It took some doing, after disintegrating the Shatter Corps’ defenses on New Cealis, to find Bliss again. She had not excused herself to her room, nor to any immediate temples within the Coldbreed. Indeed, it began to seem as though it might be impossible to find my own Stealth operative if she did not wish to be found. It was only by happenstance that I came upon her, and not even via the searching of my mind, though I was trying in that regard. But as I scoured the many halls of my vessel, I eventually caught a glimpse of a backside which, I am mildly ashamed to say, could only have been hers, for the eye-catching appeal of her figure. I paused a moment after having spied her out of the corner of my view, reflecting on how she had once told me that she only showed herself if she wanted to be seen. I wondered if that was true even now.
In any case, I found her in what at first looked to be a closet or facilities cabinet, but was in fact an unmarked and unlit room aboard my vessel. Leave it to the Callidus, I suppose, to find such a thing in the first place. Unmapped or not, this room did have its own viewport to the outside void, and within that void was a view of New Cealis. Bliss looked upon the world in relatable melancholy. I assumed she sensed my presence, but if she did she had not evidenced it. That was, however, until I stepped in to the room with her. “I’m sorry you saw that of me,” she muttered as I neared, still facing the viewport. “What sort of an assassin is brought to tears? What sort of Inquisitor falls to her knees and sobs for a Guardsman?”
“He wasn’t just a Guardsman,” I acknowledged, to which Bliss agreed with me in a pained nod.
“Still, I am supposed to be an Inquisitor. Our kind can’t cry, it’s not fitting,” she suggested, a faint quiver on her voice. I wondered how many tears yet streamed down her face, hidden from me as it was.
“Just the opposite, Bliss: You’re an Inquisitor. You can damn well do whatever you need to and no one has any right to condemn you for it,” I replied, taking another step closer to her.
“You would, if you were any less the man you are,” she answered. “Thank you. But there’s just…so much more frigged up about it all.”
“I know.”
“Yes, you do know!” she shouted, and at last turned to me. Indeed, her face remained wet from her tears. And while I sensed the tiniest bit of anger harbored toward me, it was not nearly great enough to be acted upon. “You knew about Issik. The whole time.”
“And you were glad it was a secret I kept from you,” I reminded her. She had once tried to tease Harr’s secret from me, in a test of my character. I had seen through her test at the time, which to me devalued its relevancy, but I remained steadfast in keeping Harr’s liberties to himself.
“Yes, I was. But I just wish,” she started, but shook her head and dismissed her own sentence. “Blessed are they who die for the Emperor, hm?” I nodded. “Are we cursed then? Cursed to live and watch all others receive a blessing not meant for us?”
“That is as the heretic wanted for us. But we made the choice to deny ourselves that blessing, and can renege upon that decision at any time,” I suggested. Absalom’s cure to his own machinations remained in the hands of the Inquisition, and was readily available to any that wanted it. “Bliss,” I began, and took another step toward her, now close enough to put my hands on the sides of her arms, holding her ahead of me. “Put aside all the theologies and the ideologies and the shoulds and everything else. You have lost far too much in this war, and I am so, so sorry,” I told her. She nodded and tried to respond, perhaps to thank me for the compassion, but her composure broke before she could. Instead, she fell forward against me, sobbing once more, and I embraced her and rolled my head against her own, holding her close while a river poured over my shoulder.
I will admit, I intended to try to think about how to help her, but in that moment all I could think about was simply how heavy she was to hold. Mirena had once told me that Bliss was unusually heavy for her size, having wrestled our local Callidus Assassin on more than one occasion. (And losing on each attempt; a rarity for my chief Logistics officer.) Were I without such a firsthand account, I may have thought Bliss was forcibly pushing against me, as to hold her upright proved quite the feat. I surmised her increased mass was another oddity among a great list appended to her existence on account of the Temple, perhaps worthy of investigation at a later time, but not in such an intimate, vulnerable moment as this.
Instead, I struggled to hold her up in silence for as long as I could, until at last I loosed a grunt in the process. My struggle, then vocalized, prompted Bliss to stand upright of her own accord, no longer leaning on me for support. “Oh. Right,” she whispered to herself, signaling she was aware of the situation.
“I’ll want to ask of that later,” I warned her.
“It’s not polite to ask a girl her weight,” she chided me, managing a smirk through a still-sniffling face.
“Well there’s a long record of me insulting you,” I offered with a grin of my own.
“Very true!” she agreed, blurting out a laugh. “It’s almost as long as your record of being kind and considerate to me,” she suggested, now raising a hand to my right arm, half-holding me as I had done for her. “I’m so very nearly alone in this cold, desolate universe. I would be, Callant Blackgar, had I not you to spend time with. Thank you.”
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“There are others like us. Timeless,” I reminded her.
“There are in that regard, yes. But it is not that accursed similarity of ours I refer to,” she admitted. “No, I am alone, save for you, without those I trust. Without those I like. Without those I…,” she began, but her voice trailed off. I had a good idea of what she meant to say, though, as where her voice faltered her eyes instead locked with my own.
“Love,” I finished for her, raising the arm she held such that my hand then held her face in its palm. She lowered her head into that grasp, at ease. “Was Caliman right? Am I fostering a harem of my own, here?”
