Chapter Text
Calligos
— ⭒ 18 standard hours after the disappearance of Castilla von Valancius ⭒ —
Red mist shrouds his bedchamber, clotting over his sight. Calligos has to squint to navigate it, to catch a glimpse of the Empyrean past his windows, his hand hovering an inch from the glass.
The Empyrean. Something snags at the thought. A nameless, formless doubt, gnawing at his synapses.
The klaxons have sounded. That’s it. These windows should be shuttered, leaving Calligos alone in the dark. The wails of the dying should be reserved for the lower decks.
Neither are true. Through the mist, light streams in from the windows, and there are distant voices far beyond.
It’s not that they call him closer—it is that he is called, by the prickle of curiosity at the back of his skull, by a pang in his chest he can’t name, but must tend.
Must: an instinct rooted deep as marrow. He can no more refute it than deny the blood in his veins.
He’s heard these voices before. They sang to him at the bitter end before that ending was rewritten. They whisper from every shadow on every world he roams, and here they sing as loud as in the Rifts of Hecaton.
As loud as when he was dying.
They howl his name, the name of his forebears. Winterscale, on a thousand tongues, the syllables marred.
Do they know that he has answered?
Is that why they quieted, all that time ago? Why the chorus—the pain, the hemorrhaging—stopped?
Will they quiet again, if he answers now?
His fingers land upon the window, and when they do, the darkness takes shape. It amasses because of him: the gargantuan, graceful curves of a ship. One he has seen scrawled on parchment, the ravings of an ancestor driven mad. But here it is real, this thing made of dark, strung together with the voices still crying out for mercy that cannot be given, not now, not since long ago.
They are the damned, and he is one of them. Fixed in place, starved for breath, as the massive vessel cuts through the warp, growing larger in his sight until it swallows his view of all warpspace beyond it.
Doomed.
“No,” he says, and his voice echoes through the vox-comms—as though he himself is the Emperor’s Vow, its beating heart, his soul the latest in a long line shining beacon-bright at the ship’s core. “No—I don’t want—turn, damn you! Turn!”
It does. Klaxons blare anew. The windows shutter, and at last, Calligos is able to tear his eyes from them. No—it’s as though he is released, let free from an invisible set of jaws.
When did his hand become so cold, everywhere it touched the glass?
The question slips from his awareness, and even the shadows of his misgivings melt away in the dark that blankets his chamber now. Or perhaps the shadows do not catch his eye because they are no longer at the edges of his vision, but his vision entire. Cloying doubt, left to fester, to grow, to subsume—
Green light blooms behind him, and Calligos faces it like the dawn of a world he’s yet to claim.
Castilla von Valancius stands just steps away. Hair unbound, nude but for the shirt he wrapped the Eye of Hecaton in, months ago. The garment’s rolled up at the sleeves, showing every inked chain the Beast House marked on her skin. It’s unlaced down the front—and thin enough that even through the green haze of hololithic projections, he can see the pert peak of each breast, hardened in a faraway chill.
Like before, a distant voice prods.
She smiles, because of course she’s caught him looking. Like before.
But it isn’t enough just to look. Calligos crosses the distance to her—mere steps, crossed in seconds, but every inch is a chasm when it comes to her. He takes her hips in his grasp and sighs his surrender when he can, when they indent the way he’s imagined even though they are not warm, not as soft as he remembers, not like this. He brings his forehead down to hers and isn’t met with metal, but some sort of cool static that tingles everywhere he touches.
“No more hesitation. Not anymore,” he breathes, half a growl—and then his lips are on hers, a crackle of energy against his mouth that he swears pulses in time with her heart.
This is no slow, savoring exploration. No.
This is the yawning maw inside his ribs, come to life. Calligos drags the light of her against him, all to slake the hunger under his skin, the depthless void that’s gnawed at his nerves for time untold.
What came before was not enough.
All that could come after might not ever be enough.
“I’ll see you soon,” she rasps against his mouth between kisses, “How’s that for morale?”
“No,” he groans, and she swallows the sound of his plea. “No. I don’t want to wait. Not anymore.”
