The Witch Lives (40k)

[open_sketch]

You woke up to an incessant, grating buzz from your bedside table. You fumbled around to kill the alarm, knocking a box of sedatives to the ground in the process, and squinted at the blurry numbers flashing across the chronometer.

The date, as best as the little box knew, is 4.258.008.M42. Not particularly important or portentous, save that as of this current year fragment, your body is twenty-seven years old. The age of your mind is a much, much more difficult question to answer.

It's always subjective, not just in the way some people seem old for their age or immature. Everyone's perception of time was different, in the moment to moment, some seconds lasting hours and some years vanishing in a blur. It could vary wildly even for normal people, and they were far more moored to time than you were on your best day.

You'd never been able to explain what it felt like to anyone; not to the Inquisitor or Sister Charitina, not to Grampa Bookter, definitely not to your parents. No-one seemed to get it even though they very much should have understood that the time on the clock was not the way you perceived it. People were made of memories; some were merely more recent. The only difference for you was that your memories were sharper, clearer, and not always yours.

You rolled out of bed somewhat stiffly, yawning and stretching, stalking to the shower and turning the water as high as it'd go before it might burn. You emerged feeling far more human, wiping the steam-fogged mirror to greet the person on the other side. Familiar (you saw her nearly every day), dark of skin and eyes and hair (genetics, as Magos Marvel-Ann would explain), small and slight and boney (also genetics, you supposed, with a dash of childhood malnutrition), the sleep and shower evidently having not chased away the exhaustion that still clung to her (it was too loud in her brain). The brand in her neck had faded slightly with the years, but it was still there for all to see, to tell the world she was a witch.

The witch in the mirror frowned. She smiled a goofy smile. She examined the mark and tried to determine once again how much it was fading, if she wanted it to fade, and those thoughts boiled and twisted and spiralled into something dark and awful, like the fog clouding the glass. No, no.

"I've done nothing wrong," you said, as clearly as you could, falling back on your daily affirmation. Sister Charitina had told you it over and over, whenever things were bad, and now you said them every morning. "I am not cursed, or broken. Nobody is born evil." You said it so often because it was so, so easy to forget it, when you needed it. "I am worthy of life, choice, and comfort. I am whoever I want to be."

The girl in the mirror stared, watching you recite the words, her own lips pressed closed.

"Suffer not the witch to live," she said sharply, when you'd finished. You met her angry stare with her own, and stood your ground.

"The witch lives."

---

Today was important, too important for battles in the mirror. You weren't just Dahlia the Witch, after all, you were Interrogator Hussain of the Odos Hereticus, with the badge and papers to prove it. You weren't an Inquisitor, no, but anyone who challenged you was gambling that your master wouldn't hear of it. While there were plenty of ways to fail upward in the Imperium, there was a basic degree of survival instinct necessary which you were only too happy to exploit.

There was no proper way to be an Interrogator, you knew, no set pattern or curriculum, and if there were then Joanyn Praxis would probably be the last person to follow them. There was nothing unusual about being sent off to some faraway place on a mission whose importance was secret, but it spoke volumes that it was a secret to you.

Few things were; you read minds with uncomfortable ease, without even thinking, the way you couldn't stop yourself from reading the posters at a train station even if you tried. Praxis hardly had the most guarded thoughts, the same skills of empathy and manipulation that made her so good at her job meant her mind was even more open than most, yet whatever this was, she'd sealed it away in the vault of her mind and you'd known better than to pry.

Still, you knew why you were chosen for this mission, besides being her apprentice. Even you, with your natural modesty (self-loathing, self-doubt, self-hate) knew you were ideally suited for it. It was dangerous, yes, more dangerous than anything you'd done before, but you were ready.

---

Spoiler: Vote & Info

What is your mission? Dahlia is, we know, a powerful psyker; that will be her primary statblock. What you're choosing now is her second most powerful, as that is what makes her suited for this mission.




[ ] You're heading to retrieve a data-core from the wreckage of an abandoned Imperial Navy vessel left adrift high above the nearly-forgotten world of Eriad VI. Simple enough, except that the Orks stranded on the planet below have been trying to get aboard as well to escape the planet, and probably already have a presence. Better hurry. (Physical)
[ ] You're making a deep dive into the enormous archives on the Forge World of Core Theta, containing vast reserves of biological research from the earliest days of the Imperium. The Inquisitor has a list of files for you to withdraw; the trick is that the Mechanicus does not know you are coming and absolutely cannot find out. (Mental)
[ ] You're heading to a fancy party at the shrine world of Espandor, supposedly as a high noblewoman from Terra here to scout for alliances in Segmentum Ultima. Of course, you were really there to gather information, verbally or psychically, to confirm or deny the rumours swirling about the sector. (Social)
[ ] You're taking a guided journey down to the lowest levels of the reliquary obscurus of the great City-Cathedral of Eleusis, where the most forbidden, terrible, and cursed artefacts are kept, wrapped securely in a bunker of faith and plasteel. There is a sword there, the foulest, most evil blade imaginable, and you're to have a word with it. (Faith)




This quest will use a refined version of the system used for Suffer Not. Dahlia has five statblocks; Physical, Mental, Social, Faith, and Witch. This choice will also inform what has happened to Dahlia in the past decade; that's a lot of time for her to change.




---




So, why did I suddenly finish Suffer Not and start this?




Because I started collecting Warhammer again. There's sixty Sisters of Battle awaiting the arrival of some new shade paints on the table beside me. I've read the new rulebook and gotten caught up on some of the lore.




And let me tell you.




I have opinions.​

 

[open_sketch]

CW: We're opening with some horrifying descriptions of a canonical Imperial genocide.​

That mission had led you here. Not just to this room, of course, but to the shrine world of Eleusis. It had looked, from orbit, like a beautiful blue pearl, its strong magnetic field making the entire world wave with aurora. In a galaxy of ugly things, it was a miracle. Every world was a miracle.

