Hey quick heads up; this chapter includes Dahlia looking back on her teenaged self kissing a boy. She was 17 and he was 16 at the time, but for the sake of writing an authentic scene with a telepath, I do acknowledge that teenagers do, in fact, have sex drives. There's nothing explicit, just implication and fumbling flirtation. I'm including this warning so it doesn't catch anyone by surprise.
Your hand settled on the latch and pushed, the heavy steel door creaking on its hinges. You stepped out into a grey room, harshly lit under screaming white lights. Only the lingering humidity betrayed the tropical world beyond the walls. The room was divided by a low barrier, and far down the hall, on clanking chains, were arms for holding parchment targets. A table was stacked high with ammunition and firearms.
You knew, from experience reading them, that this was not how dreams or memories worked for blunts. It was also not how they worked from the sanctioned psykers you'd encountered, but you were not surprised. You did not know exactly what happened to them on Terra, because they themselves couldn't remember anything but fragments. Those fragments were enough.
You suspected that this was not, really, your memories. It was the connections you made, to the souls in all things, they were like anchors. Not everything, of course, but important moments, critical moments, meaningful moments. Here in your dreams, when the mind became unmoored from the material just that little bit more, you could grasp them.
There were three figures in the room. The one closest to you, having just come through the door, was a woman with pale skin, wearing simple black robes, her hood drawn back to expose the short bob cut of bright red hair. Her body was just starting to show the first signs of ageing that rejuv could not hold, creating a strange contrast between her youthful freckles and the wrinkles starting to show around her eyes.
At the table was another woman. Her skin was dark, her head haloed in black hair, a pen left absent-mindedly behind her ear. She was wearing a simple black tunic and white fatigue pants, appropriated from the local military. Her mechanical arm whirred as she shuffled through the weapons on the table.
"Alright, Dahlia, come over here," Joanyn Praxis asked without looking.
In the corner of the room, sitting on a small stool, a young woman stood up. She walked toward the table, her eyes cast downward to the floor, hands together meekly. She looked much the same as you did now, but if anything she seemed
older, what little of her face you could see was worn with so much worry and exhaustion and fear. She took a moment to sweep the long length of hair from her eyes.
"Alright, Dahlia, before we start, we're going to go over a few things, okay?" she said, her voice soft, soothing. Young Dahlia stopped by the table, her head still pointed down, wringing her hands, but her eyes jumped to the guns with excitement. "Firstly, why we're teaching you this. I know you want more responsibility on our missions, you want to make yourself more useful. If you're going to do that, you're going to be able to take care of yourself if things go wrong. We might not always be there to protect you, you understand?"
Dahlia's eyes locked to the floor again, her face screwed up.
"Y-yes, Lady Inquisitor," she stammered. The Inquisitor sighed.
"Having a psyker I can count on to work by my side would be extremely helpful, and I know with time and practice that can be you. Learning to protect yourself means one less thing for us to worry about."
Dahlia glanced up, nodding. An unfamiliar look of confidence spread through her, her spine straightening, shoulders back.
"What do I do?"
"First... you listen to Sister Charitina talk about safety," Praxis replied, gesturing, and Charitina stepped forward, propping herself up on an elbow against the table in a way she hoped look serious.
"A gun is a great and holy thing. It can destroy the alien, turn back evil, protect the innocent, and preserve your life. But when the first gun was forged by the first gunsmith, tens of thousands of years ago, it was not made to do any of those things."
You walked to the table, ignored by all three of them, and ran your hand over the weapons. You got to fire all of them, before the end of the day, and you had your favourites.
"It was made to kill another human being. To this day, that is what the firearm excels at, and if you forget this, it will remind you."
You plucked the laspistol off the table, weighing it in your hands. You'd lost this gun three years ago, forced to leave it behind in anticipation of a search before boarding the craft that would take you to safety. The shadow of its memory was lighter in your hands than it was back then.
"The first and most important thing you must remember is you must treat all guns as though they are loaded and ready to fire, no matter what. I don't care if you just saw somebody unload it, you are to treat it as though they didn't."
You stepped up to the booth, slotting a power pack in place and glancing down the length. You were no taller than you had been back then, but it felt better in your hands. Confidence was strength.
"You never look down the barrel, you never wave it around carelessly, and you never point it at anything you don't want to kill."
Charitina continued her lesson as you flicked the switch on the target controls. Down the range, the crane arm snatched up a parchment target and rolled closer, the chains grinding. You donned your flash glasses, took a shooting stance, raised your hand, and fired.