It isn’t enough to taste her, static on his tongue. He rakes his fingers up her thighs, growling at the triumph that is her answering shiver, and curls his fingers to fists in the fabric around her hips. He lifts—
And her head tips back, a guttural sound tearing up her throat.
His hands fall open, empty of fabric, the promise of her heat forfeit. Calligos cradles her face, thumb roving the plane of her cheek. Something squirms under the soft curve he remembers—that he can’t make himself forget.
It shouldn’t be here.
It shouldn’t move.
He runs his thumb over the culprit, drives the digit down to quash it, but it does nothing. This—all of her, everything he seeks to hold—is a hololithic projection. Her real body is impossibly far from his reach.
Her own hands rise—and the strength in her arms goes before she can claw for purchase on her own skin.
“No—Cas—no, no—Castilla. Castilla, look at me,” he gasps. “Look at me, damn you—”
The thing—abomination, horror, no larger than half his little finger—presses its advance. Wriggles, chews, up near her eye.
She screams, when it burrows. It drowns the string of profanity hissed through his teeth. It’s gone—he can’t see it. Can’t even know this enemy, can’t rip it from her pliant flesh.
There is nothing he can do. Nothing to prevent the trickle of blood down her nose—just a drop, at first, until it floods down her lips, crimson liquid made black in the light of the hololith.
Her eyes are squeezed shut, brows creased around her augment. She can’t see the plea in his face, can’t hear the rasp when he begs for her to meet his eyes, to find his voice, to live, to live. He thumbs at her cheeks a dozen times in as many moments, desperately searching her features for any sign of recognition. Of her.
But her gaze won’t crack open, and blood drips off her chin and onto her chest, and dread sinks into his bones, coils under his ribs, squeezes his heart until it spasms.
“Not again,” he pleads. “No—not again. Not again, not like this—Castilla! Castilla!”
Her mouth moves—a word? His name?—and then the lines of it fade, dissipating into nothing. Like before.
All of her, a cold prickle against his palms, a slice of cold in empty air, dimming, disappearing—
Gone, like before—
Gone—
— ⭒✶⭒ —
Calligos wakes with his teeth grit painfully, every muscle tensed.
“Your Lord—”
“What?!” he snaps, chest heaving, nostrils flared. His hands are clenched to fists around his sheets—he was grasping for something in sleep—and he wrests his own grip away from the fabric, forcing his breath out through his nose.
A nightmare. That’s all. He went to sleep already on edge.
Castilla was supposed to—
“There has been an Astropathic message directed to yourself, personally,” a servant explains, tremoring steps away from his bedside. Yes—a servant. He requested one, one of the Vox-Master’s, to relay anything from the Chapel, prioritized over all other duties.
He’d never make a request, never bother with the rabble, on most nights. But his muscles wouldn’t unwind. His mind wouldn’t slow.
The servant—barely more than a boy—fights a crease in his brow. His jaw feathers. “An urgent one.”
Calligos’ stomach lurches. His thoughts race, determined to make up for lost ground. Cold floods from his adrenals.
He’s bolt upright, covers pooled at his waist, before he realizes he’s moved. “Tell me.”
A growl, beyond his control.
The servant blanches. “The Inheritance—”
Calligos’ ears begin to ring. Every second slows.
“—Last known coordinates denote the vessel hails from the Atlas Reach System. Vox-Master Vigdis Toliman ordered the Vow be contacted as an early emergency measure—”
An ache drives through his skull, his mind’s self-sabotaging protest.
No.
“—Rogue Trader Castilla von Valancius—”
‘I’ll see you soon.’ Her last words, left as a message, thin static crackling through a receiver. ‘How’s that for morale?’
No—not last. No. No.
“—is reported missing by our Choir’s interpretation—”
It isn’t possible. She made so many things possible. They hadn’t needed an Astropath to speak in so long.
She wouldn’t have just—after everything, she wouldn’t be—
“Though the word ‘missing’ may be mistranslated. The closer interpretation may be that she is—”
Calligos’ hand is curled in the servant’s collar before ‘gone’ can hit the open air.
It isn’t true. Isn’t real.
The boy’s skull cracks against the window. Calligos’ snarl is reflected against the stars outside—a beast, wild-eyed, staring down the barrel of the end.
“How long?”