When you'd descended to the surface, you'd landed in the great city-cathedral that served as Eleusis' capital and shared its name, and the beauty had drained before your eyes. Cities were overwhelming, they were filled with stories, so packed with people that every brick, every grating, every corner held romance and ambition and tragedy and loss. But this city, more than anywhere you'd been since Armageddon, was heavy with it.

Eleusis, like every world in the Jericho Sector, had fallen to the forces of Chaos four thousand of years ago, and had been back in Imperial hands for just two centuries. During that eternity, those loyal to the Imperium had withdrawn into the deepest catacombs of the ancient city, protecting the most sacred artifacts generation after generation. The forces of Chaos had desecrated the surface shrines and temples, hunted down the Imperial survivors, and then…

Four thousand years. The Imperium built things to last, but four thousand years was enough time for every pillar, every brick, every foundation to be remade or paved over a dozen times. The followers of the Dark Gods had made this place theirs. Generations had grown up worshipping them. There had been schools, hospitals, bureaucracy, the mundane woven in seamlessly with the madness. Children grew up carving profane symbols into their skin and communing with daemons, and beneath their feet others lived in the forgotten darkness, worshipping the ruler of a distant, nearly-mythical Empire.

The Imperium retook the world during the Achilus Crusade. They'd burnt the cities from orbit, their facades torn apart, and then three companies of Novamarines and two covenants of the Soritas and six hundred Imperial Guard regiments had come down to the world to deal with the survivors. The underground civilization had risen up to join their long-lost brethren, and a civil war had been fought over the burnt cinders of the cathedrals.

Then, when the war was won, Imperial forces built an enormous facility on the coast, a factory complex with massive blast furnaces. They'd marched every single survivor they found into them, loyalist and heretic alike, and burnt them alive.

As imported populations rebuilt the shrines and cathedrals, it had snowed ashes for over a decade.

You'd smelt the promethium when the ramp of your transport dropped, and it had taken you several minutes to steady yourself. You'd sped through all the greetings and formalities and retreated to the room set aside for you, and you'd had to spend the rest of the day acclimatizing to it, to the taste of ash in the air. It was almost gone now, the last of it washed away by your shower.

You stepped back out into the room, every bare footfall feeling the path tread by thousands of others. This building was new, as Imperial constructions went; eighty years. It was still a lot of footsteps, bearing the mark of priests and scribes and construction overseers who came and went over the years. They were all honoured guests, not important or noble like Cardinals and needing their own estate, but people deemed too important for spaceport cots.

It was luxury most in the Imperium could barely imagine; a hardwood floor, double bed, the only camera at the doorway to record who came and went. There was a vox-singer in a cabinet next to a small table, a bookshelf with a few lonely volumes, and a hearth (the smell of promethium, the taste of ashes) set into the wall. A small servant's area connected through a child-sized door, leading to a simple kitchen, storage room, and suspended canvas mattress.

Finally, in the far corner of the room, there was a shrine. Two great golden wings (aluminium wings anodized gold) stretched out from the niche in the wall, and under them was a platform bearing a book, surface for lighting candles and incense, and a discipline of twelve braided cords, with holy symbols worked into it, for those inclined, which you'd carefully placed with the fireplace tongs into a drawer so grief and guilt poured into it was at least a little distant.

Above the book, recessed in, was a preserved skull, one eye glowing red.

You knelt to pray.

---

[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is grander than this, who wants His servants to bring things back to the way it should be. (Value: Fix problems and ease suffering, wherever you go.)​

[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is disgusted by all this, who finds the evil and hateful people in His Imperium revolting. (Value: Frustrate and bring low the cruel, hateful, and oppressive).​

[ ] You pray to an Emperor who is kinder than this, who is horrified at what His Imperium has become, who weeps for every injustice. (Value: Show mercy and kindness, even when it is unwise.)​

[ ] You pray to an Emperor who hates you, because you hope to change His mind. (Value: Challenge yourself, prove yourself)​

[ ] Write In: Subject to veto.​

​

This is the 42nd Millenium. You worship the Emperor because He is God; He walked among us, it is unquestionable.​

​

But on a million worlds, in a hundred billion churches, there are many Emperors.​

24 Hour Vote Moratorium.​

 

[open_sketch]

It's a little early, but I didn't realize how late I'd posted it. Voting is now open. I recommend everyone read through the discussion first, it's quite interesting.

 

[open_sketch]

Inside your mind, there was a shrine too. It looked like the sun, an impossibly bright wash of golden, perfect light, too intense to stare at, and when you prayed, every shrine became that one in your mind. You bowed your head because the light was too bright, even with your eyes closed, you knelt because the heat was so great it had a weight. You linked your hands and stayed, in that light.

That light had never changed, not in ten thousand years, but what it represented had many times for many people.

You'd been born on a planet which the Inquisitor had called Carpandria Majoris; you'd always just known it as the world, because to you other worlds were an abstraction. Once, it had been a hot, arid world, of deserts and jungles, but the industry of great and distant cities had choked the skies until there was a perpetual cover of grey clouds. The sun there was never bright, never more than a patch of diffused light through the clouds.

Your family had lived next to the great open pit mine on the outskirts of one of those industrial cities; the great metal mountain loomed as an oily smear on the horizon. It was not a hive yet as the Imperium would see it, but it was still vast and terrible, a machine which chewed the bodies of workers, their blood spilling as grease between its teeth, its belly producing steel and ash, always hungry, desperately hungry.

While nobody had said it, long ago, generations ago, your ancestors had been nomads hunting and ranching in the rich lands to the south. The Emperor they had worshipped, whose spirit clung to the handful of heirlooms which the old clutched in trembling hands, was a giant astride the world, a father and leader who could teach all there was to know about the land and that within it, his throne every mountaintop and his kingdom every field. But then the land died and they'd settled and begun salvaging its corpse for pennies from the citydwellers.

