No sound.
No breath.
No thought.
Only the echo of what had just happened.
Las-shots still smoldered in the dust around me, faint red embers fading into the wind. Spent bolt casings rolled to a stop near my feet. The sharp, metallic stink of propellant hung thick in the air. The soldiers stood frozen in a half-circle — some trembling, some gasping, some staring in disbelief at the smoking impact marks on my torso where their weapons had done nothing.
The psykers lay collapsed on the ground, twitching lightly, their bonds sparking with residual feedback from my presence. One whimpered. Another simply stared at me with wide, terrified eyes, tears mixing with blood at the corners of his mouth.
Their fear was not because of the gunfire.
It was because of me.
Because of the void bleeding from my skin like cold smoke.
Because of the pressure I exuded without trying.
Because every breath I took erased a little more of the warp from the world, and they were too steeped in it to withstand the absence.
Slowly — painfully aware of every rifle tightening in response — I inhaled.
And then I drew it back.
Not outward.
Not into a shield.
Not into a field.
Into myself.
The null folded like a collapsing lung, shriveling from the air, pulling itself under the ribs and into the reinforced cavities of my chest. The world shuddered as the pressure eased. The psychic dead-zone shrank, retreating into a heart-sized core of absence.
The effect was immediate.
The psykers gasped violently, sucking in air like drowning victims. Their restraints stopped sparking. Their muscles loosened. Their pain dimmed into exhausted shaking.
The armsmen sagged on their feet, shoulders dropping, gaunt faces softening with instinctive relief. A few lowered their weapons without realizing they’d done it. One man fell to his knees, wiping sweat from his brow with a trembling hand.
The officer with the bolt pistol staggered back a half-step, panting as though he had been strangled and suddenly released.
Only then did I speak.
I had to force the words through a throat that hadn’t shaped this language in fifteen thousand years.
My implants scraped together the syllables like scavenged metal.
Crude.
Broken.
Barely intelligible.
But loud.
My voice rolled across the plateau, deep and resonant after centuries of disuse:
“No… harm.”
The soldiers flinched.
“Help… please.”
The psykers looked at me with raw confusion.
The armsmen exchanged glances, unsure whether I was pleading or threatening.
My implants strained.
Grammatical errors flickered.
Syntax screamed warnings.
The structure felt like sandpaper in my mouth.
But I forced it out:
“I… need… help.”
Silence followed — the kind that forms at funerals or in the seconds before disaster.
One soldier whispered, barely audible:
“Emperor… he speaks…”
The name hit me strangely.
Familiar in shape.
Wrong in meaning.
The officer swallowed hard, eyes flicking between his collapsed psykers and the monstrous stranger who had endured their fire without flinching.
He took one step forward, boots crunching in the gravel.
“Repeat,” he ordered, voice cracking just enough to betray fear beneath authority.
“Slowly.”
I nodded once.
Then I spoke again, each word dragged from my chest like rusted machinery forcing itself into motion:
“I.
Mean.
No.
Harm.”
The officer’s pistol lowered a fraction.
“Help… me.”
The mountain wind shifted.
The sky rumbled with the distant engines of the cathedral-ship overhead.
Dust drifted across the rocky ground like pale ash.
Something broke in the soldiers’ faces then — the tension, the terror — replaced by something simpler.
Confusion.
Caution.
And the faintest flicker of something else.
Hope.
Desperate, fragile hope — the kind born in people who have lived too long in fear.
The officer turned to his squad and barked,
“Stand down! Stand down! Keep weapons ready but angled!”
The armsmen hesitated…
And then obeyed.
The psykers curled in on themselves, breathing shallowly, relieved to feel the warp’s poison return to their senses — faint, distant, familiar.
The officer approached me slowly, his voice quieter this time:
“…By the Throne… what are you?”
I opened my mouth.
I had no way to answer.
Not in a language this degenerated.
Not without revealing truths they could not understand.
Instead, I said the only thing my shattered vocabulary could hold:
“Lost… long time.
Need… people.”
His eyes widened.
A long time.
He understood enough to fear that answer.
He holstered his pistol — not out of trust, but because he recognized how useless it was.