Even in your dreams, you missed sometimes. You could tell the dream what to be, what to find behind doors, but you didn't have such fine control. They were memories, after all, and you remembered how good a shot you weren't quite clearly. You pumped the trigger a few more times, watching holes burst in the paper, and you couldn't help but smile.
Some time later, Dahlia the Guilty walked up to the booth next to you, cradling in her hands a small stub revolver and fistful of cartridges. She set the box down, her newly-empty hand going to her wrist to hold on for dear life.
"Both hands on your weapon, Dahlia," Praxis reminded her, striding beside her. She plucked the instructor's baton from the side of the booth. "Better. Now, load your weapon."
You slotted a new power pack home as Dahlia tried to load her revolver with shaky, excited hands. You could feel the excited joy radiating off her, even through the wall; you'd felt the way you'd always imagined the rich citydweller children felt when they got gifts. She nearly dropped one of the cartridges.
"Okay. Now, point it at the target." Praxis said. "Where are you aiming?"
"In the centre of his chest, Lady Inquisitor." You imitated the motion alongside her, but glanced toward your younger self. She glanced over and locked eyes with you, puzzled.
"Good. Are your sights lined up?"
Her eyes snapped away from you to the target.
"Yes, Lady Inquisitor."
"Fire your first shot."
You pulled the trigger, and a smoking hole appeared, close to the centre of your target.
"I'm sorry!" Dahlia cried. Praxis' baton snapped up under her wrist, and she fired more, as you pulled the trigger in time.
Six shots, three hits. For a first timer, not bad.
"I'm sorry I'm not as good as her," Dahlia muttered.
"No, you aren't," you agreed. "Not yet."
---
The afternoon played out in pantomime around you a while longer, snatching up the guns after Dahlia fired them to have your own fun, relieving the recoil and sounds one after another just out of sync with your past self.
"Now, the laspistol…" Charitina said, searching the table. "Jo, do you have it?"
"Ah, sorry!" you said, plucking it off the table and handing it to the Inquisitor. She didn't notice who it came from, accepted without question. You watched your past self fire a few shots, quite accurately.
"Proud of you," you muttered, the way you always did. Your past selves' wide eyes flicked to you, but then settled back on the target.
You left them behind and strode back to the door, considering your options. You had so many choices, but you were tired and sleeping propped-up in the back of the car, you didn't have the energy for this level of lucidity. Maybe you could just let your dreams come to you.
You unbolted the door and pressed the lock release, and it swung open to another room entirely. It couldn't be more different; the steel tiles gave way to plush carpet, the sterile bulkheads to dark wallpaper and brass fittings. A staircase, the walls lined with portraits, lay opposite the closet door you'd entered through.
You glanced out the reinforced window at the swirling, mustard-coloured fog that blanketed the cityscape, and smiled. This dream seemed to come to you a lot.
You swept over to the overstuffed chair opposite the comfortable sofa and let yourself flop back into the chair, remembering your best clothes and letting the dress pool around you. It just felt right for the occasion. You settled in, listening close. Wouldn't be long.
"Miss Hussain, hold on-"
"What's down here?"
Voices echoed down the stairway, joyful, youthful. Feet followed in a rapid patter, and Dahlia burst around the corner. It had only been a few months, but she looked so much better. Happier, bolder, wide-eyed from wonder instead of fear.
"This place is amazing. It's all so new!" Dahlia cried, running her hand along the railing. "So new I can see all of it! A dozen servants, your mother's hand, your hand… then the builders, hello! It came from a forge in the mid-hive, and then the ore…"
Her face screwed up.
"Ergh. It always sucks somewhere."
"Dahlia?" Another person came around the corner, a young man with a sweep of brown hair in a fine shirt, half-tripping over the stairs in his haste. "Slow down, I can hardly keep up!"
"When was this place built?" Dahlia asked, looking around the room.
"Twenty-five years ago this year, I think," he said. "Why does that matter?"
"Because it's
new, Leo," Dahlia said, touching the couch with a smile before deciding it wouldn't bite and sitting. "There's not so many memories in these, few enough that it doesn't get mixed up. Most things are older, denser. Does that make sense?"
"...yeah, actually?" The boy said, standing awkwardly in the corner as Dahlia ran her hand along the arm of the couch. "That's actually fascinating. What did you mean, before?"
The refined tones of the boy's Trade Gothic made the accent your younger self retained stand out, seeing it from the other side. You hadn't always spoken Trade Gothic; there was another Gothic language, one which diverged thousands of years before and had lost all but a handful of root words.
