WH 40k: Transcendence

Warhammer is a grim, dark universe. In a way that I as an author cannot depict it from Cassian's pov. After all he is the protagonist of this fanfic, no matter how much he suffers he will have plot armour no matter how thin. So, here is an experimental chapter of my creation, let me know what you all think. Enjoy.

---

The vox-casters screamed static for a second before settling. No hymns this time. No endless loop of Martyr's Psalm #77 or the sacred recitation of Saint Ekaterina's Eviscerations. Just crackle, hiss... and then the voice.

Old. Rough. Worn like cracked leather.

"This is Captain Legate Vos Galliar," the voice said, brittle and iron hard. "By the Emperor's mercy, I bring word."

Silence followed. The kind of silence that wasn't natural aboard St. Heliosa's Lament, where every second of every day was usually filled with the sound of footsteps, sermons, cogwork, prayers, the gasping coughs of incense choked lungs.

Some of the younger acolytes froze mid-task. Others stared at the vox-grilles as if expecting the Emperor himself to speak next.

"I am the great grandson of Captain Vel Galliar, first of my name to guide this vessel from Holy Terra nearly five centuries ago. Since then, we have sailed the warp on a sacred journey across the stars. Many have died aboard this ship. More were born. Most will never see the soil their forebears prayed toward."

A pause.

"But I have news. News worthy of pause. Of prayer. Of awe."

A beat passed.

"In a few months' time, we will emerge. The Lament will breach the veil and exit the Immaterium. We will arrive in the Gothic Sector."

Gasps. Low murmurs. Somewhere, a child began to weep, not out of fear, but because their mother collapsed to her knees, sobbing with a kind of joy that felt dangerous. Like blasphemy. Or closer to madness.

"Stand ready. Prepare yourselves. Ready your minds. Steel your souls. The God Emperor's eyes will fall upon us soon, and not all shall meet His gaze with clean hearts."

The vox went dead.

No music resumed.

That silence stuck around too long.

---

Beneath the hull of the ship, the warp wasn't still. It was clawing.

Something was wrong.

Not wrong like a malfunction in a reactor conduit or a spike in air pressure. Wrong in a way that made the Geller Field feel like it was shrinking. Like the thin shell of reality around the St. Heliosa's Lament was buckling under something bigger than time.

The warp outside had begun to churn in patterns that had no pattern. Fractures spread like mold through glass webs of dark thought, glimpses of impossible stars shattering and reforming again, screaming without sound. A fire black sea sloshed against the edge of the field. Every few hours it pulsed. Once. Like a heartbeat. Or a knock.

Nobody saw it directly, only the Navigators, locked deep within their sanctum, screaming into their thrones while the choir tried to muffle their cries with louder hymns.

But the crew felt it. The psykers did too. And the beast in the warp, whatever it was, was drawing closer.

---

The St. Heliosa's Lament groaned.

Not from damage or malfunction, but as if the vessel itself were sighing an old soul stretching after a thousand years of sleep. The Geller field hissed as it peeled away, its flickering shell of sanity and prayer melting into the void.

They had exited.

The Warp spat them back into realspace with all the elegance of a half-choked cough. One moment, there was the endless madness of unreality, a realm of shifting flesh and shrieking stars and the next, only silence. Black, glinting silence. Space. Real space. Normal space. The kind with physics that obeyed the Emperor's will and not the ravening laughter of nameless things.

And hanging in the distance, surrounded by a soft golden haze, was the planet.

Savavern.

A soft blue sphere encased in gauzy clouds and thin atmospheric rings. No fires. No scars. No decay. Just light. Soft and warm. Impossible and real.

The pilgrims gathered at the thick glasteel ports. The first to arrive fell silent. Then the second. Then the hundred. Then a thousand.

Then the weeping started.

A woman near the front dropped to her knees, clutching her rosary. An old man sobbed openly, his voice thick with phlegm and age, muttering over and over again, "We made it… we actually made it…"

Some didn't cry. Some just laughed. Not madness just release. A breath held for generations finally let go. Hands clutched at the ports, lips pressed to the frost lined edges, desperate to touch what they could not yet walk upon.