Their Emperor was dead too. They still mourned.

In His place was the Emperor of the City, His throne in the highest tower, and that was the Emperor the preacher of the town brought with him. He was foreign to your people, spoke a foreign tongue and of foreign things, but everyone clung to his words as a balm, like a drunk to an empty bottle.

When you pictured his Emperor, sitting on your mother's lap in the steel pews and doing your best to stay quiet even when everyone else would talk and talk with lips closed, you saw the light, and with it everything. The world was wondrous, because you didn't understand the horrors, and the Emperor was wonder itself.

Then you had grown old enough to understand his words, and the wonder faded. The Emperor of the City, above all, hated; He hated heretics, mutants, daemons, xenos. He hated disobedience, backtalk, and idleness. He hated the land for hiding metal, the seas for their salt, the forests for not yet being lumber. He wanted everything, and hated that it was held from Him by the need for the work and care of others.

And he hated witches most of all, because a witch could not help loving the world.

They called your power psychometry, to measure things with your soul. It was a common power for psykers in the Imperium, almost incidental; it was the connections that allowed Astropaths to transmit messages, which let the leashed sanctionites of the Arbites scan a crime scene, how force weapons grew in power with every owner. It meant everything you touched, you saw the history of, the forces of, you touched tenderly the face of everyone whose hands it had passed through. You could see the land in the metal, the water in the salt, the forests in lumber, and that was a sin.

When your parents realized what you were hearing, who you were, you stopped going to church, you stopped helping sort the slag at the entrance of the mine with the other children. You 'took sick', they said, though no doctor ever saw you, and you spent the next four years never leaving home, shrouded more often than not in blankets to isolate you from your siblings. You could feel the conflict in your parents when they did it, the love tempered by revulsion, the desperate hope that maybe one day it would simply stop and they'd have their eldest daughter back, and you understood. You hated yourself too, for how much it pained them.

A rumour came through the town that an Inquisitor was coming, to inspect the mine, and it brought with it a frenzy of preparation. The preacher from the city had built a pry, dragging to it the strange and workshy and those clinging to old ways, and you'd left home and asked for a place. Hands had torn away your undersized rags, hot metal had touched your neck, and then…

The Inquisitor had arrived, and had you cut down along with the rest. Berated the preacher for breaching some forgotten rule, lied and bluffed and taken you away, onto her transport, to the City. You thought for sure you were bound for the Black Ships you'd heard of, to painful oblivion, and she'd entered the room and seen another Emperor for the first time.

Inquisitor Praxis' Emperor was small, and quiet, and she did not hear Him often. He was abstract, nearly absent, a distant figure of myth and history. But His works lived in her minds, at all times, as she pictured the universe around her, the vast machines of misery. Hers was the Emperor of the City, but one distraught by the blood, despairing at the poison, the machine-spirit of the great trillion-person device crying out to be soothed. She saw herself as a sort of enginseer of society, and you were a problem to be fixed.

You didn't accept it at first, but slowly you began to see her Emperor instead of the one who hated you. Slowly you accepted that you had a part in that machine, that you were not a broken piece, that you could fit, if the machine was built better. Slowly. You even met somebody who never even gave your abilities a second though, and though you'd known him for just a scant few weeks you still thought sometimes of Leonus and his effortless kindness.

Then Cadia. The Black Crusade. The Inquisitor had met with a High Lord of Terra, and had come out changed. Slowly, over years, she came to see a new Emperor, and you'd seen Him too. That was the Emperor you knelt before now.

Yours was the Emperor of the toppled throne.

---

The catacombs of the City-Cathedral were entered through a perversely familiar structure, more like a mineshaft now than an archway, worn and broken by years of violence. You were taken there by a groundcar covered in Ecclesiastical symbols, sitting quietly in the back seat, drawn inward, and sat in council with yourself, meeting their eyes in the window.

Your power saw the histories of things and people near you, especially that which you touched, and you could not help but touch your own mind at all times. You lived in an endless recursion with yourself, side-by-side with every moment you'd ever lived, your past peering in on your present and, more often than not, voicing opinion. There were millions of you, just as much as there was only one of you, and you heard their clamouring opinions as they passed judgement on your decision and helped with your plans.

Despite their multitude, you'd grouped them, roughly. There was you now, and those close enough. Dahlia the Witch, twenty-something, acolyte of the Inquisition, strong and righteous and worthy. There was Dahlia the Brave, in her late teens and early twenties usually, emerging from her shell, learning to care for herself, to love herself, to stand up for what she believed. There was Dahlia the Guilty, dragged off the pyre, a teenager sometimes but just as often a fearful, hateful shadow of yourself, and then, sometimes, that child-self who saw wonder. All of them had opinions; you couldn't so much as dress yourself in the morning without them weighing in.

----

Your top stats are Psychic and Faith, let's sort the others. Make a plan vote and choose…


Your best stat…
[ ] You wore light flakweave under your dress, a webbing belt and weapons displayed. (Physical+)
[ ] You wore a simple and comfortable dress, and carried with you a satchel for your data-slate and notebooks (Mental+)
[ ] You wore a beautiful, artful dress, the fashion timeless. Fairly modest, but still striking. (Social+)


Your worst stat…
[ ] Your shoes are just slips, easy to take on and off, soft and comfortable, but ill-suited to running (Physical-)
[ ] You have no pockets; you lament their absence, but never get around to fixing it (Mental-)
[ ] Your dress has a hood, and you retreat into it when things get too much. (Social-)


Do you cover your brand?
[ ] Yes. The collar is high and obscures it. No point in antagonising them.
[ ] No. The collar is low enough that all can see it. Let them stare.​

 

[open_sketch]

It was the dress. When you'd started gaining a modicum of confidence again, when you were Dahlia the Brave, you shed the oversized tunics you'd worn for years as a shield (hands pulling away rags) and experimented with clothing. It was hard; the idea that one should be humble above all beat into your brain, but it was such a sick thing to ask. Your family had had nothing, nothing, and every week the preacher would warn them against excess. What excess? What bounty was there to envy?

