Shadowkeeper

The rift closed behind him, and he collapsed onto the dirty ground. Twisting over, he managed to rest his back against the cavern’s walls and breathe a sigh.

 

The battle stimulants slowly drained out of him and his strengths faded further. He could barely lift his arms.

 

He failed. It was shameful, but failure was not the end. As he said to the thing, she was but one of many.

 

A compartment on his armour snapped open, and he pulled a small device out of it and held it up to his mouth with a shaking hand.

 

“I have failed. Target has been located on Baal, under the protection of both the Astartes and the Lord Regent. The target shows signs of … “

 

He spoke, he recapped his fight, everything he learned, and everything he knew. He spoke until his voice gave out, the malicious malady that was being inflicted upon him sapping him of the strength to even breathe.

 

Still, with his last smidge of will, he activated the small device, and the transmission was sent. The rest would come and finish what he could not, the Lockwarden himself waited at attention just for a transmission like the one he sent.

 

The faulty tool would be broken and returned to how the Emperor left it for their keeping. His younger brother’s delusions or the orders of another faulty tool mattered not to the keepers of humanity’s greatest weapons and secrets.

 

An order was given ten thousand years ago, and they would fulfil it, or die trying. One and all.

---

 

“The Lord Regent,” I repeated. “Ordered me to be protected?”

 

Thoughts warred in my mind, a dozen ideas springing up only to be stomped down by realism. This was just weird and confusing. No, I needed to calm down. I just got out of quite possibly my first life-and-death battle.

 

I almost died just now, quite a few times actually. I wasn’t in the right state of mind to think. Still, Mephiston just showed he could attack me, abduct me, or whatever else with me hardly able to do anything about it with his weird time magic.

 

Caution was warranted, no, it was a must.

 

“Indeed,” he said, his voice tinged with irritation. “I am to guard you while an escort arrives.”

 

“I don’t need an escort.”

 

“Didn’t seem that way a moment ago,” he said.

 

“A few Astartes won’t be able to protect me from him,” I said. “And I doubt you could do much better than help me escape.”

 

“Perhaps,” he said. “The goal was your survival, not his death.”

 

“Why?”

 

“The Regent’s-”

 

“What Regent?” I pressed, earning an annoyed twitch of his lips. “Why am I to be protected?”

 

“I know not,” he said. “I merely obey.”

 

Why? I thought. Why would he attack a Custodian on some vox transmission, as I could still tell the Fleet wasn’t even close to being in orbit. Did they even know who the Regent was?

 

Could be they didn’t. But why obey someone they didn’t even know?

 

Let’s do some … stress testing. I hummed to myself. If he had a bad reaction to what I was about to do, I was going to bolt.

 

Staff back in hand, I held it out straight and channelled power into it. A moment later, the desert started floating, sand, spikes, flesh, chitin and so much else levitated up into the air.

 

Then it all surged towards me. I held out a hand and the storm, a little bit of everything, flowed into my hand. I absorbed anything biological and dumped out the rest.

 

Come on, there had to be at least a single drop left behind. I frowned, but then it came. Information flowed into my mind and a grin formed on my face. Got you.

 

Even with the super quick clotting, there were splatters of blood left behind. I had him. It was far from as good as getting to eat the Custodian whole, but it was better than a lock of hair … What?

 

I stopped what I was doing, letting the remaining gunk fall listlessly to the ground as I turned my mind upon itself. What? Why?

 

There it was, a whole Custodian template. No decoding, re-attaching, re-sequencing, and filling in gaps. A perfect spotless template.

 

A strange sense of déjà vu gripped my mind, something I hadn’t experienced since coming to this universe. There was an illusion of familiarity as I looked at the mental template, as if it wasn’t the first time I saw it. Or was it really an illusion? Did I forget something?

 

Did that mental attack break something? Maybe I lost some memories?

 

No, that shouldn’t be. The rest of my mind was mostly intact, and the memories weren’t split between them. Both halves of my mind had all of my memories when the Shadowkeeper split them.

 

What was this, then? Did eldritch space horrors get mini-strokes? That’s what déjà vu was, wasn’t it?

 

What if it’s my body that remembers? If the Shadowkeepers had it before me and called it a tool … maybe … maybe they used it for creating Custodes?

 

That was a wild theory, but I was leaning toward it being true. Crazier shit happened in this galaxy. I wondered if it was true. It wasn’t even just the Custodes that used my body as a tool, but the big golden man himself before he became too much of a skeleton to continue doing so.

 

Having a bioengineering swiss-knife like my body would be fitting for a man who was said to be the greatest scientist humanity ever had.

 

Questions again that I couldn’t get answers to. I hissed. If only that asshole didn’t get away. I could be torturing the answers out of him right now.

 

Stupid. I calmed myself. Even Astartes were impossible to break through torture, thinking I could do so with a Custode was the height of arrogance. Maybe I could tease some information out of the blue man. He supposedly ordered my rescue after all.

 

That birthed a whole new list of questions, questions I didn’t even want to think about right now. They would be answered with time. The fleet loomed close.

 

I turned to Mephiston, narrowing my eyes at his face out in clear view. The Chief Librarian came to my rescue, attacked a Custodian, and didn’t even seem to care about the fact that I was a three-metre-tall Tyranid monster just a minute ago.

 

He treated it as if it was natural. Did he know beforehand? I’ve never shown my ability to change into entirely different forms before the Astartes, so the question was ‘how?’.

 

Does it matter? I was already doing some weird shit, so saying it was just some super-biomancy shouldn’t be that unbelievable.

 

Not that it mattered at all if he knows what a Shadowkeeper is. Those fuckers wouldn’t move their lazy asses even if Guilliman ordered them to. The only thing that got them to move in the first place was one of their prized toys growing legs and running away.