They began to sing.

Quietly, at first barely a whisper. A child, no older than five, began humming an old hymn. Then another voice joined. Then more. Low voices. Shaky. Out of tune. But beautiful in a way only desperation can be.

Before long, the ship's old halls echoed with the sound of ten thousand throats singing "Blessed Be the Path of Terra" a song last sung by their great grandparents, passed down mouth to mouth through steel corridors and flickering prayer tapestries.

Liturgies unfurled from balconies. Servitors sprayed sacred mist down from pipes shaped like cherub mouths. Confessors moved through the crowds, daubing holy oils across foreheads and whispering the Eightfold Benedictions. Some faithful kissed the feet of robed Tech priests, who marched stiffly along the gantries, swinging censers and intoning litanies to the ship's Machine Spirit.

In the Engine decks, Mechanicus adepts gathered before brass panels and rune etched consoles. One of them Arch Enginseer Callix 17 raised a hand and began the Rite of Release, his voice a grated stammer of binharic and Gothic:

"Oh Great Machine Spirit of Iron and Void, thou hast carried us across nightmare. We give you now silence and sanctity. Rest, O Sainted Hull."

—

With a final spark and sigh of vented plasma, the Warp-drives powered down. The red light dimmed to amber. The engines purred in reverent hush.

Down below, near the landing bays, the pilgrims lined up. Tens of thousands. Whole bloodlines. Families with names like Golvad, Leta, Marruk, and Orress. Some wore patched-up voidsuits. Others clung to worn banners of saints faded to grey. No one pushed. No one shouted. The quiet was deeper than space itself.

A Confessor named Arvim touched the head of a boy in line. The boy was maybe seven, trembling from head to toe. "You'll walk under a sky soon," the Confessor said, not smiling but not stern either. "Your own shadow will fall on grass."

The boy cried silently.

Behind them, drop-shuttles hissed as they pressurized. Boarding bridges extended. Orders were called out by pallid faced Navy servitors and looped vox chants.

The pilgrims moved forward.

As the drop bays opened, the light of Savavarn bled in across the grey hangars. Pale gold, filtered and soft. It looked like sunlight through cathedral glass. Many dropped to their knees the moment they saw it. Some covered their eyes. A few reached forward, trying to scoop it into their hands.

In one corner, a woman with silver braids held up a photo of her grandfather he'd died three generations ago, but the story said he was the first of their blood to step aboard the Lament. She held the photo high and whispered, "We made it, da."

A minute later, the landing alarms began their slow toll.

One by one, the drop-ships launched.

As they descended, the atmosphere of Savavarn shimmered like a dream long chased and finally caught.

The St. Heliosa's Lament, its journey near an end, hung in orbit above a world it had never seen but had dreamed of for a hundred years.

And in its wake, the Warp stirred once more. But that was for another day.

Today, the pilgrims walked toward a sunlit sky.

---

[CASE FILE 772-A: Subject: Eliora Thane, Civitas Class Worker, Stationed aboard Pilgrimage Vessel Saint Heliosa's Lament, Deck 32, Medicae]

[Result: Terminated. Classification: Warp Aberration : Neonatal]

[Sanction Level: VIII – Internal Clearance Only]

---

She was going to name him Jonas.

She'd picked the name six months ago, back when she was still scrubbing reactor sludge off filtration pumps and vomiting up her meals from radiation exposure. Back when the pregnancy still felt like a distant thing, like something soft and far away from the rust and the burns and the stink of half-alive laborers in the underdecks.

Jonas Thane. A good, honest name. Her husband's name.

"He'll be strong," she used to whisper at night, palms pressed to her swollen belly. "Like you were."

She didn't have a shrine to the Emperor in her hab. Just a tiny pict-screen with a fuzzy photo of Jonas, taken three years ago before he was drafted and sent to die on some planet whose name she couldn't even pronounce. They never sent his body back. Just a stamped data slate and a prayer card.

She kept the slate next to her cot. And she told it every night: "Your son's going to live. I'll get him out of this place. I swear it."

She decided to travel to pilgrim world, for her child.

---

The day came earlier than expected.