Let them be envious! Let them want, let them seethe! To see a child of the mines wearing its gold! Dahlia the Brave made some fashion decision that in retrospect were perhaps ill-considered, but she'd shoved down that demand for redundant humility and made it small, and now you dressed yourself in the finest silks your stipend could fetch and looked down your nose at the pale noblewomen whose blood and treasure couldn't buy them style, whose world you walked into and out of at will.

Dahlia the Guilty protested every morning, screamed her displeasure, back once again to that first party and first dress and her mindless panic at the possibility she might look in the mirror and love what she saw, but you soothed her quiet with visions of her future, that you'd surpassed the ancient Terran princesses of her stories.

The car rolled to a stop, chain-tracks squealing against the steel, and you carefully opened the door and set foot down on the flagstone sidewalk. There were people coming, a priest in red and white and gold flanked by a little procession, not the least of which were two Sororitas in their brilliant red power armour. You pushed your hair back and held your head high, your Inquisitorial seal at your sternum the perfect accessory to the brand on your neck above.

You saw their eyes track to it, even those behind the crimson helms, felt their disgusted, revelled in it. Felt the words branded just as sharply into their brains and rejoiced. Suffer it!

"Deacon Eisexel," you greeted as he approached, holding out a hand to shake the way one would an equal. He recoiled physically, but his eyes fell to your seal and he simply tucked his hands into the sleeves of his robes, and you felt the slow horror rolling through his brain as he tried to determine if you'd been told his name beforehand or you'd plucked it from his mind. It had been in your briefing, of course.

"I-interrogator. Your mistress made clear the importance of your mission. Do you have an escort?"

"They'll be coming to meet me in two hours, but I'll be doing this part alone," you said. He nodded stiffly, understanding the meaning; he'd best not harm you, because he'd be held to account.

"This way, please."

You followed the man through the arches of a half-built temple and down through the hole torn in the world, urban strata around you as you descended. In the cracks you could see into long-forgotten rooms, the air drifting through carrying snippets of stories. Some touched by the taint of the Enemy, for all their mundanity, and others a mix of ancient life and hidden fear. Once or twice, you thought you felt a presence moving nearby, following your footfalls by the vibration in their hiding places, but you couldn't be sure.

The journey took you, eventually, to a modern elevator which had been installed in an ancient shaft, and you rode that down through the last levels of catacombs and into the earth of the world proper, down below to the deepest vaults on the planet. Even during the thousands of years of occupation, the chambers below had been guarded and secreted, by generations of orders of Sororitas, knights, sworn secret-keepers, each taking over as the previous retreated into ancient myth, all guarding what they knew was a terrible darkness. The forces of Chaos had torn at this world looking, and had never found it.

The most unholy things were secreted in the holiest of places. This world was a prison built of faith and fire and steel and blood, to contain the foulest relics of the Eastern Reaches. And one above all.

The latest guardians of the tomb were Sororitas of the Order of the Bloody Rose, and their counterparts in the Order of the Eternal Gate, an Order Pronatus which tended to artefacts. The door to the vault was guarded by six enormous silhouettes, armour within armour, swords larger than you were crackling with barely contained power. Inside were more doors, layers on layers of protection, each a darker place.

The artefacts you passed near called out to you, desperate, needy, touching your mind with their foul histories. A book of hissing, twisted words which had robbed the minds of its readers (they burnt into the eyes, into the brain, you couldn't stop reading), a vial of blood from an active daemonhost (this isn't me, I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry-), an autopistol that chanted the names of its master's victims (Eawynn, she screamed and screamed! Haya, fell like a puppet with strings cut! Ardith, so beautiful, I preserved her-) and you were perversely grateful when the Sororitas pulled ahead to walk at your flank. The pure purpose of their minds sort of… blocked it all out. Yes, they hated, yes, they wanted you dead, but in a familiar, almost comforting sort of way.

Each door was thicker and more elaborate than the last, carved deep with symbols and wards from a hundred generations of craftsmen. Each door was also older than the last, like walking back through Imperial history. The fleur de lis and Inquisitorial seals gave way to sharp-angled wings and skulls, and before them to thunderbolts and an elaborate, upswept Palatine Aquillia. That door took several minutes to open, its grinding mechanisms labouring to do so for only the thirty-fifth time in ten thousand years.

The sisters around you, numbering now two dozen, raised their bolters in unison toward the open crack of the door.

Inside there was a stone slab, a metre thick, which raised slowly on ancient, grinding hydraulics, and you stepped under it to look into the cavity under it. There, in a hollow perhaps two feet tall and half as deep, resting on the bare stone, was a sword. It looked wrong, ill-proportioned, its handle too big; it would be an arming sword in the hands of a mortal man but it looked almost like a knife for a giant. It had a short curve to the blade, and the cutting tip was a chipped, blunt ruin, like somebody had used it to cut through stone. For all that, it was a simple, modest thing, unadorned, just a loop of metal with a small nub of a crossguard. The handle's wrapping was long gone, leaving just a steel tang.

You stepped a little closer, aware of the enormous weight of rock hovering just above your head, which would be dropped if anything was amiss. It was warm here, warming than the rest of the room, unnaturally humid in the dry vault. You knelt down next to the hollow, the temperature rising, and reached as close as you'd dare to the blade.

You saw, for a moment, the face of its makers, faint from the millenia but preserved by isolation. There'd been two of them, secluded deep in a ship travelling the warp to an unknown destination. They were the third generation on the vessel, and the first aware that something had changed since launch, that they no longer served the lightning bolt and aquilia, that their masters had new masters. They'd made this blade alongside six others, and taken great care, knowing who it was for.

