A Light Not Extinguished

Five Thousand Years: Part 2

Five Thousand Years: Part Two

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The being known as Kathicia Jorenn fell flat onto the floor.

Five thousand years of struggling in the Warp had taken its toll; the bronze armor was gone, replaced by a slapdash work of daemonic bone from all that she has killed, while every inch of her skin iswascovered in bruises and scars. Then there was the ascent back to realspace; hounded by the slaves of the Gods every step of the way, it felt like another eternity before she had managed to claw her way back.

She is too tired to do anything other than conceal her presence from all sight, before continuing to lie on the floor and falling into a deep sleep.

Weeks passed. In front of her, hiver gangers and Arbites skirmish and fight, oblivious to the woman clad in daemon bones sleeping on the floor. At once point a coterie of hivers drink and sing around a fire next to her, and she still remains unnoticed, both body and soul rendered invisible.

After exactly thirty-two days, her blue eyes snapped open once more. Blearily, the Marshal stood up, taking note of her surroundings. She appeared to be in some sort of run-down storage room; the paint on the walls is peeling, shelves empty except for some cans of rotten food. Expanding her senses to the rooms beyond and the surface thoughts of the souls nearby, she could immediately deduce that she was in a Hive Spire.

Kathicia took a deep breath of the rank air, running a hand over her face as it shifted to that of a pale-faced hiver's with unassuming brown eyes, changing the bone armor for a set of dirty rags, and opened the door to be immediately confronted by a pockmark-faced ganger.

"What are you doing here, huh?" The ganger shouted, pointing an autogun at her chest. "Never seen you around here—"

Kathicia grabbed him by the throat. "Just a moment, please." The psyker delved into his mind past nonexistent defenses, only looking at what she needed. A lexicon of the planet's spoken language, and what was going on. Apparently a spacefaring organization called the Imperium of Man had conquered the planet called Akastra she was now on, and was now starting to integrate the underhives after they had finished with the upper levels. The ganger in question belonged to one of the gangs that was currently resisting said integration.

Spacefaring. Just what she needed. And apparently this Imperium was offering free citizenship to whoever willingly surrendered to them too. Kathicia let him go, and he dropped to the floor like a sack of bricks, temporarily knocked out. As she left, she erased the memory of her ever being here from his mind.

[...]

"Hey! Don't shoot, I'm unarmed! Unarmed, ya Imperials!" Kathicia shouted in an underhiver's dialect as she approached the end of a street where Arbites had formed a blockade, only one tiny part of the massive cordon around this section of the underhive.

The commanding voice of one of the Arbites pierced through the tension-filled air. "Hands up! On your knees!" they roared, their tone brooking no opposition.

"Alright alright! I give up man!" Kathicia yelled as she got down on the floor. "I just want a job and a meal, damnit. I'm joining your side!"

A moment of silence followed as the Arbites assessed the situation, one of them turning a remote scanning device on her their suspicion palpable, while two of them came forward to pat her down. Finally, one of them spoke, their voice gruff. "She's clear, sir. No bombs or weapons on her."

The commanding officer nodded, their gaze fixed on Kathicia. "You have any ID?" they asked, their tone demanding answers.

"No can do, bossman." Underhivers never had any identification papers of any sort.

The commanding officer turned to one of their subordinates. "Peyes, get her to one of the registration stations," they ordered, their voice firm. A fresh-face recruit saluted, before hastily escorting Kathicia past the blockade out into a comparatively cleaner street festooned with aquila iconography, and into a registration stall.

Kathicia sat down, the bored official opposite her not bothering to look up. "Name?"

"Kelmah Vendes." One of her old identities that had been discarded during the Age of Strife.

"Do you know how to read or write?"

"Yeah, bit of both. Momma used to teach me a bit before her head got 'sploded by them glassheads."

"In that case, fill this out." A dataslate was handed to her. Kathicia took her time writing, idly taking comfort in the simple action of boring bureaucracy instead of constant violence. When she was done, she gave it back to the official, who hooked it up to a printer machine next to her. The machine made a few noises, before printing out a card and a set of documents.

"Your ID." The bureaucrat said. "That transport at the end of the street will take you to manufactorum block 3E," they informed her, their voice carrying a note of boredom, and the monotone of someone who had repeated the same words a thousand times. "There, you'll find opportunities for employment and sustenance. Prove your worth, and you may just find yourself on a path to a better life."

Kathicia trudged up onto the crammed transport, squeezing onto a window seat alongside so many other Hivers. The hovertrain took off, swiftly delivering them to a residential hab-block. An electronic voice echoed through speakers as the crowd shuffled into the complex: "...one day of rest is allowed. Report for work at Manufactorum Section 3E-1 at approximately 0800 time tomorrow. Failure to show will result in disciplinary action..."

She headed to her assigned apartment. It was clean but cramped, with a tiny toilet. There was a tiny shelf of books— mostly mass-printed low grade entertainment, but the one that caught her eye was the one simply titled Imperial Truth.

