It was three days before we left Jaegetri. Seven when Cyclonic Torpedoes bombarded the planet’s surface, blowing the rotten, dusty world to smithereens, never a tear to be shed for its loss. Ten when, finally, Castecael gave me permission to leave the medicae unit, on the condition that I stay laying down. Until then, both Lucene and Bliss had stayed by my side in perpetuity, neither one wanting or capable of removing the other. It impressed me, frankly, how two who loved me as much as they did were willing to guard me together, without any sense of jealousy or concern between them. They both genuinely wanted whatever was best for me, and their being at odds with each other would have been far from it.
Nevertheless, when those ten days were up, Lucene took me to our shared quarters, and for the time being I would not see Bliss again. Lucene brought me food and fed me, she laid with me and prayed with me. She did everything with me, and I cannot begin to describe how grateful I was for it all. Thanks to Lucene, I cannot say my bedridden days were boring, and even with such company, I still found ample time for reflection and contemplation. And I had much to contemplate and reflect upon.
On the thirteenth day of my recovery, Astropathic communication had been established with the Dawnshadow, and we were recalled to Quintus for debriefing. Indeed, though Quintus itself was a compromised location for the Inquisitorial starfort, it remained strategically placed within the Ixaniad Sector and still had resources and personnel to extract from the world proper. It would be some time yet before a replacement world for the Dawnshadow to hide behind would be chosen and moved to. And even still, the war for Ixaniad was still being raged; while we had pierced through to the enemy’s stronghold, many of their forces remained in our Sector, where they would undoubtedly be hunted down and pursued by Inquisition operatives for decades longer. It might be a task I saw need to oversee as well.
On the fourteenth day of my recovery, when I was finally allowed to rise to my feet—with Castecael’s supervision—I gave the order to initiate Warp Translation. There had been some delay on my part in that regard; though we had obliterated Jaegetri, sorting out the logistics of our fleet—in making sure all surviving personnel were on the ships they should have been—was still being finalized. It was during those final hours, then, that I found my newly-mobile way to the single, circular viewport of my quarters, beholding the shattered world of Jaegetri one final time. I would not, in my lifetime, see its remnants ever again. I wanted not for my view to be afflicted so, henceforth, but at the time the rocky chunks that were once a stronghold of heresy served as a grim reminder of the sum total of suffering and loss that it had taken to vanquish such profanity. And yet, among the many, many enemies of mine that haunted me still, the words of Valeran Mortoc stood out most prominent. Still, he questioned my faith, even postmortem. Or perhaps that was Cronos speaking through the voice of another of the dead; I could not say.
Regardless, Lucene, as ever, offered me an opportunity of clarity. “What’s on your mind, Cal?” she asked me from my rear, approaching me while I stared out the viewport.
“All too much, these days, I’m afraid,” I admitted.
“May I ease that burden for you?”
“I’m sure you’d like to,” I nodded, grinning, though she could not have seen my facial expression.
“Of course,” she agreed. “Do share, Cal; I am here for you, always.”
“The truth,” I replied, then shook my head. “And whose truth is true. Your time on Jaegetri…it was hard, I know that, though you have not yet shared with me what you experienced firsthand. I can only assume that to peer into the Darkness so deeply has afflicted you with the questioning of Faith.”
“Not so much, no,” Lucene admitted with a shrug.
“Really?”
“Really. To see Shadows of such a depth is to know that a great Light casts them. If anything, it has reinforced my belief in our cause being righteous and worthy. I suspect this assurance will not help you, though; for all your sanctity, doubt has ever wracked your mind,” Lucene acknowledged.
“That’s more accurate than you can know,” I agreed with a snorting laugh. “My faith was questioned. Directly. And now I question whether any choice I have made has ever been the right one.”
“Cal, the enemy is dead, are they not? And we are here to strike out against the next foe, Ouranos or otherwise. Your choices have brought divine fury to bear against the enemies of the Imperium; how can such decisions be made in error?” Lucene insisted.
“What if being here, being what we are, is the wrong choice?” I asked her. I was not about to tell her about Cronos, both because I did not know what she might think of me, personally, in our relationship; and because I did not know how her Ecclesiarchical background might insist she act upon that knowledge. The Inquisition wanted me, and therefore Cronos, alive. But the Inquisition was not the Ecclesiarchy. Instead, I substituted a similar denigration of our shared existence in Cronos’s place. “This timelessness of ours. We are corrupted, all of us. Is a heretic a heretic for what they are, or for what they do? Valeran Mortoc did what he did to find and eliminate Ouranos, as we do. And sure, in his efforts he made an enemy of an Imperial Sector and the Inquisition. But many would-be loyalists have done the same; we’ve been at war with the Space Wolves in the past, after all. Is Mortoc more of a heretic than a Wolf? Is he more of a heretic than we are? What if he isn’t? What is our response to ourselves?”
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Lucene was silent for several moments, then; a rarity in our philosophical arguments and discourse. She was often possessed of a wit with which to have the right response or counterpoint to anything I posed to her. But not then, not immediately. In fact, a response only came when she gingerly raised a hand to one of my shoulders, drawing my attention from the viewport of the shattered world beyond to her lovely visage instead, where I stared silently at her for a moment more before she answered me. She was dressed in a red and black body-tight gown, adorned in the colors of her order. “Callant Blackgar, you are no heretic. Ever you achieve greater victories, and ever you think lesser of yourself afterward. As your wife as much as your shield and sword, this uncertain and vacillating reasoning must end. I would not love you as I do if I thought you a monster; no, everything you have ever done has been to the betterment of the Holy Imperium. You once told me that you were not a hero, and in that perhaps you were right. But our Imperium has heroes enough; you are the bane of our foes, as every one that has crossed you has been destroyed, wholly and utterly. And if this is not the cause of our Holy War, I ask you then, what is?”