“Come with us,” he said, motioning toward the open ramp of the dropship. “Slow. No sudden moves. Our lord-captain will want… answers.”
I nodded.
And followed.
The soldiers parted before me.
Not out of respect.
Out of the primal urge to step aside for something incomprehensible.
We were halfway to the dropship when a noise split the air behind the soldiers — a grinding, uneven mechanical wail, as though a rusted engine were trying to scream.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Then a shape pushed through the line of armsmen.
Not walking.
Lurching.
A figure swathed in red robes, the cloth stiff with grease and dust, badly cut, frayed at every edge. The hem dragged over the ground and caught on loose stones. Chain-links hung from the belt, clattering like bones.
There was no elegance in the movement.
No balance.
No grace.
Just a body weighed down by its own augmentations, fighting to stay upright.
A Tech-Priest.
I felt something twist in my stomach — not fear, not anger.
A kind of grief.
This… this was what they had become?
His face was half-flesh, half-machine — but the machine was crude, ugly, bolted directly into the bone without alignment. His jaw was metal on one side, fitted with overlapping plates that shifted with a grating noise when he moved. Exposed actuators clenched and released, leaking oil. The organic side of his face was swollen and scarred around the augmetic seam, as though the surgery had been done without anesthetic… or hygiene.
Worse: the skin hadn’t fused correctly.
Red, angry flesh bulged against the metal.
Wet. Infected.
Unthinkable by any standard I knew.
His robes parted as he stumbled forward, revealing a mass of cables snaking from his ribs into an exposed data-port grafted directly into his abdomen. The port was rimmed with sutures — crude stitches of iron wire. A flickering screen embedded in his chest played diagnostic symbols in jagged, archaic script that my implants could not fully parse.
One of his mechanical legs hissed sharply as he stepped, hydraulics coughing like a dying engine. A single spindly mechadendrite curled behind him, moving with jerky, insectile spasms that kept throwing off his balance. The metal limb dragged across the ground, claws clicking.
Not precise.
Not calibrated.
Barely functioning.
A cybernetic insult to the engineers of my age.
The soldier nearest him recoiled as a gout of hot air vented from the priest’s back-mounted power unit — a rusted, box-shaped contraption belching ozone and metallic dust into the air. The stench clawed at my throat, thick with burnt insulation and leaking coolant.
And then the sound hit me.
His vox-caster — a rusted grill grafted where his throat had once been — crackled to life. Static burst out in a violent wash, like tearing metal scraping across the inside of my skull. My senses recoiled involuntarily. Even with my augmentations, designed for clean dataflow and machine-language clarity, the noise felt like a claw raking through my nervous system.
Then the chanting began.
Not speech.
Not liturgy as I once knew it.
A broken, glitching hymn:
“GzzK–PRAI—I—zzzHH—to the Om—Omni—Omnissiahhhh—kSSSH—BLESSED—be—his—DIVINE—FORM…”
The words jittered, skipping in mechanical hiccups.
Feedback whined through the vox like metal screaming underwater.
I clenched my teeth.
It felt like needles piercing the soft tissue behind my eyes.
The priest reached the front of the formation and lifted his head toward me. His primary optical implant — a large, red-glowing lens grafted into a hollowed eye socket — clicked and whirred as its aperture narrowed. The light washed over my face.
In that unnatural crimson, I saw my reflection distorted in the curve of his optic:
A figure caked in the blood of warp beasts.
Eyes sunken from centuries of solitude.
Armor fused to skin by time and suffering.
A relic staring into the face of another relic — but one broken beyond recognition.
The priest’s mechadendrite twitched violently, scraping the ground and throwing him off balance. He stumbled sideways, one fleshy hand grabbing a soldier’s shoulder to keep from falling. The armsman flinched as the priest’s metal claws narrowly missed his ear.
The priest hissed through the vox, static warping every syllable:
“Additional—kZZH—UNREGISTERED—MECHANISMS—detected—zzkKK—In the struct—struct—structURRRR—on the—planet surface.”
He jabbed a trembling finger toward the ancient metropolis in the valley below — toward my crashed ship, entombed in stone and time.