The knives had then been taken by a great man, a Captain who held his private reservations for a century, who dreamed momentarily of taking the knife and plunging it into its intended bearer, to take back an honour he had abandoned for friends now long dead. He thought better of it.

They were placed in armour which bore so much of its wearer that you could feel it even second-hand, a corrupt self-obsession which momentarily transfixed you with a vision of indistinct perfection, and the rage that accompanied it, the limitations of mortal reality which prevented the transcendence the being truly chased. And behind it, just for a moment, you heard a small voice, a child's voice, calling for help.

You drew your hand away from the knife of Fulgrim the Phoenician, took a deep breath, and reached out again to touch the blade.

---

Our first roll of the quest! Here's what we're doing differently from last time; you do not have to do any kind fo wager; you can buy new dice after the roll is made and keep rolling until you succeed, you just face the escalating costs of doing so. That also means you can roll using the SV system, so you can roll one at a time until you get the result you want… facing costs to do so.




Our first roll here is a Hard Reading check, one of your psychic stats. That means to succeed, you need to score 2 successes of 8+ on d10s, with 12+ scoring 2 successes.




Fortunately this is your greatest strength; you have 5+ (your Reading is 4 and you have the Psychometry speciality).




Whoever rolls first gets to decide how many d10s are rolled and when to stop; I recommend you roll them one at a time. For more important future rolls, we will have subvotes to limit costs. More dice means higher costs; every dice past the first costs 1 Harm, and every result equal to or lower than the number of dice rolled is also 1 Harm.​

 

[open_sketch]

The metal was hot to the touch, slick under your fingers, like touching the side of a hot kettle. You willed your fingers to stay and read what was there.

The blade was not possessed, or haunted, or cursed. It was not made of special materials, not carved from the bones of some great beast or forged by strange xenos with forgotten technology. It didn't crackle with strange energies or hum with power. The poison which had once coated the blade had been scoured off and nothing now remained. It was just a sharp slip of steel.

But that's not all it was. It was nestled in a web of perception, which imbued it with a special kind of power. This whole place was built to contain it, out of revulsion and horror for what it had done. The Enemy had descended to this world looking for it, so great was the prize. Millions of people over thousands of years had bound this steel up in webs of thought and feeling until it came to reflect what was put into it, until its psychic shadow had cast into the materium, all bound up around one connection in particular.

This was the blade which had slit the throat of Roboute Guilliman. The blade by which Fulgrim had spilt his brother's blood. That connection held to this day, a metaphysical line which bound the two of them together, and you could see it. One line disappearing into the violent eddies of the warp, and the last…

Everyone knew that the Primarch Guilliman lay in stasis on Macragge, held at the brink of death, a mirror of the Golden Throne in miniature. There was rumour from pilgrims, always rumour, that the wound was healing, slowly sealing over the millenia, but that was not how stasis worked. Time was frozen, a portion of the universe removed from its flow, nothing could change. The dim light which reached the eyes of pilgrims was a projection, light scattering off light which had frozen at the edge of the field. That preservation is what kept the link between this blade and the demigods it had connected so strong.

But this connection was not frozen. The wound was not open. The connection, imperceptible, was fading.

You withdrew your fingers and sat back. You were sweating, the exertion having crept up on you. Your heart was pounding, ears ringing. You stood and walked out from under the creaking stone.

"Is it done?" Deacon Eisexel asked. You nodded.

"Yes. I have the information my mistress needs," you responded. The first part of your mission here was complete. "Your cooperation is noted; you have done the Imperium a great service."

You began to move toward the door, but your way was blocked by a wall of golden shields. An older woman behind one thrust a hand between them, holding a golden aquilia on a chain. It radiated power; a saint had once worn it around her neck, in her final hours, and there was a world full of temples dedicated to her serenity and joyful sacrifice.

"Touch it," the woman ordered. You put two fingers to it and heard a young woman crying out for mercy, felt her fingers around the metal go limp as the shadow of her memory tried to cling to your mind. "Speak the first verse of the Lectio Divinitatus."

"Gaude, quia nuntium gloriosum tibi affero. Deus adest," you responded automatically. She asked you to open your mouth, and stared at your tongue.

"Go, witch," she snarled. You pushed past her for the entrance of the vault, out of this awful place.

---

Spoiler: Voting

Your mission here is, technically, complete, once you report back to the Inquisitor, but you have a feeling this world isn't done with you yet. Your companions will be vital to finishing the work here.




Firstly, you have an assistant, a close second who you have become fast friends with. They remind you of yourself.
[ ] Seth, formerly a Scout Marine in the Gate Wardens chapter. His ascension to full Space Marine halted by a genetic anomaly, the Inquisitor took him on as a ward. He is young, impulsive, and brave to a fault.
[ ] Vira Reineiss, once a Repentia of the Order of the Last Candle who the Inquisitor requisitioned the service of. Left to die of her wounds, the Inquisitor rescued her against her will.
[ ] Castallya Solaali, once a stormtrooper of the Tempestus Scions, she was placed in a penal unit for charges of degenerate behaviour and ended up catching the Inquisitor's eye for her talents.
[ ] Write In (a person of similar age to Dahlia, and fallen from an honoured position in the Imperium).




