blukitty40k
blukitty40k
My 40K Brainrot
189 posts
Blu/BeetleHe/Him/They/Them27So I don’t harass my normal followers with 40k brainrot
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blukitty40k · 3 days ago
Text
From Rust and Bone pt.24
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: minor reference to past struggles
Word Count: 1545
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie @vithralith
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22 | pt 23 | pt 24 | pt 25
               In the fractured plaza the survivors gather, their breath steaming faintly in the chill that seeps between the fractured walls. Lanterns swing in the wind; casting halos of light that makes the surrounding ruins seem deeper and darker by contrast. Every face turns toward him, scarred, soot-marked, wary. Some stand straight as soldiers, others lean heavily on their weapons or the shoulders of their comrades.
Dorn steps forward, the dull metal shard of the Aquila at his hip catching the lanternlight for a heartbeat. He stands without embellishment, cloak brushing against the stone, gaze sweeping the crowd as if measuring each soul present.
“You are alive,” he begins, his voice carrying with a resonance that doesn’t need to be shouted. “That alone is a victory.”
The words hang for a moment in the brittle air, before he continues.
“You have endured loss. You have been scattered, bloodied, and pressed to the edge of extinction. And yet, you remain. Here. Now.” His eyes move across them again, taking in the battered armor of the Astral Knights, the faces young and old. “That speaks to your will. Your stubbornness. The same qualities that built the Imperium I once knew, and that will carry us forward now.”
He lets the pause stretch, the silence weighed but not oppressive.
“I will not offer false assurances,” Dorn says at last. “Our trials are far from over. We will face hunger. Storms. The eyes of those who would see us dead. But I swear to you this, while I draw breath, I will see you through. We will rebuild shelter, we will make the ground yield, and we will hold this place against all that would break it.”
His right hand, scarred and whole, closes into a fist. “Stand together. Work with discipline. Keep your watch. And remember, survival is not enough. We are here to endure.”
There are no cheers when he finishes, only a hard, silent nod from one man, a straightening of spines. It isn’t the roar of a war party; it isn’t the quiet locking of shields before a siege. That, Dorn thinks, is better.
The murmurs of the gathered survivors slowly ebb as Dorn’s final words hang in the air. Faces that have been shadowed with doubt now bear a steadier set to their jaws. Not hope exactly, hope is a rare and dangerous currency here, but the beginnings of cohesion, the sense that they are no longer a scattering of desperate individuals.
Dorn stands a moment longer on the rise, letting them disperse. Kessa remains at his side until the last of the crowd breaks apart, her quiet presence anchoring him. When the square is nearly empty, Alcaeus approaches, helm under his arm, his expression grave. Erastes is a step behind him, scanning the stragglers as if weighing which ones might pose trouble later.
“Lord,” Alcaeus says quietly, inclining his head. “We should speak.”
Dorn gives a single nod, eyes sweeping the thinning streets one last time before turning toward a partially intact structure on the edge of the gathering space, a low ferrocrete chamber with its entrance patched together, but it’s intact enough to serve for privacy.
Inside, the air is cooler, heavy with the smell of stone dust and old rust. The doorframe has been reinforced with scavenged plating, a poor defense against anything determined, but enough to keep unwanted ears at bay. Dorn steps through first, letting his gaze take in the crude table at the center, the map-slate propped against a wall, and the few stools that remained unbroken.
Alcaeus and Erastes follow, sealing the door behind them. The muffled sounds of the settlement fade, leaving only the low hum of a scavenged generator somewhere in the room.
Dorn rests his hands on the edge of the table, looking between the two men. “We will decide our next step,” he says, his voice low but iron hard. “We have strength, but not yet security. That must change.”
Alcaeus sets his helm down with a dull clink. “We’ve taken stock of food, munitions, and shelter. Enough to last through the next storm cycle, barely. After that…” He shakes his head.
“Then we plan beyond survival,” Dorn replies. “We plan for control.”
Erastes leans forward, the lines around his mouth deepening. “Control means drawing attention. The wrong kind.”
Dorn’s gaze is steady. “Then we will decide which attention we can afford, and which we will crush.”
The room falls into a tense, expectant silence as the weight of that choice settles on all three of them.
