The world below the Auric Silence had no dawn.
Its star was a dull ember, never bright enough to push the dark away, only to paint it in shades of bruised blue and iron. Lightning stitched the upper clouds but never touched the ground; the storms seemed to circle the planet out of habit, like predators that had forgotten hunger.
Kael watched from the bridge viewport while the ship sank through the vapour bands. The glare reflected in his lenses, black on black. Even with filters open, the landscape resisted definition—ridges, towers, lights that were not fires but the reflections of other lights. A city under glass. Var Juren stood beside him, gaunt under the lumen strips.
"No records of this system before now," he said. "Yet there are manufactorums, gridlines, population heat. Someone built here and then decided to be forgotten."
"Someone," Kael repeated. The word tasted familiar.
They dropped through the last layer of cloud. Rain slicked the gunship's hull in constant ribbons, metallic and slow. The landing pad was an island of steel surrounded by an ocean of rooftops. Beyond it stretched a metropolis whose lights trembled in the wet air like fever dreams.
When the ramp fell, the rain hit armour hard enough to sound like applause. The first drop steamed against Kael's breastplate and rolled down the lines of his armour. He looked across the pad and saw, waiting in the shadows, figures thin as starving dogs—watchers. Their skin shone the same colour as the rain. And their eyes… all black. Not dark iris, not dilated pupils, but entire orbs of midnight that reflected nothing.
Malchion voxed softly. "Mutation?"
"Adaptation," Kael said. "They see what they need to see."
The watchers didn't speak until Kael stepped off the ramp. Then one—a woman, probably, though her hair was cut to the scalp—lifted a lamp. The light wavered, caught in the rain, then went dull as if it had entered fog that wasn't there. "You came fast," she said in a voice half-gone from disuse. "No one comes from above anymore."
Kael studied her eyes. He saw himself reflected twice: black inside black. "We came to ask why."
The woman looked past him at the Company forming in ranks, shapes taller than any human frame. "Because the sky forgot us," she said. "And we learned not to ask."
They moved through streets that glistened like veins. Buildings leaned together to make alleys that never saw the sky. Every face that watched them from windows had the same absence of white, the same mirror-dark gaze. Kael felt the echo in his chest—not recognition, but a kind of relief that disturbed him more than fear would have. These were his colours. This world was a palette already mixed to match his armour.
At a junction of four streets stood a spire gutted by fire long ago. The soot had become permanent. A child sat in the doorway holding a shard of mirror glass. When Kael passed, the child lifted it, saw nothing but the reflection of the black sky, and smiled as if that was enough.
Silas's auspex whispered static. "Power distribution minimal. Local grid self-contained. I read movement below—levels upon levels."
"Downward culture," Joras muttered. "They dig instead of build."
Kael thought of Terra's prison sinks. "Darkness is safer than open ground," he said. "It hides mistakes."
The descent began where the street turned into stairs cut from obsidian. The steps glistened with rain and the drips made a sound like ticking. The deeper they went, the warmer the air grew; the darkness thickened until it felt physical. Kael's cloak clung to him, drinking the meagre light from the lumen beads. He felt the other darkness—the one that obeyed him—stirring under his skin like a slow breath.
At the bottom, an atrium opened. Lamps burned under cages. Men and women moved between them, dressed in patched leathers, weapons scavenged from ages. When they saw the Astartes, they did not shout. They froze. Silence held them as surely as gravity.
A tall man stepped forward. His coat had once been velvet; now it was rain-soaked suede. His eyes were black mirrors like the rest. "Visitors from the void," he said. "What's left to take?"
"Names," Kael answered.
The man smiled with all the patience of someone who'd tried defiance once and kept the scar. "Marik," he said. "Street-master. For now."
Kael let the word sit between them, then nodded. "Marik, tell me what you fear most."
The man's smile broke a little. "The morning."
"Why?"
"Because it never comes. We've forgotten what to do if it does."
Kael turned slightly. "Malchion—record that. It's a good truth."
He stepped closer to Marik until their reflections merged in the wet floor. "You'll gather your people. We'll speak when they can listen."
Marik looked around at the crowd. "They're listening now."
"Then they'll obey," Kael said.
And they did.
As the hours stretched, Kael moved among the people. He watched the way they avoided the light, the way they flinched when laughter escaped them. He caught his reflection in a broken window and saw what they saw: armour dark as old iron, eyes the same void as theirs. For the first time since his creation, he looked like belonging.
That thought unsettled him.