 

That’s how they see me. A rebellious tool that had the audacity to grow a consciousness and run off on its own.

 

It was … humiliating. I was not that. I knew I was more than just some malfunctioning tool, but the fact they thought of me that way was infuriating. To make it worse, I couldn’t even murder him and eat his corpse for it.

 

Whatever. He will be back, and I will be strong enough to butcher him. I huffed, relaxing my set jaws and raising an eyebrow at Mephiston.

 

He was a weird fellow, truth be told. He spoke like some rattling half-dead man who was annoyed at the sun for existing while quite possibly being the strongest psyker under the Imperium’s yolk.

 

“Let’s go then. I want answers from someone more talkative than you.”

 

“The escorts will be here shortly,” he arced, his lips downwards. “And I believe it will be you answering our questions.”

 

“Bah,” I rolled my eyes, then snapped my fingers.

 

A flaming portal hissed into existence right in front of me, revealing the command room with Dante on the other end. I stepped through.

 

“I’m closing it in five seconds,” I said, ignoring the dozen bolters levelled at my face. I just fought a fucker with a disintegrating beam-spear thing, bolters were pathetic toys in comparison.

 

I smiled at them and heard Mephiston step through behind me at the four-second mark. Then I closed the portal. Dante sat in his regal command chair, face concealed beneath his golden mask.

 

I felt … concern, doubt. Not my own, but those around me. Empathy was one of the basic powers of a psyker and one that came to me naturally. I felt their fears, their doubts, brush against my mind. I felt them but was distinctly aware those emotions were not of my own.

 

My eyes narrowed as my gaze flashed between them all with a slow grin on my face.

 

“What is it?” I asked. “Don’t keep a girl waiting, Commander.”

 

“Under the orders of The Lord Regent,” he spoke slowly, each sound coming out of his mouth measured and well thought over. “You are to be kept under guard until he arrives on the planet to interrogate you. You are to be kept alive at all costs.”

 

I narrowed my eyes further, and then a thought struck me. These fuckers were far too confident. Did they think Mephiston would be able to kill me? Subdue me?

 

A deep pit formed in my stomach. Did they do something to her?

 

‘Selene?’ The telepathic channel was frayed at first, but I sent more power to reinforce it. My mind was slowly mending itself, but that left doing things that required precise control, a touch challenging. Long-range telepathy being one of them.

 

Long range? She should be in this building.

 

The connection snapped into place, but on the other end of it, I only felt a slumbering mind. Just to be sure, I checked on her soul and was relieved to find it in perfect condition.

 

Her body, not so much. Slowly, my control spread over the fractured armour they couldn’t quite peel off of her unconscious body, and I deeply regretted not leaving a tendril in it.

 

Still, better some Astartes than a Shadowkeeper. That asshat would have just obliterated her, and not … knocked her out with drugs?

 

Her vitality was nearly spent.

 

My hand twitched.

 

Space Marines, normal humans, servitors, servo skulls, and tech priests were sent flying, smashing into walls and pillars with their limbs bound with a savage force of my power.

 

“If you move, I will obliterate their souls.”

 

“It need not be this way,” said Mephiston, now clearly more concerned. Still, he remained annoyingly calm. He thought his time fuckery could beat me.

 

My armour thickened, the helmet closing around my head. Around me, a dozen psychic shields snapped into place as my off-hand grabbed Atiesh.

 

I might not be adept at time manipulation, but if this fucker wanted to play, he was more than welcome to. I managed to bend space in that fight with the custodian with half my mind and without my soul to back me up.

 

“You didn’t have to beat up my lover, drug her, and drag her off to some dark hole, and yet here we are.”

 

His lips twitched in a grimace.

 

“Now,” I said. “I know your fancy little fleet is still hours away from making planet-fall. You might think me cornered, out of options. You are wrong. The only reason I was on this shithole of a planet is to get into your Regent’s good graces, but if he wants to spit in my face for it, I am more than willing to leave a planet of corpses to him.”

 

“No void ship will take you off of this planet,” he said. “You have no escape. You were to be kept alive.”

 

“Negotiation isn’t your strong suit, is it?” I gave him a smile full of teeth.

 

A handful of the Astartes roared, pinned to the wall as they were, struggling against the psychic bonds. They all failed and were put to sleep in quick order, with spikes of telepathy smashing into their minds.

 

“Pray to your Emperor that she is safe, for if she is not, I’ll let you see for yourself how little his protection matters once you are dead.”

 

Mephiston’s power smashed into my shields, but he failed to pierce more than two layers and I still had ten. Stopping time didn’t matter much if he didn’t have the power to break through my shields.

 

Then, I was gone. Blink pulled me along the telepathic channel and into a dark cave half a continent away from the fortress.

 

It was dark, dreary, and without light. The air was damp and stale on my cheeks as I dismissed the armour and kneeled next to the body, bundled up in more shackles than any death row prisoner I ever saw.

 

I closed my eyes and felt a dozen presences slowly closing in.

 

The place where we were, was the deepest part of a cavern system and the only way out of this wretched cell was through a void-ship grade shutter. There were presences on the other side of said shutter.

 

“Kill them all,” I muttered as a Hunter Drone melded out of my back and dashed off, easily crashing through the bulkhead aimed to stop Astartes. “Kill anyone that comes into the cave.”

 

I hugged Selene’s body to my own. Feeling the coldness of her skin, the bruises, fractures, and burns tied my stomach into a knot. I flooded her body with vitality and bio-mantic healing.

 

I kept hugging her, burying my face into the nook of her neck as her body slowly warmed and her shallow breaths slowly grew steady. Her heart beat vigorously, but she stayed asleep even as whatever drugs they gave her were purged.

 

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, the slowly lessening number of presences and distant screams only slightly lightening my mood.