Medicae said it was stress. The heat. The malnourishment. The work. "Nothing to worry about," they told her, even as her legs gave out beneath her and she was dragged across three decks to reach the maternity bay. They hooked her to machines older than she was. Servo-skulls buzzed overhead like flies. One of them sparked and dropped mid-flight.

The floor tiles were stained with old blood. The cot she lay on had restraints built in.

She didn't care.

All she could think was:

"I'm going to meet him."

"He's coming."

"Jonas is coming."

---

The pain was brutal. Animal.

She bit her lip raw. Tore her nails against the bed rails. The painkillers they gave her didn't touch the real thing.

Still, she bore it. Like she had borne everything else. Radiation. Death. Grief.

She'd borne the loss of her husband, the collapse of her hab-unit, the day the ration lines had run out and she'd stolen algae cakes from a dead man's pocket. She bore the memory of praying until her throat bled on Ascension Day, not because she believed, but because hope was the only rebellion left to her.

So yes. She bore the pain.

Because when it ended, her son would be here.

And she could start again.

---

The moment stretched.

She screamed. Pushed. Cried.

The medicae counted. Monotone. Dead-eyed.

And then, finally

A child.

Slick, small, gasping,

Only,

He didn't gasp.

He didn't cry.

---

He laughed.

---

At first, it didn't register. She thought maybe it was her, maybe she was delirious. But then the sound came again. A sharp, bubbling titter, like wind through broken pipes. A wet little giggle.

The medicae froze.

The servo-skull twitched and dropped from the air with a high-pitched whine.

The machine next to her monitoring her vitals flatlined for a moment. Then started again.

No one moved.

Except her.

Eliora turned her head. "Is he–?" she whispered.

No answer.

"Is he alright?"

Still no answer.

Then,

She saw him.

And everything in her broke.

---

He was smiling.

Newborns don't smile. Not like that.

Not wide like a slit in the skin.

Not with eyes open.

Not with eyes like that.

Black. Glossy. Reflecting light wrong. Deep. Like holes.

Like pits that didn't stop.

And his gums,

Not teeth. Not yet. Just the suggestion of them. Thin white lines.

Waiting.

He opened his mouth again. Not to breathe.

But to whisper.

"Mmaahrrn… ch'zael... Ahhhnn… Maa…"

Guttural. Deep. From a throat too small to make those sounds.

It wasn't language. But she understood.

Every part of her did.

The whisper felt like sin.

She started to cry.

---

"I want to hold him," she said. Her voice cracked.

The medicae didn't move.

"I SAID I WANT TO HOLD HIM!" she screamed.

Still nothing.

So she reached.

Blood still dripping from her legs, hands shaking, she took the child from the medic's frozen arms and cradled him against her breast.

The baby laughed again. Louder this time. Echoing.

She kissed his forehead.

Rocked him gently.

Whispered to him like she used to when he was still inside her.

"It's okay," she said. "You're okay. You didn't mean it. You didn't mean it. You're just… you're scared, aren't you? You're just scared."

But something inside her knew.

He wasn't scared.

He was hungry.

---

The purity alarm sounded.

Steel doors clanged open.

Guards entered. Flamers at the ready.

Eliora screamed.

"No! He's my son! He's MINE! He's JONAS!"

The child whispered something again.

One of the guards vomited in his helmet.

They pulled her back.

She didn't let go.

They beat her.

She still didn't let go.

They wrenched the child from her arms.

She bit one of them.

They cracked her jaw.

She crawled. Reached.

"He's all I HAVE!"

The furnace door opened. A hiss of steam and sacred oils.

---

They threw him in.

---

There was no scream.

No cry.

No noise at all.

Just a pop of fire.

And then,

Nothing.

---

They left her alone in the room.

Just her.

The furnace.

And the bloodstained floor.

She crawled back to the cot.

Laid down.

Clutched her belly like she used to.

Then she slit her throat with a broken piece of the vitals monitor.

No prayers. No rites.

Only her blood.

And a single name scratched in her own skin,

"Jonas."

---

The incident was classified. Sanitized. Filed away.

---

Word Count: 2206

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