In the farthest north of Thrysa, where even the dense forests finally failed,
the land broke into a spine of jagged stone—a natural wall torn from the planet's bones.
It stretched beyond sight, uneven and merciless, its surface scarred by ages of wind and ash.
Nothing grew here. Nothing nested.
Even sound seemed reluctant to linger.
Behind that wall rose the Ivory Command.
A fortress not built upon the world, but imposed on it.
The Xarcarion foothold on this feral planet.
—
A young man stepped forward, a dark blue half-jacket hanging loose on his frame, the left sleeve empty.
With his remaining right hand, his fist clenched—psychic force bleeding into the air around it.
He struck the wall.
The impact rang dull and hollow.
The rock did not so much as flinch.
A spiderweb of cracked stone.
He exhaled sharply.
"Great," he muttered.
"So how are we supposed to get past this?"
—
Behind him,
a man clad in Inquisitorial black and red shifted his weight.
The rosette at his belt caught the pale light, its authority heavy even in silence.
"You tell me, Kochav," Helsin replied dryly.
"You're the one who's good at improvising."
—
Kochav ground his teeth, then dropped down onto a slab of stone, shoulders sagging despite himself.
"You're going to regret putting me in charge," he said, staring up at the unyielding wall.
—
Helsin sighed softly.
"I already do."
—
Kochav turned, glancing past Helsin toward the assembled force behind them.
"An army of five thousand," he muttered, lips curling to one side.
"Against a fucking wall!"
He flopped backward onto the cold stone in defeat, arms spread, staring up at the pale sky.
After a moment, he lifted his head again—eyes drifting to the lone figure seated apart from the rest.
A wooden throne.
And upon it—
Sleeping.
The wind cut through the rocks, carrying only one sound in the stillness.
Snoring.
Kochav stared.
He reached down, picked up a loose shard of stone cracked from the wall, and flicked it lazily.
Phewwww.
The rock made it halfway.
But a golden gauntlet snapped up, impossibly fast, closing around the stone and crushing it to powder.
The fragments rattled back toward Kochav a heartbeat later.
He yelped and rolled aside as grit peppered the rock beside his head.
The figure straightened.
Half her face was hidden behind a golden gorget, armor catching the cold light like a relic torn from another age.
One eye dimmed, the other flared faintly—annoyance bleeding through even the dead stillness.
She tilted her head toward him and signed sharply with one armored hand.
"Not cool, K."
—
Kochav groaned, letting his head fall back against the stone.
"The only person who could level this wall is in a coma," he muttered,
eyes still fixed on the rock face that cut the sky in two.
"And where is the Aeldari anyway?"
—
"Her lady is expanding the woods way,"
another voice answered calmly,
"as per our retreat parameters."
The speaker padded forward with a soundless, lithe stride. Black fur drank in the light, broken only by the faint gleam of ritual markings along his limbs.
A long staff was slung across his back, and his tail swayed lazily as he passed.
It brushed Kochav's nose.
—
"Achoo—!"
Kochav sneezed violently, then recoiled.
"Keep your tail to yourself, kitty!"
He snapped, scrambling to his feet beside Rouar.
Rouar's ears flicked once, unimpressed.
—
"You were lying in the path, Monke'igh," Rouar replied evenly.
—
Kochav shot him a glare.
"Just wait until I get back at you, felinid."
—
Rouar's muzzle twitched—almost a smile—as he turned his attention back to the wall of stone.
"And yet," he said, voice low, thoughtful,
"you still haven't answered the question."
He planted his staff into the frozen earth, eyes narrowing as he studied the jagged barrier.
"How do you intend to get us through, Monke'igh?"
—
Kochav sighed.
"The wall is just a vertical."
A pause.
His eyes flicked downward.
"Floor....."
—
"You want us to walk the wall, kid?" Helsin asked, one brow lifting.
—
"No way." Kochav shook his head, already pacing.
"Localizing gravity on this scale would pulp my brain. I'd last maybe ten seconds."
He stopped, crouching, pressing his palm against the stone at the wall's base.
"I checked the density," he muttered.
"Can't tell how tall it is. Can't tell how deep it goes."
A breath.
Then a slow exhale.
"But everything has a base."
He straightened, force bleeding from his fingers into the rock beneath his feet.
"This wall is the result of a series of tectonic shifts millions of years ago."
Helsin stiffened.
Rouar's ears flattened.
Kochav didn't look at either of them.
His gaze drifted past the wall, past the sky—eyes unfocused, pupils dilating as something else listened through him.
Pressure.
Strain.
Old scars in the world's bones.
—
He counted them like a ledger of buried sins—faults locked under impossible weight, stresses held for millions of years.
All waiting for the wrong touch.
"I will enhance my senses, and find the weakest point..."
A breath.
"Then the rest will fall on its own."