Only a few words of it survived from your childhood, and you imagined without the ability to go back and check you'd have lost it all by now. That process had started long before the Inquisitor took you in; you'd spoken less and less in your final years there.
"Oh. Well, everything that gets made gets made out of pain," young Dahlia explained simply, sounding a little taken aback that she'd need to explain it. "Everything I've ever touched became itself by hurting somebody, it's the way of the world."
"There's nothing without sacrifice, right?" the boy responded automatically, reciting from a lesson. To him, that sacrifice was an abstraction, something to be done at some point in the distant future, something to be ready for. Dahlia nodded, thinking of something else entirely.
"Exactly. The smelting of the ore for the rail is done in this city, in a level far below here. It's dangerous and dark. There's many workers involved. Some are very old. Some… aren't."
The young man stood stiff in place.
"The ore itself is from an asteroid, somewhere, mined by spacers who have never even seen a world," she said. "That's all I have. I guess nobody touched it before the miners."
He relaxed a little. There were a lot of reasons the young man didn't dwell on the brand on her neck, the danger your powers represented. A not inconsiderable element was that he was infatuated; there was a pretty girl in his house who both seemed to like him and, critically, who was unchaperoned. A lot of things that might have concerned him could be put aside for that reason.
"That's incredible," he said.
Dahlia smiled, and, knowing just a bit what she was doing, leaned back on the couch in a way she hoped looked inviting. The young man saw the signal, perked up, and then the cautious part of his brain that winced uncomfortably when his classmates told lurid stories about the vulnerability of the house staff corrected sternly that he shouldn't read so much into such small gestures.
"By the Throne, go sit by her," you muttered. Dahlia's eyes flicked to you in annoyance, but you smiled. It was that same concern which made him safe enough that a young Dahlia would even consider something like that. It was the concern that made Dahlia feel confident enough to ask explicitly.
"Come sit," Dahlia said finally, and, with a sort of wind-up mechanical action, the young man did so, sitting as far on the other end of the couch as he could just to be safe. She sighed and pulled her legs up onto the couch to poke him with.
You shook your head sadly. She had a lifetime of awful internalised messaging which had at some times overpowered even her
survival instinct. However, the same indoctrination about the virtue of chastity was simply powerless against teenage hormones; there was a handsome boy here (already enough to start her heart pounding), and what's more he was kind and polite and didn't treat her like a
freak. She was a guest in his house, and he called her
Miss Hussain like she was a proper lady and not a mutant subhuman from the mines.
She stood no chance against that. Her head was filled with detailed lists of deliciously forbidden sins and the stirrings of a rebellious conviction that, given the Emperor had not reached out and struck the Inquisitor down for far worse, perhaps she should consider having a taste. She just promised she'd hate herself later.
"You said psychometry works on anything you touch?" he asked. Dahlia nodded.
"Not just touch, things I'm near and things I use, and the longer I interact with something the more I know. I can tune it out, sort of, I've gotten better at that, but yes. Everything so far. I've seen where ships have been, what printing presses have stamped out, who has handled a gun and who has been struck by it. It can be overwhelming, especially when it shows how much everything hurts. But it's beautiful too, to know how much care went into…"
She ran a finger along the carved wooden arm of the sofa, seeing in her mind's eye the sculptor's tools, his gnarled fingers, the confident motions as he turned a graphite sketch against the surface into a winged skull with motions he'd practised a million times.
"... everything."
Leo reached a hand toward her leg and brushed against the cloth of Dahlia's simple dress with cautious slowness. Even from across the couch, Dahlia could hear how his every motion was cheered on by the excited, ever-optimistic voice that lives in every teenaged boy, and the idea that she was having this effect on somebody, that she wasn't just normal but
desired, beautiful, it was intoxicating.
"So… what happens when you touch somebody?" the young man asked, in what was quite possibly the greatest play in fumbling teenage seduction the galaxy had ever seen.
"I-I don't know," Dahlia lied, the reality of the situation finally crashing home through her brain and nearly crushing her with a sudden, crippling guilt. "S-sorry." What usually happened was very little; people were guarded, they trusted no-one and trusted the witch less. Touch usually revealed little more than a burning hatred and fear of contamination, or the iron mental blocks of the adults in her life who cared, but who also compartmentalised ruthlessly.