“Om—Omnissiah’s bounty—BLeSsED—ARTIFACTS—must be preserved.
You—ALL—stay.
Investigate the ru—ruu—RUIN.
LOCATE—holy—TEK.”
The officer stiffened.
“Magos, the lord-captain ordered extraction—”
“EXTRACTION—DENIED!” the priest screamed, voice rising into a howl of vox-static so loud the psykers cried out and the soldiers covered their ears.
“Sac—SACROSANCT DISCOVERY—DETECTED!”
His red optic flared brighter, scanning me again with frantic, predatory fascination.
“TECH—ANOMALY,” he hissed.
“UNCLASSIFIED—BIOLOGICAL—MECHANICAL—STRUCTURE.”
He pointed directly at me with a shaking, metal-clad finger.
“THIS—ONE—must—be—contained.”
The armsmen hesitated, fear creeping back into their eyes.
My heart slowed.
My breath steadied.
Contained.
The word from a priest whose species once engineered the stars.
I stepped forward.
The soldiers pushed back instinctively.
Even the psykers whimpered.
The priest’s lens focused sharply, drinking in every detail of me with trembling reverence and greed.
He whispered through static:
“DI—DIVINE—PATTERN…
ANCIENT—SCHEMA…
YOU… are of the Omnissiah.”
I shook my head.
Slowly.
Exactly once.
“No.”
The priest froze, mechadendrite spasming erratically behind him.
I let the word fall again, heavy, undeniable:
“I am not of your… Omnissiah.”
My voice echoed across the ridge.
Every soldier felt it.
Every psyker felt it.
And the tech-priest — for the first time — went completely still.
The Magos froze mid-step.
Something in my tone — the absolute negation — triggered a cascade of emotionless calculations behind his optics. His twitching mechadendrite snapped into a rigid pose. His head tilted sharply, the red lens narrowing to a thin pinprick as internal diagnostics recalibrated.
Then the vox-caster cut out.
A soft click.
A breathless stillness.
And then—
“<01101000—Primary Query: Origin-Class?>”
“
He had switched into Techna-Lingua.
Real.
Proper.
Structured binary.
Not the butchered, ritualized imitation spoken by many low-ranking tech-adepts.
This was higher. Pure.
Stripped of superstition but still crude by my standards.
His machine-side dominance asserted itself; the human vocal cords fell silent, replaced by sharp, arrhythmic bursts of binaric data.
Cold.
Efficient.
Harsh.
“
His mechadendrite buzzed, stabilizers jittering.
“
Beads of sweat formed on the faces of the armsmen.
They could not understand a single syllable.
But the tone was unmistakable.
This was no longer religious fervor.
This was analysis.
Dissection.
Clinical intent to reduce me into parts.
The Magos turned slightly, speaking to his internal recorder:
“
A burst of binaric static crackled as he streamed data to the ship above.
“
He twitched violently.
Then spoke again:
“
He reached behind himself.
A horrible grinding whine rose from his power-pack — coils spooling up, charging, resonant fields building to lethal levels.
The air vibrated.
Dust jumped on the ground.
Ozone burned my nose.
His mechadendrite straightened like a spear, ready to strike.
The armsmen gasped.
The psykers screamed.
The officer stumbled backward.
He was about to fire.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t blink.
I simply answered him in the same language.
Perfectly.
Calmer than his machine-brain could comprehend:
“
The priest froze mid-actuation.
Every lens dilated.
Every servo held its breath.
I stepped forward once — a single, precise footfall.
Then I spoke again.
Slowly.
Softly.
Each bit sharpened like a blade:
“
His optics flickered.
Static ran across his frame.
“”
His power coils sputtered.
Charge dropped.
Threat-recognition flared in a burst of panicked machine-code:
“”
I raised my hand — palm outward.
Not as defense.
As invitation.
“
The Magos hesitated.
His mechadendrite dipped.
The glowing red optic widened.
“
His tone warbled.
“”
I leaned closer — just enough for him to sense the truth in my field.
“”
Silence.
Then I said the part that broke him:
“
The Tech-Priest’s systems rattled.