Like dominoes.
—
Kochav lowered himself to one knee and pressed his palm to the frozen ground before the wall.
His eyelids slid shut.
Beneath them, his pupils ignited—burning orange, dim at first, then brightening as his divination stirred.
Then came the whispers, the voices akin to his own.
Fractured, multiplied—threaded outward through the rock, riding fault and fissure, tracing pressure like fingers reading braille.
Every crack carried a story: weight, age, strain, hunger.
Where one path faded, another opened.
Deeper.
Wider.
Until the noise thinned.
Until the whispers died one by one—
—all but one.
Kochav inhaled slowly and opened his eyes.
The orange glow dimmed, retreating behind flesh and bone as his awareness snapped back into the present.
He lifted his hand from the ground.
"Found it."
Kochav turned back toward them and gave a single nod.
—
Helsin stared at him for a heartbeat longer, then lifted his hand.
"Fall back."
The beastmen moved first—horned silhouettes and heavy hooves grinding against stone as they withdrew from the wall's shadow.
A few of them broke formation, lumbering toward Mira, who still slept soundly upon her wooden throne.
With careful, almost reverent motions, they lifted the throne as one—thick fingers steady, muscles coiling beneath fur and scarred hide—and carried it away from the fault line.
Kroot followed, slipping away with predatory quiet, crests low and rifles tight to their bodies.
The felinids came last, light-footed and wary, tails flicking as they vanished into cover.
—
The ground before the wall emptied.
Wind screamed along the sheer rock face, carrying dust, grit, and the deep, uneasy groan of something massive being held in place by time alone.
Kochav remained.
Alone before the scar in the world.
He knelt, lowering his hand to the ground.
His fingers dug in—and the stone answered.
Cracks spidered outward as he tore free a strand of rock, long and sinuous, as if the mountain itself had veins.
It dangled from his grip like a frozen rope, grinding softly as it twisted.
The air around him went still.
Breathe fogged.
Cold bled inward, drawn from the wind, the stone, the thin space between atoms.
It pooled in his palm, sank into the rock, and spread—frost racing downward along unseen seams.
The strand stiffened, crystallized.
The cold plunged deeper.
Toward the fault line he had found—
CRACK!
The veins of stone in his hand shattered,
bursting into razor shards that rang like breaking glass.
—
For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.
Then it answered.
The ground roared.
A thunderous tremor ripped through the land,
the mountain screaming as ancient plates ground against one another.
Stone split, cliffs howled, and the planet shuddered as if a god had risen in wrath beneath its skin.
The earthquake rolled outward, toppling trees, throwing bodies from their feet, echoing across leagues of wilderness.
Yet Kochav did not move.
He remained kneeling amid the fury, one hand buried in broken stone, frost crawling up his arm like a living thing.
Unyielding.
His conviction stood firmer than the world itself.
—
The roar deepened.
The sound sank, folding in on itself, as though the mountain had stopped shouting and begun to break its own spine.
High above,
far beyond sight, something gave way.
A drawn-out groan rolled through the wall,
stone grinding against stone as weight shifted where it never had before.
Stress raced along invisible seams, racing downward toward the wound Kochav had torn open.
Then the interior failed.
The wall folded inward.
A massive section of the escarpment buckled as a hidden cavern collapsed, its ceiling shearing away and vanishing into darkness.
Entire shelves of rock dropped straight down, swallowed by the earth as the mountain hollowed itself from within.
The noise was overwhelming.
A continuous thunder, layered and endless, as secondary collapses followed the first—supports failing, pillars snapping, millennia of pressure finally released.
The ground convulsed.
Beastmen were thrown to their knees.
Kroot dug claws into stone.
Felinids flattened themselves low as dust burst outward in a choking wave, blotting out sky and sound alike.
Air rushed into the breach.
A violent pull, dragging debris, loose stone, and clouds of powdered rock down into the widening maw. The world seemed to inhale.
Through the haze, a void took shape.
When the shaking finally subsided, the thunder fading into distant echoes, the dust began to settle.
Where the wall had once stood unbroken,
there was now a vast, sloping hollow torn into its face—raw and jagged, its ceiling fractured, its sides carved by collapse rather than craft.
A tunnel.
Not smooth. Not deliberate.
But colossal.
Cold air poured from it in a steady breath, carrying the scent of deep stone and ancient pressure long denied release.
Darkness stretched inward, descending into the mountain's heart at a shallow enough grade that even titanic mass could pass through.
—
At last,
Kochav withdrew his hand from the shattered ground.
Frost flaked from his fingers.
He rose slowly, dust and cold clinging to him.
He crossed the threshold as if it had always been meant to open for him,
boots crunching over fresh rubble, dust curling around his calves like reluctant smoke.
The cold inside the tunnel was sharper—older—pressing against the skin with the weight of buried ages.