Secondly, you have you specialist, a less-attached but still vital part of your group shoring up a weakness. Their loyalty is perhaps questionable; their skills are not.
[ ] Arkhan Mabez, enginseer who came to Praxis' service from the shattered remains of the Cadian regiment he was once attached to. Brilliant, sour-tempered, and constantly on the verge of tech-heresy.
[ ] Rhonda Wienu, an administrator whose corruption was so widespread it was equal parts despicable and impressive. Praxis recruited her as an alternate to her well-deserved execution, to put her skills to use.
[ ] Ishmael Skaldric, a cutthroat assassin who had been sent to kill the Inquisitor by one of her rivals. After Marvel-Ann blew off both his legs with a Phosphor Serpenta, he was forcefully recruited.
[ ] Write In (a shady character with important skills)




Finally, you have your minder. Technically they follow your orders, but in reality they are assessing you for the Inquisitor… and keeping you safe for Sister Charitina, who will probably kill them if you get hurt.
[ ] Dremell, an Ogyrn bodyguard formerly of the Imperial Guard who Praxis hired to be your bodyguard. He is immensely protective. Perhaps overly so.
[ ] Janetta Lovero, underhive guide turned Inquisitorial enforcer. While her husband stayed behind with the dogs, she accompanied you to ensure anyone who attempted to interfere had a very, very bad day.
[ ] Zodalos Xi-5, a Skittarri Ranger whose obedience protocols were reprogrammed by Marvel Ann during a job. He is unflinchingly loyal to his orders, to the letter, and his first is to not let you come to harm.
[ ] Write In (Somebody who won't let you have any fun)​

​

​

 

[open_sketch]

Waiting at the roadside was the sleek, black gravcar which the Inquisitor had lent you for the mission, which she'd done with a practiced casualness that belied the immense trust inherent in the gesture. The Inquisitor was not given to material sentiment; objects were to be requisitioned when needed and given away when not, just things to serve a purpose. The car was one of a very small number of exceptions.

As an Inquisitor, Praxis didn't feel the sweat poured into coin. She could spend it like breathing, not that she had to. She had to reach back decades to remember when food needed money, money needed work, and work needed food. She tried to force herself to remember, to put herself back in the place of a juvie in Hive Tempestora on the waiting rolls for factory work, but it grew ever-more abstract and with it things ever-more were simply things, all the social forces regulating them overruled by dint of her office.

But there were things she valued. Gifts she could never requisition, things she still needed to earn. Her inquisitorial icon, though she still thought of as belonging to another. The sonic machete that Marvel-Ann had arranged for her to take from a Mechanicus forge, patterned after the home-forged knives of the plantation workers and, to her, both a romantic keepsake and a statement of purpose. And a belt-buckle gun, which you'd touched once and felt such overriding loss that you'd spent the rest of the day in bed, the only tangible object left from a man whose story she'd never told you and which was too painful for her to even think.

Of these, the car was simply a car, but her handing you the keys was so momentous the moment had seemed to warp space and time around it, heavy like a black hole.

And then, like the enormous idiot you were, you'd given the keys to Castallya Solaali, and immediately regretted it upon seeing her smile. That same smile was plastered on her face now, as she waved to you, standing up in the driver's seat and getting her soldier's boots all over the flawless leather interior, while simultaneously introducing the altar boy waiting by the stairs to some interesting new vocabulary painted onto her carapace.

"Dahl! How'd it go!" her voice, deep and joyful, carried easily over the sacred silence of the cathedral front. "Have a fun time, didja?"

Your face lit up, somewhat in spite of itself. You could be a little gloomy, even you could admit it, but you couldn't help but smile around Cass. This was, of course, hardly a universal opinion of the woman; most people quite plainly thought she was loud or annoying or perhaps degenerate, but after a lifetime of fitting into other people's boxes in the Schola Progenium Cass had graduated far beyond caring a whit for what anyone else thought. Normally, this sort of attitude got you killed, but if you happened to display it in near enough proximity to Inquisitor Praxis, it got you a job.

"Great, wonderful. They were very friendly," you assured her, as she effortlessly leaned over to pop the side door and push it open. In another life, Cass was the very model of a perfect Stormtrooper; six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, chiselled features, ready-made for her marble statue after her inevitable glorious martyrdom. In this life, however, she'd been shuffled off into a penal battalion after being caught stealing.

From her commanding officer's quarters. A dress intended for her commanding officer's wife. Which she had been wearing when they took her in.

"Where's everyone else?" you asked, and Cass shrugged, jamming her finger on the ignition and shifting gears with the sort of confident carelessness that characterised all her mistakes.

"Our scribe said she was chasing down something important, and I may have left the big guy behind after telling him I'd be a minute," she said, as the car rose up off the street and toward the spires, the engine warbling. "So! You get a word with the Sisters, then?"

"I'm afraid they're still not taking transfers from their brothers in the Scions, even when those brothers are sisters," you joked, leaning back into the plush seat and shutting your eyes as the city rose up around you, the scaffolding of enormous steeples and half-finished vaunted roofs reaching for the heavens. Light from the morning sun glinted off golden tiles and marble gargoyles and the sweat of the builders, flooding the streets like a liquid poured over the world. "Look at this place!"

"It's pretty, I'll say that for it," Cass said, then she spit over the side of the door. "Wasted though. Who's gonna get a view like us? Not none of them down there, huh?"

Cass was still midway through what the Inquisitor called her political education, but she'd fought through the slums of a hive city and retaken rural settlements abandoned to the enemy for cost saving. She caught on quick to the general attitude in the retinue.

"This could be housing, or factories. Or hell, farms, like them vertical farms on San Leor, could feed the planet with plenty to spare," she added. It was a bit forced; she was trying to show she was learning.

"It could still be cathedrals," you said quietly. "But because people wanted them."

She nodded solemnly, strangely quiet for a moment, then she broke back into that stupid smile.

"Nah, it'll be gambling dens and chem-halls," she said confidently. "You know the rabble."

"Joygirl's paradise," you confirmed. "Decadence and sin as far as the eye can see."

"Speakin' of decadence, if we're done-" she began, but there was a crackle from the vox mounted above the glovebox which cut her off. She slowed the car and dipped into the wind-shadow of a mighty steeple, sheltered behind an eagle's wing, as you plucked the mouthpiece and clicked transmit.

"This is Seraphim, go," you responded. There was a brief pause.

"Seraphim, this is Ravenwing. We have a problem," the voice on the other side, an older woman's voice, said. Rhonda Wienu, part of your retinue. Vaguely, nearly lost in the static, were lower, angry tones, somebody bellowing in rage. "Do not, repeat, do not return to your quarters. Fall back to secondary rally point."

