Bonds forged in blood. Trust. A shared commission to bind us. All for our father. All for the future of mankind.

  I was a fool.

  Laying in a rorschach illustration of my own blood, unable to bring myself to harm my sons, my dearest friends, even as they rip into me as a wolf tears at the flesh of a fresh kill. I saw the psyker father had assigned to me, Kairin the Shade, disappear after melting my eldest son at his infernal touch, and leaving a double in his place. This was it. I had failed, and my sons, unknowing of the deceit that blinds them, were to be my end. And yet, amidst the maelstrom that eviscerated my heart, I plucked out the feeling of pride, and gripped it tightly in my fists. My sons were not wrong. My sons were still the Unbroken.

  I looked up at my dearest friend and confidant, Custodes Curian Dredd. His metal boot pressed down on my breastplate, a bolter to my head. What I saw in his eyes haunted me. The sheer anguish of betrayal. I allowed myself to grieve in that brief moment as my sons drove off the traitors into the warp, and the other Custodes killed the reprobate who stood in Kairin’s place. I died, my closest confidant believing I had betrayed him. Tears of crimson flowed from my eyes, and I slowly closed them, allowing Curian to fulfill his duty without my gaze upon him.

  I heard his armored finger clink and grind as it squeezed the trigger. The inner mechanisms whirred, clicked and danced in a morbid waltz of impending carnage. Flames erupted from the muzzle, charring my flesh as the bolt lurched through my skull.

  I was lost in the void, voices nipping at the edges of my mind like piranhas testing their prey before taking a jaw-full. They were the voices I'd heard countless times before, the cries of anguish and agony tearing away at my soul in a death by a thousand cuts. Yet it did not stop at a thousand. Nor a million. Each cycle would end abruptly, and his voice would whisper. He would offer me respite, an escape from this grim torment. He called me daughter. His voice was oh so sweet. Intelligent, thoughtful. But I knew the plague that infested his every word. His fermented breath was not of wine, but of fetid flesh. I would not fall to him.

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  I know not how long I was interned in the storms of chaos as the putrid one slowly eroded me away. My soul was as worn and tattered as the clothes of a street urchin on a Hiveworld. But one day, all went silent. The quietude was somehow more tempestuous than the ones who cried out to me, and yet there was an eye in that storm. My soul was not clean enough to exist in this presence. I was too ragged, too broken. I could feel the might of the being before me, and all I knew in that moment was terror.

  "Please, father! Don't look at me!" My voice echoed in the black, and was met with silence. I didn't need to look to know his expression: his taciturnity carried his disappointment as slaves would carry a litter.

  When he finally spoke, it was as a terrible thunder, and a disparate whisper. "I have designs for you, my child."

  I felt my whole being go rigid. Designs? For me? A failure? I dared not question.

  "You need only speak it, and I shall obey."

  A hint of pride slipped from my father, yet I knew it was not pride in me, but for himself.

  "You will avenge yourself on the traitor, Kairin the Shade, and earn your salvation."

  Avenge myself against Kairin? But I was dead. How could my father expect me to do such a thing from behind the veil of death?

  "I will do as you command, father."

  His divine smirk could be felt across the void. "Good. Now go, my daughter. Make known the name Evaria Manoash once more."

  I finally met my father's smug gaze for but a brief moment, and I bowed my head. "As you wish."