“That is some reassurance, then, that what I do defines whether I am righteous or fallen. But it does not address the discrepancy we’re faced with others; why are the Wolves loyal, and Mortoc heretical? Biases based in what Mortoc has done to us personally aside, Mortoc was on the same path we are. He might have hated Ouranos even more than we do,” I explained.
“Cal, I do not know what transpired on your end of things, either. So I do not know what Mortoc may have told you or what you may have gleamed from his mind. But what would Mortoc have done after killing Ouranos? I cannot imagine such a long-term goal would have been beneficial to others beyond himself and his soldiers, not as yours are, and not as the Wolves claim. We fight for the whole of our Imperium; Mortoc—I assume—fought for a factionalized amalgam of villainous heresies. Sure, there may have been a—brief—intersection of paths between us, but that does not make us heretical, nor him reverential,” Lucene answered.
“Ever the voice of reason,” I sighed, admonished. “Perhaps one of these days I’ll start listening to it instead of my own.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be something,” Lucene laughed, raising her hand from my shoulder to a cheek of my face. I leaned into her grasp, finding her, as ever, soft and warm. Easy to rest upon. Easy to lose oneself with. But in that regard, on the subject of losing oneself, I arrived at another conversation I needed to have with her. She, meanwhile, furthered her grasp of my head, bringing her other hand into the fold and pulling me against her body proper.
“I will need to ask a favor of you, and of our relationship,” I told her after a time spent in her embrace, while she patted the crown of my head.
“You intend on another vacation with Mirena,” Lucene asserted, still coddling me in her arms. “You’ve already told me that, and the war is won, now. Go ahead. Mayhap she will even clean some mud from your mind for me.”
“I actually was referring to Bliss,” I admitted. “Though yes, in some time Mirena will likely try to steal me off on another flight with her somewhere. Whenever our affairs are in order aboard the Dawnshadow, I should think.”
“Ah. Well, what of Bliss, then?”
“I had promised her a night’s drink.”
“Is that all?”
I barked out a laugh, then pushed myself away from Lucene. Even so, she kept me in her grasp, her arms wrapped over my shoulders and her hands upon my middle back. “I should hardly think that, where concerns someone like Bliss, there would ever be something ‘all’ about any time with her.”
“A longer night, alcohol, someone like Bliss…do you imagine it could get sexual between you two?” Lucene wondered.
“I imagine it is a possibility,” I admitted.
“Well good, maybe someone else would smash some sense into you if Mirena can’t,” Lucene grinned.
“That is far from the response I expected,” I replied, eye widened. “And while I want to explore the nature of that response, what about you? Aren’t you and I…isn’t the ‘smashing’ more your role?”
“It is, and I will try a hand at it. Though not today; you have only just gotten to your feet and I imagine Castecael would frown upon us if I were to begin dancing upon your chest so soon,” Lucene answered, chuckling.
“I appreciate that.”
“Oh, you’ll come to appreciate it much more soon enough, dearest,” she assured me. “But as to Bliss, I do not desire—nor believe I possess—a monopoly upon your will or your body. We are wed, yes, but it would be unwise to assume that I can, at every hour of every day, be who you need at a moment’s notice. Indeed, I gather this wisdom from Mirena, who upon her exit from her Inquisitorial penance found that her lover, Castecael, was insufficient for her needs, and turned to you afterward.”
“I don’t spend time with others because you don’t satisfy me, Lucene,” I clarified.
“I know,” she laughed before pulling me close to her again, albeit never so tightly as to risk harming my recently-settled chest. “That wasn’t quite my point. The care you need, Callant, is less physical and more psychological. And while I am always right, being right isn’t everything. You are a multicolored man—as I suspect many are—and value differing outlooks more greatly than several of your peers. I know you spend time with Mirena, for instance, for a breath of fresh air from Imperial dogma and zealotry, yet you always come back to me all the same. I value this in you greatly, as it evidences not only your continued to loyalty to our shared cause, but also your groundedness to greater Mankind. I would not wish to get in the way of that.”
“And in that, I believe you are quite unique for your kind, Lucene,” I chuckled. “Thank you. It will be some time, yet, before I accompany Bliss…err…however she needs. I will want to check in and debrief at Quintus first. So you have me until then.”
“And I intend to put you to good use during that time, too. When you’re ready,” she grinned, stepping back and pulling me with her toward our bed. I obliged, and joined her in the play, gentle as it was, that she had been hinting at desiring. Warp Translation followed soon thereafter, and our nightmares at Jaegetri were left in the dust behind the betterment of our lives.
It had been M41.977 when Mortoc staged his attack on New Cealis, initiating this terrible war with the Inquisition and the Ixaniad Sector in the process. It was in M41.979 that the perpetrators of that war were, quite literally, decapitated. But the great war, the one of which Mortoc and I had spoken of transpiring beyond the confines of Jaegetri, was the sort that does not end. We may have been bloodied, broken, and diminished in number from our scrap with the Iron Warriors, but our fight was far from over. Only in death does duty end.
Whether we believed in it or not, that death was fast approaching.