"What's going on?" you asked, dropping the pretence of vox discipline, and the headset squealed.

"An old friend dropped by, we got a tip-off through customs control," she said. "They're probably already at your door. Fly low."

The implication of that statement was clear; they might have already gotten to the PDF, which meant they might have control over the Hydra and Manticore batteries around the city. They could swat you out of the air with contemptuous ease; the streets were your ally.

"Cass, get us to the fallback point, stay under the rooftops," you ordered, and her jokey demeanour disappeared in an instant, replaced with the stormtrooper. She thumbed the controls to raise the roof and put the car in a steep drop toward the streets, nearly skimming the edges of the scaffolding.

You popped your glovebox and reached inside.

---

Other than her webber, what weapon does Dahlia carry for self-defence? Keep in mind; Dahlia is about five foot even.
[ ] Write In a Warhammer 40k sidearm, ranged or melee. Vetos may be in effect for particularly egregious options.




Where is your secondary fallback point?
[ ] A cafe in the shopping arcade in the Talons, an upscale region for clergy and visiting dignitaries. The upscale public surroundings limits overt options, but it being well-guarded may be a double-edged sword right now.
[ ] A construction site at the edge of the city which was originally supposed to be worker's housing, which was abandoned mid-construction to redirect resources toward temples behind schedule. Excellent cover and out of the way, but also nothing preventing a foe from bringing real force.
[ ] The rooftop garden of Bishop Lyrzike, a quiet supporter of Praxis' who has offered you safe haven. While you'll have the protection of his estate and guard, if something goes wrong you may implicate one of the Inquisitor's most powerful supporters at a critical time.​

 

[open_sketch]

Your fingers wrapped around the handle of a weapon, and instantly you felt an unnatural sense of calm wash over you, like you'd dipped your hand in warm water. The slinger pistol was a smooth, fluted object, bone-white, with a flat cylindrical disc in its centre and a flat slit for a muzzle. It was a comforting void of memories, retaining only the warmth of its caring creator and the protectiveness which its giving had expressed. It did not remember blood.

You ran your thumb gently against the small pink gem near the handle, and it whistled like a wet finger rang along the edge of a glass.

The gravcar dove through alleys, skirting the edge of rooftops and ducking under balconies as Cass opened the engine,

"Not the street, they'll take it out first," you warned. "There, the roof, there's an alcove, we'll take the stairs down."

"I don't like it," Cass said. "Stay low, just in case."

You sank under the edge of the door as the car descended, cradling the pistol to keep hold of its calm. The buildings grew around you until they were giants, and then there was a grinding sound as the legs touched down. Cass stood up in her seat, scanning with her hand on her holster, then she indicated for you to move and reached back over the seat into the back, pulling out a great travelling case and slinging it over her shoulder.

The two of you proceeded down the stairs, Cass close to your side and steadying you with a hand on your elbow, filling your head with lines of sight and sniper positions and ricochet risk. You tucked your pistol away in your handbag as you came around the corner and ducked into the alcove of the café, claiming a small table in the corner, recessed in the shadows, with view of the square beyond.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…" Cass muttered to herself, pushing you into the corner and sitting so her body covered as much of you as possible from the square. You pushed back against that, as firmly as you could.

"You're not my bodyguard," you corrected, and she chuckled grimly.

"Better me take the bullet for you than the other way around, Dahl," she said firmly. "Wouldn't even slow down, hitting you. You good?"

"Yeah," you said, keeping a hand inside your handbag under the table, fingers on the handle of the pistol. A bright young woman in a modest, shapeless blue dress came up to take your orders, and Cass sent her off for a pot of recaff, doing a very bad job not looking nervous.

"How long until the others get here?" she asked.

"Thirty minutes," you said. "I don't know if they'll be here first. She knows about the car, they'll be coming. We just had to get out of the air."

"Fuck!" Cass repeated, partially unzipping the lid of the luggage. "How did she find us?"

"I don't know," you confessed. "The tarot, maybe, she has seers."

Cass forced a smile back on her face to take the pot of recaff, for the sake of the girl, and tipped her a whole golden throne with instructions to take the rest of her shift off, now. She scampered out of the way just in time for a black half-track car to roll up to the edge of the square and a familiar man to get out. Somebody on the street pointed him toward the cafe.

"Gerhart," you muttered. Cass laughed nervously. "Of course."

The man was tall, dressed in a long black coat, his arms wrapped in long, flowing strips of wax-sealed parchment. Chains ran from his pockets and off his coat, rattling with every step, and the protruding handles of a pair of long-barreled pistols jutted forward from his shoulder holstered. He was smoking, stringy black hair wreathed with smoke, and behind him fell in a quartet of men in black robes, their faces hidden with bright red masks.

"Come out, Witch!" he cried. "I just want to talk!"

Cass reached into the luggage, steadying herself. You put a steadying hand on her shoulder and saw the men as a squad, leader, enforcer, burner, and flanker, saw her choose to sweep left-to-right, saw all the targets behind she'd be hitting. People were already scattering, but not everyone understood what was happening yet.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," she was muttering, screaming silently that you were alone, vulnerable, the absence of her old squad felt so keenly it rasped against her heart. But it was giving way to a chant inside, one that smoothed everything out, as the hellgun warmed in the bag below the table. Not today, not today, not today, not today-

"What does he want, he's not just here to kill us, he'd have burnt us out already…" Cass said, her breathing steadying. Through her eyes, you saw the layers between you and your opponents; the dark recess of the café interior, the niche corner your table was backed against preventing a shot from the street, the three support pillars at the open facade which could provide cover, the two low planters outside that the enemy could dash behind. The door to the kitchen was about three metres away, but you'd need to dash into the open. There were maybe a half-a-dozen people still inside, too terrified or confused to run.

