Chapter 308: Echoes of the Past (Patreon)

“They are not enemies! Open the gate!”

The command echoed along the battlements, swallowed and repeated by vox-grilles and rusted loudhailers embedded in the fortress wall. After several tense seconds, the heavy alloy portcullis groaned as it rose inch by inch.

An officer, one who had previously witnessed Yoan’s aid during the purge of the Genestealer infestations, emerged from the fortress wall with two escorts and personally guided Yoan into District One Hundred.

Chen Ye vaulted down from the seven-metre-high wall in a single effortless motion, landing before Yoan. The White Scars Space Marine looked almost animated as he spoke.

“Did you come back to help me?”

“No,” Yoan replied. “I came to investigate something.”

Chen Ye raised an eyebrow.

“The death of the Usurper,” Yoan continued. “Tell me what you know.”

Chen Ye shook his head immediately.

“Not usurper,” he corrected. “The former Governor.” He gestured toward a larger structure nested between the hab-blocks, its façade reinforced and marked with Ecclesiarchal purity seals now faded by time and soot. “The people involved are in there. Ask them yourself.”

Yoan wasted no time.

....

When he pushed open the door, darkness closed around him. The lumen strips inside flickered weakly, their light barely penetrating the gloom. The air was thick with the stench of disinfectant, cheap, overused, and barely masking the underlying smells of blood and rot.

The room contained little more than a broken cot, its frame warped by age, and an old sofa salvaged from a higher district long ago. Medical supplies were stacked in careful, rationed order, suggesting scarcity rather than neglect.

A frail young man lay upon the cot, barely conscious, his breathing shallow and uneven. His skin was pallid beneath the grime of the hive, and his fingers twitched intermittently as though grasping at phantom pain. Beside him stood an elderly man, his hands steady as he carefully changed blood-soaked bandages with practiced precision.

The old man was unmistakably a psyker.

His eyes had been sewn shut. Scar tissue ran from the bridge of his aquiline nose to the corners of his eyes, ritualistic, unmistakably deliberate. A sanctioned psyker, or perhaps one who had chosen mutilation to escape damnation.

The psyker turned his head slightly toward Yoan, as though seeing him despite the stitched flesh. He paused only long enough to suppress a wince of discomfort before resuming his work on the wounded youth.

Yoan spoke at once. “You are the—”

“Yes,” the psyker interrupted calmly. “The one who can foresee fragments of the future. And the one who witnessed the former Governor’s death firsthand.”

Yoan paused, then continued. “Then this man—”

“The former Governor’s grandson,” the psyker said, as if reciting a familiar script. “His name is Khurai.”

“And he—”

“He was wounded during the fighting in the underhive,” the psyker answered before Yoan could finish. “You and that lord of yours have been there. You know of our efforts to cleanse the Genestealers.”

Yoan stepped forward and examined the injury.

Laceration trauma.

His internal cogitator archive cross-referenced the wound instantly.

[Cause identified: Genestealer hybrid. Purestrain-adjacent. Genetic purity insufficient.]

“You were fortunate,” Yoan said grimly. “Had it been a true purestrain, you would have been reduced to slurry.”

From a compartment in his jump pack, Yoan withdrew a syringe filled with a mercury-like fluid, its surface rippling faintly with internal motion.

Khurai was too weak to speak or resist, but when he saw the shimmering substance, his body shuddered violently in instinctive fear.

“It’s all right, child,” the psyker soothed him gently. “Those are restorative nanites. They will replace necrotic tissue and rebuild what has been damaged.”

As Yoan administered the injection, his gaze lingered on the old psyker.

This one’s psychic potential is… exceptional.

A silver sheen spread across the wound, consuming dead flesh and knitting muscle and bone back together at an unnatural, controlled speed.

“Thank you…” Khurai exhaled deeply as the pain receded, leaving behind exhaustion and fragile relief.

The psyker helped him sit upright, supporting his weakened frame.

“Now,” he said softly, “you should answer this lord’s questions.”

Yoan turned his attention back to the psyker.

Before he could speak, the psyker smiled faintly.

“In my sight, you are ash drifting through the void, soulless remnants without fate. Yet I can see what words Khurai and I will speak in the future, and what paths we will walk.”

“…Very well,” Yoan said after a pause. He had no desire to dwell on matters so deeply entangled with the Warp. “Then tell me—”

He had intended to ask how the former Governor had died.

Instead, another question surfaced unbidden.

Why had District One Hundred launched a purge into the underhive at all?

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the Genestealer cult posed no immediate existential threat. There had been no uprising, no open rebellion, no disruption of tithe quotas. Even the spire elites might never have known of their existence.

So Yoan asked Khurai instead.

The young man answered calmly.

“Vengeance. For seventy years, District One Hundred lost two hundred infants and sixty-three adolescents. Taken.”

“Filthy vermin,” Yoan muttered. The memory of his own child flickered through his mind, sharp and unwelcome, buried beneath centuries of discipline. He crushed the urge to descend into the underhive and slaughter everything that moved.

He steadied himself.

“Tell me how the nobles’ so-called usurper truly died.”

“They smeared my grandfather’s name,” Khurai said quietly. “He was no usurper.”

He stared up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused, lost in memory.

“One hundred and twenty years ago, he was no different from me. A nobody from the lower hive. To the nobles, just another insect.”

Yoan listened in silence.

“Before he became Governor, he lived like everyone else. When the ruling Governor of that era sought a ‘bride’ for his mechanical hunting hound, a man from District One Hundred had his lover taken. My grandfather laughed about it in the drinking dens, like everyone else.”

His voice tightened.

“Until it was his closest friend’s wife chosen for that fate.”

At this point, he turned toward the psyker.

“We were born together,” the psyker confirmed softly. “Neighbours. Brothers in all but blood.”

“My grandfather and he plotted to save her,” Khurai continued. “They killed the hound. But when they returned, they were declared criminals. They fled into the eastern underhive.”

“The Governor simply rebuilt the hound,” Khurai said bitterly. “And continued his hunts.”

“When my grandfather secretly returned to District One Hundred and learned the full extent of what had followed, he realized some evils cannot be ignored. So he chose to end it.”

“The uprising spread like wildfire,” Khurai said, emotion creeping into his voice. “Poorly armed workers marched into the streets. Gangs and civilians emerged from the shadows to join them. From the underhive to the spire, even nobles and clergy of the Imperial Creed stood with them.”

His eyes burned.

“My grandfather slew the Governor and his hound. And before all witnesses, the Ecclesiarchy crowned him Governor.”

“He changed everything,” Khurai said. “Improved living conditions. Stabilized ration distribution. Established trade with the agri-world Beisu Seven. Created laws where once there had only been whim.”

Then his voice dropped.

“And then, in his old age, he was assassinated, along with my father. A psyker who could glimpse the future. And a Captain of the Guard who had protected him for seventy years.”

“There were guards everywhere,” Khurai whispered. “Even the latrines were watched.”

“And yet he died. The moment the Captain’s gaze shifted, from my grandfather… to a candle, he fell. Along with most of the guards in the room.”

Yoan turned slowly to the psyker.

“You did not foresee his death?”

“Prophecy is not a complete vision,” the psyker replied. “It is fragments. Flashes. Sounds without context. It took me a century to refine my gift, to hear the words clearly, to arrange them into sequence.”

“But not everyone failed to see the assassin,” Khurai said quietly, closing his eyes. “I was a young child, walking toward my grandfather’s chambers. In the corridor, I heard movement in the ventilation shafts.”

Yoan leaned forward, listening intently.

“I looked up,” Khurai continued, drawing a slow breath.

“And I saw… a tail. A long, slender tail.”