The others followed.
Rouar entered first after him, moving low and fluid.
His staff hissed softly as he twisted the haft, caged lightning spilling free in branching arcs.
Blue light washed over raw stone, revealing torn striations where the mountain had been peeled open, veins of mineral glittering like exposed bone.
Helsin came next.
Inquisitorial black swallowed him almost entirely, his silhouette dissolving into shadow save for the bronze rosette at his belt.
It caught Rouar's light and threw it back in dull flashes, the sigil momentarily visible—authority walking willingly into the dark.
Mira rose last.
The throne groaned as she stood, stretching with an almost exaggerated languor.
She yawned, one gauntleted hand covering her gorget, utterly unimpressed by the impossible violence that had just rewritten the land.
Then she followed.
Gold reflected blue, then vanished as she passed beneath the broken stone arch, her armored form briefly haloed by light before the cavern swallowed her whole.
A dual-aspect Psyker.
A Felinid Assasin.
An Inquisitor Ordo Malleus.
And a Knight-Centura of the silence sisterhood.
Against an army of a Rogue Trader dynasty.
—
"What do you see, Monke'igh?"
Shadowgaze's voice hissed through the vox, laced with static.
—
Kochav looked forward—
Nothing.
A vast, empty expanse greeted him, barren and silent, stretching until the horizon swallowed it whole.
His brows furrowed, eyes narrowing.
Only a single white structure rising from the dead earth.
A colossal cylindrical spire,
smooth-sided and obscene in its scale, plunging straight down into the planet like the shaft of some titanic drill. Its surface was ribbed with segmented rings and lattice vents, faint lights crawling along its length in slow, methodical patterns.
"The Ivory Command," Kochav muttered.
More a conclusion than a guess.
He squinted, trying to judge the distance.
"What do you think—how far?"
—
Mira stepped forward, leaning slightly, eyes narrowing.
She measured in silence, then signed.
"Ten. Maybe twelve."
A pause.
"Terran kilometers."
She shrugged, as if the number were merely inconvenient.
—
Rouar slowed.
He knelt and placed one clawed paw against the ground.
The pads pressed flat to the stone, ears angling as his senses reached beyond sound—into vibration, rhythm, wound.
The earth trembled beneath his touch—continuous. Methodical.
A pressure that never eased.
His tail stilled.
"That structure," he said slowly,
"is unmaking nature."
A low vibration thrummed beneath his palm—constant, deliberate.
—
"Report?" Shadowgaze demanded again, impatience bleeding through the vox.
—
Helsin clicked his tongue and turned away from the open ground.
"Send everyone back.
There's no way we can march across this dead zone."
—
Kochav hissed under his breath.
"They know that," he said.
"They know we can't do anything."
Then,
despite it all, he stepped forward into the open.
POP! POP! POP!
Artillery flared from the spire.
Serpents of smoke and burning propellant tore across the sky, spiraling toward Kochav in screaming arcs.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The shells detonated just short of him.
Fire and shrapnel washed over his position, debris shrieking as it ricocheted off the translucent curve of his force-shield.
The ground around him cratered, stone pulverized into dust and fragments.
Yet he did not move.
He stood there, rigid, fist clenched—fuming.
They were mocking him.
—
While the others had already turned away and begun their retreat, Kochav remained, alone against the open ground, the distant spire still glaring white against the horizon.
Only after a long, bitter moment did he move.
He turned and followed.
—
They marched back toward a great tree—a living colossus rising from the land,
its presence a stark counterpoint to the sky-piercing drill they had just faced.
As they approached, the bark parted.
Within lay the Woodsway.
A vast network of intertwined roots, ancient and deliberate, stretching deep beneath the forest floor.
Each one of them were imbued by a spirit stone from Shadowgaze's craftworld.
The forest closed behind them.
And the world above no longer existed.
—
"What is the plan?"
The words pulled him back from exhaustion.
—
Kochav opened his eyes.
He was seated at a massive wooden war table, its surface scarred by age, blade marks, and old burns—a table that had seen more arguments than victories.
To his left sat Helsin, posture rigid and unreadable,
and beside him Mira, her golden armor catching the low light of the chamber.
Directly across from Kochav stood Shadowgaze, her red Autarch armor unmistakable even in the dim glow, helm tucked beneath one arm, gaze sharp and unyielding.
To his right was Rouar, silent as ever, staff resting against his shoulder, ears twitching faintly as he listened.
"How would I know? I'm as clueless as you are," Kochav mumbled,
his face planted against the wooden surface.
—
Then Helsin placed a hololithic display onto the table.
A three-dimensional image of the Spire shimmered into existence above it.
"I think it's a drill," he said.
"And whatever they're after, it has a higher priority than hunting us."
—
"Or finding it could destabilize the planet and kill us along with this world," Shadowgaze answered.
