Lord of the Night

And then there was the energy she deeded, there was the adrenaline and fear and mingled rage, and there was the crackling fist of her psychic self, taking form, locking around the lever like a snapping maw, pulling with all its strength. Pulling so hard she felt her eyes fill with blood. Pulling so hard her ears popped and her heart roared in protest. Pulling so hard she thought her bones would shatter. She thought her veins would explode.

The lever turned.

The doors awoke like slumbering gods, shedding the layer of dust and ice scrawled across their inner surface, grinding open like the gates to some forbidden paradise. An arctic wind cut between them, flurrying snow boiling into the cavern in tumbling waves, and with it came a modicum of light: a ghostly spillage from the outer shell of the hive itself — wan and incomplete, scarcely a true light at all, but enough to determine shapes. Enough to distinguish friend from enemy.

The vindictors paused mid-riot. Maul blows went undelivered. Fingers eased from triggers. Doused in feeble luminosity, able at last to settle their frayed nerves and seek a modicum of calmness, the Preafect chaos ground to a slow, uncomfortable halt.

And above Mita's exhausted body, eyes blazing in the half-light, the Night Lord changed direction with seconds to spare, a bone-jarring jink from the vertical to the horizontal, the robe-tails of the man it had captured fluttering behind it. It whooped once — as if in farewell — and was swallowed by the ice-spume of the gates, splitting the snowy night with claws outstretched.

There were bodies everywhere. Most were dead of shotgun wounds.

And Mita Ashyn, who had spared the lives of those who remained, whose mind had been all but wiped away by the demands of the animus motus, sagged to the floor and felt as if she'd died. She considered whispering a prayer of thanks to the Emperor. It was the sort of thing she'd be expected to do.

But then... the Emperor hadn't saved her. She'd saved herself.

Just like always.

A flash of familiarity circulated through her, and she recalled the reflective shape of the Night Lord's psyche. Such doubt, such solitude. He had nothing but his principles to sustain him, nothing but himself to rely upon. Just like her.

A young Preafect approached, carefully crouching beside each body that littered the floor, checking for injuries, calling out for medics wherever he found life. He reached Mita's huddled form and squatted on his haunches, squinting at the rag-coated bundle that his eyes could scarcely make out.

'You okay? You injured?' he said, voice soft, with youth.

'I c-could use some help standing,' Mita stammered, all her energy spent.

The man backed away abruptly as if stung, recognising her face. Orodai had hardly been recalcitrant when it came to letting his men know whose testimony had lead them on this mission.

The Preafect continued his way along the heap of injured and dead as if she didn't exist, and it was only on the very cusp of her hearing that she heard him spit into the shadows, whispering beneath his breath.

'Witch.'

It was the last straw.

I just saved your life, you contemptible little shit.

Squatting on the floor of the Macharius Gateroom, bleeding from her ears and her nose, watching the crowds thin and the medics come and go, Mita Ashyn had something of a crisis of faith.

She sat for a long time and considered her place within events. In the main, the uncertainties that troubled her — exacerbated, no doubt, by exhaustion — revolved around a single query:

Why?

Why did she do it? Why had she struggled so hard, since those long-forgotten days when the blackships stole her from her family, to serve this bloated Imperium? Why had she toiled on behalf of these ignorant bastards, these bigoted fools who feared her and hated her and called her an abomination? Why had she bled and cried, why had she poured effort and energy into protecting the glory of an empire that... that had no place for her?

Had she been used? Had she been enslaved by those who sought only her destruction — a tame little witch that they could wield like a weapon until she ceased to be needed, and then snuff her out?

Why had she never felt these uncertainties before?

That, at least, was a question she could answer:

Because you've never found a partisan before.

Because you've never tasted such bitterness in another creature's soul, and it makes you question your own.

Because the Night Lord feels exactly the same.