He walked away from the crowd and into the deeper alleys, where the buildings became cliffs and the air smelled of stone dust and human oil. The darkness followed him like a tide. At a blind corner he stopped, pressed a gauntlet against the wall, and whispered without intending to. The light in his helm flickered; the world inhaled. Shadows folded over him until even his armour lost outline. The rain on his pauldron slowed, each drop dragging a tail of black behind it.
He breathed out, and the dark released him.
He had not asked it to obey, but it had.
"Captain?" Malchion's voice, distant in the vox. "We've found something. You should see this."
Kael found Malchion at the mouth of a service tunnel where the city's face had been shaved to bone. Pipes as thick as bodies ran along the ceiling, sweating, their joints laced with wire and prayer-ribbon. Water whispered down the concrete in hair-thin streams, each with its own sound. Two boys with black eyes and bare feet stood ten paces back and tried not to stare. They failed; staring was the only free thing here.
"Silas traced a feed that shouldn't exist," Malchion said, helm angled, voice lowered by habit rather than need. "Power that doesn't show on any board. It goes down."
"Everything here goes down," Kael said, and stepped inside.
The tunnel narrowed until the armour learned new manners. Cloaks brushed slime and drank it without complaint. The smell shifted from wet iron to old dust baked and rebaked. The floor fell away by increments, then by decision: stairs poured in one long spill from some ancient mould. Their tread sounded like apology. Silas's auspex chirred to itself in contentment and pointed left when walls offered three rights.
They came to a door that wasn't a door so much as a mistake the rock regretted. No hinges, no handle, only a seam that knew it was a seam. Kael stood before it and felt his tongue shape a word that had never been taught. He didn't let it leave his mouth. He opened the codex instead. The pages showed a diagram of something built to be forgotten: counterweights tucked in stone, pressure flutes, a harp of channels that sang when air moved.
He pressed his palm to the seam and pushed gently where the diagram said stone would pretend not to be hollow. The world around them took a breath. The seam widened with a sigh that sounded embarrassed to be heard. The door slid sideways into its own shadow.
The room beyond was cool and dry, the air so still it felt like glass. Lights lived in the floor—threads no thicker than veins—pulsing faintly with a rhythm that did not quite match a human heart. Banks of machines sat in considerate rows. They wore the patina of long use, the dust of long neglect, and the careful touch of someone who cleaned them without worship.
Three figures stood at a console, robes hooded, masks lacquered. They turned together as if remembering choreography. Their eyes (the two who had eyes to show) were black as every other in this city, but they were not surprised.
"You took your time," the first said. The mask made their voice sexless. "We've been keeping the lights off for you."
Kael didn't raise his weapon. "Whose lights?"
"Everyone's," the second said, tapping the panel. "The city's. The ones above and below. The ones under palaces you haven't seen yet. He said teachers were coming." The mask canted in what might have been a smile. "You look like the lesson."
"The Sigillite," Silas said quietly. It wasn't a question; it sounded like a diagnosis.
The third figure chuckled, and the sound said tired, competent, unafraid of being killed so long as it was after the work. "Call us maintenance," he said. "It keeps the jealous gods sleeping."
Kael moved closer. The machines spoke a language of numbers and flows, written in the plain hand of an honest clerk. He loved them for that, a little. "What did you keep off?"
"Attention," the first said. Fingers danced. A schematic unfolded on the panel—this city's veins mapped over something older, harder, deeper. "Signals go up. Signals don't come back. We eat the echoes so no one remembers there's food here."
"Why?" Kael asked.
"Because when the sky looks down," the second replied, "it eats everything it can name."
Joras's helm tilted, listening to the city through armour. "Something below this," he murmured. "Weight, not mass. The way a dream sits on your chest."
Kael felt it too then: a downward insistence, not gravity, not magnetism—a familiarity with no courtesy. The dark in the room leaned toward him as a dog leans toward a hand that has fed it before. He didn't feed it. He let it feel the denial and live.
On the panel's margin, scratched into the lacquer with a blade, was a symbol a child might have drawn if the child had learned its letters in fear: a bat-wing, stylised, a curve and two points, too simple to be anything but deliberate.
He touched it with a knuckle. "Who drew this?"
The third figure shrugged inside the robe. "Men who thought the mark would save them from their neighbours. Or from themselves. It didn't. It never does."
Kael copied it into his slate with the accuracy he saved for names. When his gauntlet moved away, the thread-lights in the floor brightened for a single pulse, then went meek again. He pretended not to notice. He suspected the city had stopped pretending.