"He wants me alive, I think. Weapons?"

"Autoguns, hand flamer on the little guy to the right, mauls I think," Cass rattled off. "Why does he want you?"

"Judgement's coming, witch! Fifteen seconds!"

"He wants to know where the Inquisitor is," you summarised. "Things have escalated." You swallowed, trying to cast your mind along the strings of the future, but it was still too muddled, like always, to know what would happen. "Cass, if I don't make it, the Inquisitor needs to know that-" You paused, considering euphemistic language before settling on something more direct. "-That the Primarch Guilliman has returned."

"What?" she responded.

"Time's running out, little witch! Ten, nine-"

---

He is here to capture you, though you do not think he will much mind failing to take you alive. He will kill Cass. The past ten years are catching up, little witch, no time to reflect on the mistakes that lead you here.

[ ] Write In: His Mistress has her reasons, but why does he hate you, personally?
[ ] Write In: What do you do?

 

[open_sketch]

Dahlia Hussain
Inquisitorial Interrogator​

Physical​	Mental​	Social​	Faith​	Psychic​
Strength: 0 Agility: 0 Dexterity: 1	Awareness: 0 World Knowledge: 2 Analytics: 1	Charisma:2 Contacts: 1 Empathy: 1	Devotion: 2 Doctrine: 2 Community: 1	Sensing: 3 Suggestion: 2 Manipulation: 0
Harm: 0/1 XP:0	Harm: 0/3 XP:0	Harm: 2/4 XP:0	Harm: 2/5 XP:0	Harm: 0/5 XP: 0

Skills:
- Imperial Psyker +2

- Object Reader
- Mind Reader​

- Spy +1
- Historian +1

- Old Terra​

Weapons:
- Knife
- Web Pistol
- Eldar Slinger Pistol

 

[open_sketch]

You put your other hand to the wall behind you, to steady yourself, take on an aspect of the fine-hewn stone. You felt just a shadow of the thousands who had sat here, leaned against this wall, privileged people with their business deals and courtship and petty little talk, and the servants which had moved around them over the years, walking the same steps over and over, invisible desire paths carved against the flagstones.

"Cass, we're going to move," you said quiet. "I know the way."

"... three, two-"

You pushed yourself to your feet at the same time that Cass flipped the heavy steel table over with one hand, the other drawing out the enormous mass of her hellgun and sweeping it toward the figures outside. They all immediately dropped to the floor as she jammed her finger on the trigger, her eyes closed. The entire café turning blood-red from the overlapping lasers, the air screaming and filling with the scent of ozone.

She hit nothing, of course, the shots scattering and skipping off the floor, but they ducked, and you moved. She was right behind you, the power pack in one hand and the smoldering weapon in the other, the heat at your back as you turned and ran through into the kitchen. There were the cooks, backs to you, pressed against the wall in terror.

"Behind," you muttered unthinkingly, following the footsteps of a thousand serving girls who'd walked this path before you. There was an obvious door at the far end of the kitchen, that was obvious, they'd have people there. Instead, you turned toward what looked like a closet, pulling at the door.

"Dahl?"

"The lock," you gasped, fighting against barely-controlled panic and adrenaline. She shrugged the power pack over her shoulder, flipping her las-glasses on, and she indicated for you to look away. There was a pulse of heat, and you felt the pride of an apprentice locksmith's first installation in a real building melt away into red-hot slag, and then cracking apart as Cass kicked hard.

"Open," she announced, and you pushed through. There was a staircase, leading down. "Dahlia, where are we?"

"The passages here are used to quietly bring food to the convent across the street," you explained, descending the stairs as quickly as you could. "It's an old deal."

"Are we going there?" she asked, and you shook your head.

"No, they won't like me. There are other passages," you said. "They'll be after us, but we can lose them."

You reached the bottom landing and found yourself in a tunnel, the sort of maintenance space which was used, but not well-used. Lights flickered on weakly at your passage, clicking off behind you. You came to a junction of two passages and very deliberately turned away from the footsteps of the busboys sneaking food (and themselves) to the Sororitas, following instead the weaker and more infrequent paths of the enginseer's apprentices and their servitors as they walked their beat, checking on the plumbing and electrical systems of the buildings above.

"Why is it always Gerhart? Doesn't she have other acolytes?" Cass asked, easily keeping pace despite walking backward with her hellgun held out. "It's always him."

"It's personal for him," you explained. "He's the son of a Rogue Trader, one of the ones we screwed at Capella."

"Oh," Cass responded. "That'd do it."

It had been the perfect moment; Praxis had tracked down a conspiracy of Rogue Traders overstepping their bounds, engaging in the smuggling of an almost unbelievable quantity of tech both heretical and xenos in origin through the hive world of Capella and pulling a profit whose numbers could buy worlds. She was fully in her rights to shut it down and confiscate their ill-gotten wealth from the endeavour, earnings her faction desperately needed, but they hadn't gone quietly. It hadn't made you or her any friends.

Gerhart had become a thorn in your side soon after, the perfect lapdog for his mistress with a ship and crew at his beck and call. The man was very much his father's second son; not standing to inherit the charter, he'd found religion in the sort of way that got people like you killed. Nearly had; this was the third time.

You turned down another junction and paused, touching the wall carefully. The footsteps were growing older, less frequent, less confident. People didn't come here on purpose anymore.

"Dremell will be coming, right?" Cass asked. "He's going to walk right into them, fuck…"

"He can take care of himself. We just have to live until then," you said. Cass put an arm out to stop you, hissing to be quiet, and you waited a moment in the flickering half-light.

There were footsteps, distant, echoing through the catacombs.

---

[ ] Find a place to lay an ambush, where you can hold them until backup arrives.
[ ] Find a route back to the surface, and hope to lose your pursuers in the city.
[ ] Find a route deeper into the catacombs, where you can hide and double back.
[ ] Write In​