A dozen micro-servos stuttered.
His breath hitched — a human response struggling against machine reflex.
Then:
“
”
A long pause.
Wind cut across the ridge, lifting dust from our feet.
The armsmen stood rigid, caught in a moment they could not decipher.
The psykers stared in hollow horror.
Finally:
“
He bowed his head.
Not in reverence.
Not in worship.
Not in submission.
In pure, cold logic.
“
I gestured to my throat.
“
He reached into his robe and pulled out a dataslate — battered metal frame, cracked runes across the screen, half-functional interface studded with devotional nails.
The dataslate rested in the Tech-Priest’s trembling metal hand, its bronze casing scratched and dented from years of misuse. Glyphs and devotional scratches crawled across its surface like scars. The display flickered with low-resolution holos, stuttering in and out as if afraid of me.
I reached for it.
The moment my fingers closed around it, the Magos stiffened — some part of him expecting reverence, ritual, prayer.
Instead, I performed the one act that shattered every expectation in the clearing.
The flesh at the tip of my right index finger… unwound.
Not torn.
Not ruptured.
Unwound.
Skin unraveling into fine, pale threads of bio-synthetic fiber. Musculature pulling aside like petals. Bone retracting smoothly. Beneath it all, the gleaming tip of a long-forgotten interface spike emerged — calibrated, adaptive, DAoT-pure.
A proper data-jack.
The soldiers recoiled.
The officer swore under his breath.
One psyker vomited from the shock of the sensory spike.
The Magos froze completely, red optic dilating in awe and terror.
“By the Omnissiah—” he whispered.
He reached to stop me.
Too late.
I pressed the jack into the slate’s port.
It clicked.
A perfect, intimate mechanical fit — something the priest could never have achieved with his crude augmetics.
The connection opened.
And the world inside the slate poured into me.
No hesitation.
No compatibility checks.
No ritual.
No authentication.
My systems reached into its memory like a thirsting ocean.
Language packs.
Technical readouts.
Engine-cycle logs.
Flight diagnostics.
Atmospheric stress tests recorded by junior tech-adepts over decades.
Personal notes etched in informal script — complaints, fears, maintenance shortcuts.
Every byte.
Every fragment.
Absorbed.
Integrated.
Filed.
The slate’s lights flickered violently — drained dry in a heartbeat.
The Magos staggered backward, clutching at his chest as though the theft of data were a physical attack.
“IMPOSSIBLE—!”
His vox sputtered into distortion.
“Unauthorized—total—ACCESS—BREACH—!!”
One armsman dropped his lasgun in shock.
Another crossed himself and whispered a prayer.
I withdrew the jack.
The flesh re-knit instantly, finger re-forming into seamless skin with no scar.
The dataslate — empty, clean, and warm from the transfer — spun in my hand as I tossed it lightly back toward the Magos.
He caught it clumsily, almost dropping it.
“W–what… did you…?”
His voice trembled in binharic static.
I answered him in fluent, precise Low Gothic — not the broken, stuttering approximation of before.
My voice rang calmly across the plateau:
“Thank you.”
The soldiers jolted.
Some gasped.
Even the officer’s eyes widened.
“I appreciate the data. And your assistance.”
I stepped forward, slow enough not to trigger their panic.
“I realize my presence… unsettled you.”
I looked at the psykers — still curled on the ground, breathing hard.
“My field affects minds strongly. I did not intend to harm them.”
The Magos stared at me, as if trying to reconcile me with every law of his order.
I gave him no time.
“I am… lost,” I continued, choosing my words with care.
“Lost to time. Stranded here alone for millennia.”
A soldier murmured something like a prayer.
“I would very much like to leave this place. Truly.”
I met the officer’s gaze directly.
“If possible, I would speak with your captain. We have much to discuss. A parlay, if she permit
s it.”
Silence spread across the mountain — heavy, stunned, reverent.
Even the wind paused.
Finally, the officer swallowed hard and straightened.
“I… I can arrange that,” he said, voice faint but steady.
The Magos stared at me as if seeing the resurrection of a myth.
And I — for the first time in fifteen thousand years — felt something like hope.