Bliss grinned, but did not immediately reply. Instead, she first stepped even closer to me, that our bodies touched from our chests down to our waists, and in that regard she also stepped a leg between my own. “Do you love Silas Hager?”
“Yes, I do, but—”
“Luther?”
“Yes, but—”
“Zha?”
“Bliss, I—”
“You love us all, in your retinue. Is it any surprise, then, that we love you in return?” Bliss smiled. “I didn’t know it at first, because I wasn’t by your side, then, as often as I have been these past few years. But you don’t lead soldiers onto the battlefield, Callant. You lead people you’ve come to love. And sometimes you lose them, as I have,” she acknowledged.
I felt a tear roll down my cheek, then, though I had a feeling it was far from the only one. “It’s been slower, more gradual, their passing, than that of the 8th’s. But every one hurts just as much, if not more,” I admitted as Bliss raised each of her hands to coddle my head. “You see? We Inquisitors can be brought to tears. It’s only human. Though I admit, there are few—merely Lucene, Mirena, and Silas—that have seen this from me.”
“So you, too, wear the same façade I do to spare others of our weakness,” she sighed.
I shook my head. “It is not weakness, this sense of loss. It’s clarity. Clarity that our fight must be fought, in the name of all those who lost their lives giving us the chance to fight it. There was a girl, just a little kid, on Hestia Majoris. They butchered her, those heretics, among many others in silencing my former mentor. Val Eracian was her name. When I killed the last of that abhorrent quartet, I made sure he knew her name, and I have not since forgotten it. And when I kill Valeran Mortoc, her name, amidst all the others, will be on my mind as I deal the finishing blow. I will kill him for them, and the Emperor.”
“I will kill Mortoc,” Bliss whispered.
“What?” I asked, and she stepped away, ceasing our intimacy for the time being.
“I will kill Mortoc,” she repeated, closing her eyes in a wince, and tensing her hands into fists by her sides. “I have made the vow to myself. To Jack. I will rip the Iron bastard limb from limb and shower myself in the gore of his brutal end,” she assured me, then opened her eyes, glaring into mine. “Do not get in my way of this, Callant Blackgar. I don’t want you to get hurt, and I don’t want to hurt you. But I will be the one to kill Valeran Mortoc, and no other.”
“I’m not going to hang around and wait for you to finish him off, Bliss. If I see a shot that ends his life, I’m taking it,” I promised her.
“No. You’re not,” she asserted, furrowing her brow. “I mean it, Callant. Do not get between me and him. I love you dearly, but I must end him. I owe that to Jack.”
“In this regard, my dear, Jack Harr is just a Guardsman, and our duty to Ixaniad and the Holy Imperium is worth more than honoring him,” I insisted, tensing my own fists. This was not where I expected the conversation to go when I first approached her. I wonder if she had anticipated this.
“Is this how it happens? How our Imperium so often wars with itself?” Bliss frowned, shaking her head. “Two immovable ideologies, two uncompromising forces of nature, doomed to come to blows by their very design?”
“Quite likely,” I acknowledged.
“I don’t want to go to war with you, Callant,” she admitted.
“You’re right. You don’t.”
“But I will,” she affirmed, still staring me down. “If you take Mortoc from me, I will never forgive you.”
“And I will have to live with that,” I nodded.
“If I let you.”
I was not ready for that one, and must have shown it. I had no witty response, nor anything in my arsenal to seem nearly as imposing as Bliss Carmichael. Even so, my own tactical defeat in the conversation spurred her to concede a bit of ground herself, and again she stepped up to me. This time, however, while she again planted her hands on my head, she did so to pull my lips to hers, and it was in this heated exchange that she and I shared our first real kiss. As Vilk Issik had hinted at, and as her beatific visage did not betray, she proved to be quite lovely when she was not murderously terrifying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered after a few moments of sucking my lungs dry. “I…I won’t…I shouldn’t have…I will kill Mortoc. First. It is my responsibility to Jack to reach and slay Mortoc, and my responsibility to you to do so before you can. And I will. That way there’ll be no bad blood between us and everything will be fine.”
“Work with me here, Bliss, and I would happily let you deal the finishing blow,” I insisted.
“Respectfully, Callant, and as much as I love you, I do not believe you know how best to use me. It’s understandable; you are an Inquisitor, not an Assassinorum operative. I am not at my best on the front lines, as you have often wielded me. I am good there, yes, better than most; but I am better still elsewhere,” she explained. “No, I will do this on my own. I will beat you to him on my own. And I will kill him on my own. Mortoc is owed to Jack, not to Val Eracian. That debt is not one you can or should need to fulfill.”
I had so much more to say to her. More to say on this matter itself, to try to coerce her to reason and her duty to Ixaniad—which I upheld. I had a plethora to say on the subject of Cronos, and the rationale and intentions of Lord van der Skar and the late Caliman. Had I screwed up, in that regard? She and I were meant to be close allies, not enemies, and this conversation seemed the first step down such a route. I also wanted to bring her up to speed on Ouranos, and all the other voidshit that circled around the bastard. But Bliss denied me all opportunities for further discussion with a single short, bittersweet kiss before stepping past me, leaving me in the solitary darkness of an unmarked, unknown room of my ship.