Her fist slammed down on the table, the impact rattling the hololithic spire and knocking Kochav back in his seat.
—
"Elaborate."
Kochav straightened, chin resting on his remaining arm—listening.
—
Shadowgaze sighed, leaning back as she closed her eyes.
"This world has been unstable since your kind first sullied it," she said quietly,
"and it has only worsened."
She opened her eyes again, gaze sharp and critical, ember light catching in it.
"I sensed a wrongness beneath the land.
The roots recoiled from an unseen force below the surface."
Her fingers curled slowly against the table.
"The spirits grew restless. Disharmonized."
—
"You've seen the land around the structure, mon-keigh," Rouar muttered, arms crossed.
—
"So now there's a time limit," Kochav groaned.
"Remind me—what exactly is our priority again?"
—
"Steal a ship and escape," Helsin answered flatly.
"But all available vessels are housed within the Spire," he added.
—
"Why does everything have to be so complicated," Kochav groaned again.
"How much time do we have?"
—
Mira signed swiftly, golden gauntlets whispering softly as her hands moved.
"Planetary mass. Spire scale. Land degradation...."
She paused, one finger touching her temple as she calculated in silence.
Then she looked up.
"A month," she signed.
A brief hesitation.
"Give or take."
—
"Why is it," Kochav snapped, pushing himself to his feet,
"that everything they do always costs a planet?"
He turned away from the table, pacing a few steps as frustration bled into every movement.
Then he left—his footsteps fading, light against the wooden floor.
—
"At least we gained something," Helsin spoke at last, his eyes drifting to the now-empty seat.
—
"We could scout the slopes," Rouar suggested, voice low and measured.
"I doubt they will fire beyond the dead zone."
His tail flicked once.
"That would at least give us a clearer picture of what we're facing."
—
"Then you will go with them," Shadowgaze said at last.
"Report back if anything changes."
She rose from her seat, the gesture alone enough to dismiss the gathering.
—
"Yes, my lady," Rouar answered.
He bowed once—precise, respectful—then turned and left.
—
Somewhere deeper within the Underwoods,
Kochav kept walking.
He entered a quiet chamber where luminous fungi threaded across the ceiling like pale constellations.
Their glow stirred faintly as he passed beneath them, reacting to his presence.
A figure lay at the center of the room.
Bergelmirthe Grey Knight.
He rested upon a carved wooden frame, its shape unmistakably funereal—less a bed than a sarcophagus fashioned by those who did not dare entomb him yet.
One pauldron was ruined, split and scorched where an Exitus null-round had struck true.
A second breach gaped in his chestplate, ceramite folded inward as if time itself had recoiled from the wound.
His hands were folded around the haft of his Nemesis force hammer, locked in a warrior's vigil even in stillness.
An idol laid upon a bier,
awaiting either awakening—or judgment.
"If you don't wake up now, I'm removing your helmet," Kochav muttered, trying for levity.
The dark circles beneath his eyes betrayed him.
He lifted his right hand, hovering it near Bergelmir's face—close enough to provoke, not quite close enough to touch.
The ward etched around Kochav's left stump flared cerulean, reacting instantly.
The sigils—fed by Bergelmir's own blood—burned hot as his hand crossed an unseen threshold.
"Ouch!" Kochav hissed, jerking back instinctively, clutching his left side as his fingers brushed the still-warm inscription.
He winced, breathing through the sting.
"If you're going to bite," he grumbled, irritation bleeding through fatigue,
"at least wake up and do it yourself. Asshole."
With a sigh, he lowered himself to the floor and sat beside the wooden frame, his back resting against it.
For a moment, he stayed there—small, quiet—
keeping vigil beside a warrior who refused to wake.
—
He lifted his left arm and stared at the emptiness where his forearm had once been.
The ward flared again, then the whisper came.
Daemonic.
"You are desperate…
Use us.
Seek us, and we will change the thread of fate—
together."
The voice fractured as it spoke, overlapping tones folding into one another, as if several mouths shared the same promise.
—
Kochav barked out a short, humorless laugh—pure disgust.
He turned his face away, dismissing it entirely.
"You're a tool," he muttered flatly.
"Tools don't talk."
His jaw tightened.
"And I don't care about a tool's opinion."
The ward flared in response, cerulean light biting into the air as if to seal the declaration.
The whisper faltered.
Then stopped—
—For now.
—
He lingered there for a while.
When he finally rose to leave, someone was waiting just beyond the doorway.
Kochav lifted his gaze from the floor and met theirs.
"You're coming with me, Rouar?" he asked.
—
"Yes," Rouar replied as he stepped forward, already turning away.
"I will join you and the Silent Queen at the Northern Hold.
We will map the area around the Spire."
He moved past, leading the way back into the hall,
—
and Kochav followed.
"At least they can't hide."