it was not a cry for help, but for mercy. Sister-Excelsior Palatea crouched alongside a Celestian of Sariya's squad; in the latter's arms lay one of the innocent victims, gazing up at the Sororitas with religious awe.

"You're too beautiful to be one of those nightmares," he said. "Please, please, pray for me, for I have failed."

That he was a man was only an assumption; the area between his legs was a red ruin, and his voice was withered from thirst and wracked with agony. Most of the rest of him was a combination of sores and scars; the Celestian's armor was getting filthy wherever he lay upon it, justifying in one moment the Order's use of red armor. It took a substantial portion of the man's effort merely to brush his fingers against the upper arm of his savior, and the look in Palatea's eyes confirmed that he was in his final minutes.

"We are looking for the ritual," the Celestian said. "We know it is here, in this spire, but we know not where. Tell us where to look, any clue at all, and you will not have failed."

The man blinked up at her, at the blank helmet which she did not dare to remove lest she be even more afflicted by the miasma than she already was. Palatea dropped to a knee besides the both of them, a syringe in hand, and injected something into the man's arm. He did not respond to the pain. But over the ensuing seconds, he appeared to unwind: his muscles lost some of their tension and his breathing slowed, both signs of an ensuing narcotic overdose.

"I can feel it," he said, and his voice was a fraction stronger. "The presence of the Empress is upon me."

"Yes, yes, it is. She is here, She is watching, She sees your suffering and will grant its end so very soon. But you must tell us where the heart of the evil is."

The man nodded. "Above. They ask if you were anybody… and if you say yes, they take you above…"

A spark of collective mercy arose in the hearts of the mission. None of them wanted this poor, pious fellow's last words to be the answer to an interrogation. Innogen didn't hear who started it, but someone, muffled by a helmet and uneven with fatigue and the awful effects of chaos exposure, began to sing a hymn, "The Blazing Sword". The man was dead on the floor by the end of the second chorus, and there was no time to give him his proper last rites. The Empress would have to find his soul on Her own.

"Above" was not much of a direction, but it was better than they had had previously. Indeed, there were several extrapolations that could be made from the fact that the ritual was taking place in the highest portions of Thannetch Spire; it meant that they had not chosen to make use of the Sacrarium Sacrosanctus or any of the largest chambers in the very belly of the Spire. The Orrery Astrologis, perhaps, or the highest point in the whole of the Spire.

The main lifts were, of course, guarded. Yet more Celestians fell before the scything of the heavy bolters set up there, or were blasted to pieces by stray melta shot; but in the end, the mission made it more-or-less intact onto the lift, and up. And up. And up. The lift was heavy and slow, a monorail rotated ninety degrees, designed to be able to carry over a hundred serfs through the upper portion of the spire. Two dozen Sororitas made it feel eerily empty, the few words shared and the clicking of their armor utterly failing to match the droning, grinding sound of the lift climbing floor after floor. It was the closest any of them had had to a rest since the start of the mission.

Some minutes later, the lift disgorged the mission into the upper spire, and Innogen immediately felt the truth of the dying man's testimony. The lift must have shielded her somehow, for the influence of chaos was as present as a migraine headache in the upper levels of Thannetch Spire, and the terrain all the more warped and distorted for it. Canoness Jesmaria must have sensed it as well, for before they set off to begin a search of the upper levels, she had all the Celestians gather together. They knelt, and Jesmaria began to speak a High Gothic prayer, calling upon the Empress for protection from evil.

It was an inspiring oration, and the circumstances were as something out of a faith story, elite soldiers stopping to pray in the nest of chaos. And yet Innogen found herself distracted. She tried to force herself to look ahead, to distill down her mind into a single point of piety, but she could not. Something was calling for her.

…

Canoness-Commander Innogen's testimony trailed off. This next part was something she had spent the last eight years shoving aside, something she had never mentioned to anyone. It was something she could not explain, did not dare attempting to explain. It was not in the report she'd written, and though she had been sorely tempted, not even the Inquisitor had ever learned of it.

"Canoness-Commander? I did not ask you to go silent."

"Apologies. This next part is… not easy to explain." She sighed, looking down at the floor of the interrogation pedestal. "Have you ever had a moment of… intuition?"

"My intuition is strong, yet tempered by reason," Selina replied. "I assume by your tone you mean to imply something more?"

Innogen nodded. "Indeed. It was…Were I a more arrogant woman I would say it was a message from the Empress, but I would not dare make such a claim. All I can say is that, during the prayer… I suddenly knew. I can't say how, but I knew which way we needed to go."

"And did you indicate this sudden belief to the others?"

"I did. There was an argument about whether it was a miracle of faith or the whispers of chaos tempting me into a trap. In the end, Jesmaria had me remove my helmet and pressed the tip of a blessed stake into my brow. When that failed to dispel the feeling, we voted to follow it."

"And this strange intuition… did it lead you in the correct direction?"

Innogen nodded. "That's the part that's always frightened me the most, Canoness-Preceptor."