You'd come back to this memory often. It wasn't a proud thing, really; it was nine years ago and you really shouldn't pine over a silly boy any longer, but nobody since had ever put you at this sort of ease and you were beginning to doubt anyone ever would. You'd met a handful of men you might have felt some affection for in the time since, but your job and the realities of the Imperium had meant nothing could come of it, not even close.
So it was this moment, over and over. You kept coming back to it, wearing deep paths into your imagination. Over your life, you had spent weeks in these few minutes.
The young man withdrew his hand, putting it back on his lap, and tried very desperately to think about something boring and unpleasant. He settled on confessional. Quite involuntarily, this became him and her squeezed together in the confessional booth, because the sprawling railway network of his mind had suffered severe shortages in recent minutes and was now wholly one-track. Dahlia, unable to stop herself, laughed as she saw his thoughts, and reached out to that bit of herself lodged in his imagination.
The Dahlia in the confessional booth, in the young man's head, did not share her reservations; obviously, she was the image of a pretty girl in the head of a sixteen year old boy. That Dahlia could lean in and whisper into the boy's ear, into his head…
"Why don't we find out?"
He was shaken back to reality, to Dahlia holding a hand out from the other side of the sofa, a cautious smile on her face. Slowly, he reached out and took her hand, and relaxed when the world didn't end. He learned to trust her.
In that moment, she saw that stupid boy for everything he was, everything he thought about her, everything she could ever want to know, and you fell hopelessly in love. Pulling yourself to him, you planting a kiss on his cheek felt almost like an afterthought, nothing in comparison to touching his soul. His arms settled around you.
His handsome, pale face turned bright red, but he had enough presence of mind to, clumsily, awkwardly, press his lips to yours. He mostly felt teeth for his trouble. It was the greatest moment of either of your lives to that point, and you could confirm that first-hand.
"Master Gobrecht!" a voice called from up the stairs. A jolt of soul-shattering panic went through the both of you. It was the voice of a distant servant, who had seen the brand on your neck and the Inquisitorial icons and had decided she could do her best work on the other side of the tower. "Master Gobrecht!"
Nobody in the history of the galaxy had moved as fast as Lionus Gobrecht did in that moment. Eldar warriors would have struggled to follow. In an instant, he was sitting perfectly still, perfectly upright, as far away from you as physically possible and already smoothing the wrinkles in his fine clothes. His gaze was locked dead ahead.
"I'll go sort that out," he said haltingly, standing up.
"Yeah" you gasped, still overwhelmed. The young man disappeared up the stairs like a shot, and you slowly relaxed on the couch, still processing the exciting, buzzing rush through your whole body as all the fuzzy good neurotransmitters made the brain into their playground. "Oh…"
After a moment to recover, you glanced over to the witch sitting in the chair by the fireplace, watching.
"That woulda been easier without you watching, you know," you accused. The hazy images of your future self, more real here than you'd ever seen her before, offered an incompatible cavalcade of protests, mockery, and reassurance. You recoiled from it. "Sorry. Just nervous. This m-must be important, right, that I remember it so often?"
The shadow-selves nodded.
"Good. It felt important," you said.
"Sorry, Dahlia, what was that?" a voice asked, footsteps coming back down the stairs. Leo emerged, still clearly not recovered from the shock of nearly being discovered.
"Oh," you said. "Just talking to myself. What's up?"
"The Inquisitor wants to talk to you. It sounds important," he said, gesturing to the stairs. "I'll… I'll wait here?"
A creeping feeling of dread washed over you.
"I'll be right back," you assured him.
You never saw him again.
---
You awoke to Cass poking you with her boot.
"Hey. Get up. Cogboy did some maths in the night, and
Pilgrim's Wake shifted orbits. We're an hour to airlock."
"Already?" you asked, pawing ineffectively to chase the sleep from your eyes.
"You've been out for ten hours," she said simply. "Couldn't bear to wake you. And, uh… thanks. For the dreams."
"Anytime," you mumbled, fumbling with the latch of the car door.
---
What sort of ship is Pilgrim's Wake? What limits are placed upon it?
[ ] It's a civilian tramp freighter belonging to a local trading cartel. It's slow and barely armed, but the cartel's shareholders have thrown in with Praxis; it was at your complete disposal.
[ ] It's a Vagabond-class merchant trader of the official Merchant Fleet, requisitioned by the Inquisitor. It will go where you tell it, but you only have it from one more journey, then you need to figure out alternate arrangements.
[ ] It's a Claymore-class corvette requisitioned from the Imperial Navy. You don't know if they'll be willing to take you on further, or if they'll follow the original plan of dumping you on a nearby spaceport system to find your way from there.