"Seal this place when we leave," he told Silas. "If anyone opens it again, I want the stones to remember that they were closed."
"They'll remember," Silas said, hands already caressing locks invisible to other men.
The robed figures stood aside to let the giants pass. As Kael reached the threshold, the first spoke again, almost gently. "You should know—there are more like this. Far from here. Near places with better weather and worse men. Your ring opens them. Your eyes will be believed."
Kael looked at the iron on his finger and the black in his reflection and allowed himself a small truth. "It isn't the ring."
"No," the figure agreed. "It isn't."
They climbed into rain that had learned patience. The city was quieter than before, as if it had decided not to cough while guests were listening. Men slept in doorways with their hands on their chests. Old women counted loaves without looking up. Marik stood by the bread, eyes down, the ledger under his arm as if warmth. He did not meet Kael's gaze. He didn't need to. He had understood the lesson and chosen to live with its taste.
At the pad, Var Juren waited with his hands behind his back, coat beading water as if it resented the attention. "Report," he said, not because he didn't know but because saying it made the machine of command run without grit.
"Unregistered infrastructure secured," Kael answered. "Local authority cowed, not broken. Population compliant under minimal pressure. The undercity is… dense."
"Dense," Juren repeated, and his human eye creased a fraction. "You felt it."
"I felt what I needed to." Kael kept his voice level. He did not look back at the skyline that pretended to be a mouth. "This place knows us."
"Us," Juren said. "Or you."
Kael did not reply. The rain made the decision for him by getting louder.
They flew before dawn-that-never-came, bow rising on a column of blue that made the city's roofs vibrate. Kael watched through the side port as the lights of the streets drew long threads and then snapped. The world below let them go without argument. Above, the clouds parted to show a star that had forgotten how to be bright. He wondered if anyone missed it.
In the troop bay, the Company settled into the ritual of leaving: kit checked until boredom bent into calm, magazines seated with the whisper that said home, plates wiped down so blood would not harden where it would be found later by men who looked for excuses. Malchion sat across from Kael and flexed his fingers. "They had our eyes," he said, almost conversational.
"They had their own," Kael answered.
"Like ours," Malchion insisted, but without heat. "Not just black. Empty. Like they never learned to reflect."
Kael lifted his helm and let the bay's thin light fail on his face. "We reflect what we choose," he said.
"You think they chose that?"
"I think they survived it." He set the helm back and the world shrank to the correct size again.
The vox pinged a private channel. Malcador's voice arrived as if it had already been in the room and decided to speak. "You found the maintenance."
"We found a room that doesn't exist," Kael said.
"Good. There are others. There will be a time when doors matter more than armies. Did you meet the people?"
"We did."
"And?"
"They remind me of work I haven't done yet."
Malcador made a small sound that might have been approval and might have been grief. "Hold that thought. It will keep you honest."
The channel clicked and died. Kael looked at the deck until the hum of the engines became steady again. He let the darkness pool at the edge of the bay in a trick of light the armour couldn't explain, then told it to settle. It did, grumbling like an old dog told to stay off a couch it believed was its right.
Var Juren came forward when the bay lights shifted to the warm tone that meant we are leaving a story behind us. He stood without ceremony. "We have a vector," he said. "We will not be the only ones on it. Elements of the VII and the Sixteenth are moving coreward to other fires. We go rimward again."
"Far?" Kael asked.
"Far enough to call it beyond and not be corrected." Juren's augmetic eye clicked twice. "The Sigillite's office attached an addendum." He held out a slate.
Kael read. The seal sat in the corner like a keyhole.
Continue. Do not mark what you find. Do not name it. Some truths walk toward those who do not call them.
— M.
He closed the slate. He could feel the unasked word in his mouth like a shard of glass he had declined to swallow. Father. It would cut if spoken. He kept his tongue.
The gunship locked to its cradle. The Auric Silence turned her nose to the dark and let her engines decide how fast the future should arrive. In the quiet before acceleration pinned them, Kael allowed himself one unmilitary thought:
There are places that invent men. Sometimes they do it before the men are born.
The straps took him in hand. The ship pushed. The rain-world dwindled to a smear, then a dot, then a memory with weight. The Company slept or pretended. Kael watched the lines on the deck where boots had worn the paint shy.
He did not know the name of the world he had left, and he did not speak the name that waited for it. He did not need to. The dark under his breastplate had already learned it, and it was patient.