Kathicia plucked it off the shelf, proceeding to spend the whole day reading it. The ideals of human supremacy, hatred of the xeno and the mutant. It denounced faith as heresy, dismissing it as a foolish and detrimental belief system. Amidst these disconcerting ideas, one recurring theme stood out—the glory of the Emperor of Mankind. The book reverberated with a relentless mantra, extolling the virtues and accomplishments of this enigmatic figure, alongside twenty generals that claimed to be his sons. The Alpha-Plus psyker had a deep frown on her face as she finished the book. The Age of Strife had been a time of immense turmoil and suffering, and she had hoped for a brighter future, one that embraced unity and cooperation. Yet, the book's contents painted a different picture, one that hinted at a society where fanaticsm and prejudice reigned.

As Kathicia trudged into the manufactorum alongside other menials, a cacophony of machinery assaulted her senses. The air was thick with acrid fumes and metallic tang, a constant reminder of the hive's ceaseless production and the toil that lay ahead. Idly, she watched the vast assembly lines stretching out before her, a mesmerizing dance of servo-arms, conveyor belts, and hissing steam vents. The rhythmic clanking and whirring of machinery provided a relentless soundtrack, drowning out any semblance of tranquility. She was no stranger to crude machinery; Degraded tech like this had become more and more depressingly common as the Age of Strife dragged on, but it was still disheartening to be reminded of everything that humanity had lost.

Assigned to the manufactorum's lowest ranks, Kathicia's role was to perform the most menial and repetitive tasks. Donning a tattered factory uniform, she joined the ranks of their fellow laborers, a sea of weary faces marked by grime and exhaustion. A foreman's voice barked out orders, assigning hundreds including Kathicia to a monotonous station at the assembly line. Their job was to perform a single, mind-numbing task in an endless cycle of repetition; assembling Solar Auxilia helmets.

Kathicia kept her body moving on autopilot as she began to plan. Her identity had to remain secret; she didn't know the real intentions of the Imperium of Man, nor if it truly ruled the stars as it claimed. Intel wise she was in the dark; she didn't even know if any renegade Men of Iron remained, waiting to take a shot at the former High Marshal.

The next step had to be getting offworld and to wherever the central government was, then. The booklet had claimed that the capital world was Terra, 'the Throneworld and dominion of the Emperor'. Once she made her way there, she could start doing some real work.

Now, how to get off the world without being detected? That booklet had mentioned something about Black Ships. It encouraged people to turn themselves in if they displayed psychic powers, and these 'Black Ships' would take them to glorious Terra in order to learn how to control their powers. Whether that was a lie to get rid of psykers or not, at least Kathicia would learn something from that.

Cautiously, Kathicia extended her Warp sight into orbit. A stroke of luck— there indeed seemed to be a Warp-capable fleet in orbit, just as black as their name implied. Now, time to give a convincing display. Kathicia 'accidentally' let a spark of Warp-lightning fly off her fingers, setting the helmet she was assembling on fire.

"Witch!" One of the people shouted next to her as everyone in the vicinity immediately backed away. "Guards, guards! Get down here!"

"What do you mean? I'm not one of them!" Kathicia shouted angrily. "It's a mistake! I—" She let the Warp lightning fly off her fingers again. "Oh." She pretended to look dumbly at her hands. "Damn."

Four burly guards rushed into the room. "Unsanctioned psyker! Surrender immediately!"

Plastering a look of fear on her face, Kathicia held her hands up. Two of them immediately grabbed her by the arms, before being frogmarched to the exit with the other two pointing lasguns at her back. One of them spoke urgently into a vox.

They took a cargo lift straight to the top of the Hive Spire, then outside to a landing pad. Right as they emerged into open air, an airborne shuttle touched down, and a team of soldiers emerged, clad in black armour that was made up of interlocking light metal plates.

"This is the target?" One of them asked the guards.

"Yes sir. She was compliant and didn't resist arrest."

"Much obliged." The Black Sentinel said, another one stepping out from the ship carrying a set of suppression manacles ready to put on Kathicia. "We'll take it from here."

They were interrupted by a peal of jubilant laughter, and everyone on the landing pad turned to the psyker, who was staring at the sky laughing. The Black Sentinels instantly trained their weapons on her, anticipating an uncontrolled psychic outburst.

"I'm sorry." Kathicia coughed out. "It's just, it's just that it's my first time looking at the sky. It's so... pretty!"

An underhiver was lucky to ever see the sky, even if it was the smog-filled grey haze of Akastra. Most hivers never saw the sky at all. Slowly, the Black Sentinels put down their guns.

The laughter wasn't fake, but it wasn't for the reason Kathicia said. The woman was looking into the Empyrean, where a great golden pyre stood on the planet she knew to be Terra, cleansing all around it in its glorious radiance, shining with the same Anathemic light that could only belong to the man who Kathicia had saved five thousand years ago.

He's alive.

"Yeah." Kathicia mumbled, a tear falling down her cheek even as she held out her hands to be cuffed. "It's beautiful."