...

Celestian-Superior Innogen was terrified. Was she going mad? She had to believe that the more terrifying option, that her mind had finally broken against the ceaseless onslaught of chaos, had been ruled out by the stake test, but the possibility that this was a more normal type of insanity still remained. If she led her mission astray, she would have no choice but to end herself there and then.

It was impossible to define how long they had been marching in that direction, following Innogen's vision. They say there is no such thing as time in the warp, not truly, and the corruption in the upper levels of the spire had grown so intense that it was becoming true there as well. Time slowed or accelerated at its own whim. It was also eerily silent and empty; they'd only encountered a single group of cultists, languid and drunk and easily slain. Their flesh had split open like cooked fruit.

They arrived at an intersection, the fifth by Innogen's count, and stopped. They needed her intuition to tell them where to go, although nobody dared to say it out loud. Not even the chosen warriors of the Empress were eager to continue this death march into the warp with too great a haste.

Innogen, meanwhile, had nothing. She had lied when she said it was a feeling, an intuition, anything internal to herself whatsoever. She stood in the center of the intersection, combi-flamer held tight to her chest, her armor a sea of sweat in which she swam, and looked around, waiting for the next appearance of the apparition. It could have taken hours for all she knew, but it didn't take long before it appeared. A boy, or a girl, young, no taller than a meter and a third, wearing a shirt and trousers of impossibly smooth white material. Their eyes were huge and pale and staring, and their hair was multicolored, chunks of blond alternating with chunks of grey.

The child stood off in one of the corridors extending out from the intersection, leaning against a wall for a moment. They beckoned for Innogen to follow, then vanished around a corner.

"That way," Innogen said. "It's that way."

That went on for a time. Passage after passage, intersection after intersection, chamber after chamber. The Spire could not possibly be this large, its corridors this entangled. It was like walking through a living creature, a vast garden of coral and bone and soft, wet skin. Innogen kept seeing people embedded in the walls, people who writhed and moaned and thrust… but whenever she turned to look they were gone. She wanted to scream, but instead of screaming she prayed, and the prayer made the ever-growing pressure of chaos upon her become momentarily less severe.

And then, finally, they found it. It was outside. There was no roof above the ritual, and the thick smoke of the battlefield hung barely above it. That alone made Innogen want to cry; if the Thunderhawk had merely circled around somewhat, they could have found it, known its location from the very beginning, maybe even landed atop it. As for why it was out in the open air, on a terrace of the Spire, well.

Nice to have airflow for a party, isn't it?

The ritual was a proper ball. A huge dance floor was the center of attention, a dance floor containing dozens, all moving in elaborate spiraling patterns. Musicians played and played a song sweeter than lovemaking, a song that made Innogen's heart want to call out in response to its heavenly rhythms. All around the edges of the dance floor, small groups of people conversed, playing games, some even sneaking brief carnal liaisons in the shadows of the outer wall.

Beyond that was the dinner tables. No one table could have held all of the guests, so there were six, one huge table up the middle and five others on its flanks, all piled high with food. Most of the party guests were on the floor, but many of the chairs were still full of revelers. At the head of the table sat the guest of honor, sleeping off a heavy plate of meat and drink.

Innogen's head stung. She pulled in a breath, shut her mind to the influence of chaos, and looked again.

The dancers were moving in a pattern that was impossible to follow, a spiraling fractal dance too precise for any amount of normal coordination to create it. Many of them were cultists, nude or clad in clothes designed for carnal appeal, and with bodies modified into perfect simulacra of sexuality; others were victims, ordinary men and women whose bodies had been pushed so far past the brink of exhaustion by the endless dance that they seemed about to shatter. The musicians were yet more distorted, playing instruments whose designs were unwholesome to even contemplate.

The servers, carrying their plates of hors d'oeuvres, were not human. Two and a half meters tall and androgynous, their over-muscled bodies barely seemed able to fit into their uniforms. At the edges of the dance floor, groups of guests chanted paeans to the chaos gods, or else piled onto unwilling victims in savage destructions. Over the dinner tables hung a series of great archways, from which were suspended almost a hundred human bodies, skinless carcasses whose blood dripped down into punch bowls and whose flesh was carved away bit by bit with long knives. Some of them were even dead.

Innogen should not have been able to see the guest of honor. They were simply too far away, too small, such a tiny detail amidst the panoply of absolute madness before them. And yet, as though her very perception were carried across the space by a sucking vortex, she could see them perfectly. At the head of the main table was a chair, a chair coated in thorns, thorns which had grown through the arms of its occupant, pinning them in place. Vomit stained their mouth from when they had been force-fed flesh and blood and wine and fruit and drugs, so many drugs of a million different descriptions. Two beings, one human and one decidedly not, fed them still.

The guest of honor was a child of ten, eleven, maybe twelve years old, pale and slender, wearing a loincloth. The depths of the torment visited upon them had already caused the poor thing's hair to go white.