“Here,” he says, a metal tipped mechanical finger taps a hand-drawn outline of the settlement and its surrounding ridges. “Our outer pickets are insufficient and too predictable. We will break them into three rotating teams, one patrolling the northern ridge line, one covering the marsh flats, and one stationed on the south road. Movement must be constant; patterns are weaknesses.”
Eréstes leans forward, shadows falling across the table. “We can shift Brother Hadriel’s squad to the ridge patrols. They know that ground.”
“Agreed,” Dorn replies. “But knowledge alone will not suffice. Observation points must be established.” His finger traces three sharp marks across the map. “Elevated positions, dug in, partially plated. Our stockpiles can furnish enough salvaged steel and plasteel to provide cover without alerting anyone below.”
The planning progresses like the strike of a hammer. Scouting routes are drawn in deliberate loops and intersecting lines, distances measured for speed under varying conditions. Defensive works are arranged in phases: reinforcing the palisade and gate, establishing a secondary barricade at the northern choke point, and finally a series of shallow ditches with concealed spikes across the eastern approaches. Every plan is weighed against manpower, available materials, and the endurance of the civilians under Dorn’s protection.
Midway through, Dorn straightens and gestures to a sentry by the door. “Bring Kessa.”
She appears with quiet efficiency, the chill of the dawn still clinging to her cloak. Dorn indicates the map. “You understand the seasonal flows better than any of us. Tell me where the marsh will become impassable in the coming weeks.”
Her finger traces across the faded ink lines. “Here. Floodwaters will split this flat completely, you won’t cross without sinking. The ridge path, however, will remain passable, and the western gully stays shallow until high spring. Place watchers near these vents, gas will settle heavy after storm cycles.”
Dorn studies her movements, memorizing every mark and annotation. “And the herd?” he asks quietly.
“By the time they migrate this way, they’ll need relocation if the winds continue shifting. Keep them downwind of the living areas, but close enough for quick handling.”
Dorn inclines his head. “All noted. Thank you.”
When Kessa departs, Eréstes shifts slightly. “She knows this land as if it were her own pulse. We should leverage her insight wherever possible.”
“We will,” Dorn says simply, moving to the next layer of planning: reorganizing the settlement itself. Civilians would be relocated toward the inner workshops, livestock pens shifted inward for protection, and work areas arranged to maintain efficiency without leaving workers exposed. Dorn considers everything: elevation, cover, escape routes, even the psychological effect of the new layout on those who had endured years of uncertainty.
Hours pass as they refine the plan, layers of defenses sketched, contingencies tested, and supply routes adjusted. Dorn’s voice is calm but insistent, each decision weighed against both human endurance and the strategic landscape. He pauses occasionally to ask detailed questions; how long would it take to prepare pins for the herd? How many able fighters could man each post simultaneously? Could the younger neophytes manage rotations on their own, or would veterans be needed for constant supervision?
When the session concludes, the table is a patchwork of calculations, sketches, and notes. The surviving Astartes step aside, lingering together in a shadowed alcove, their voices low.
“He is… exactly as they said,” Brother Malchior whispers, helmet tucked under one arm. “Even here, without the Legions, without the Imperium, he shapes a fortress from nothing.”
“Yet he listens,” another says, voice softer, tinged with surprise. “To her. To a baseline.”
Eréstes’ gaze is steady, unwavering. “Do not mistake that for weakness. He knows the value of knowledge. Of experience. That is strength, perhaps more than any blade or bolter.”
A younger marine exhales slowly. “I never thought we would find him like this. Nor that he would choose to remain among these people.”
Eréstes inclines his head. “He measures survival differently. Duty is not only to the Imperium, but to those under his care now. That does not make him lesser, it defines him.”
Malchior glances toward the room where the few civilians have begun rearranging gear and shelters according to the new instructions. “Do you think he will return to the Imperium? Or is this… here now his new battlefield?”
Another voice, quiet but thoughtful, responds. “It matters little. The weight of command does not vanish. He is Dorn. Wherever he stands, he makes it the front.”
The group lapses into contemplative silence. Outside, the wind whispers through fractured metal and slag glass. Inside, the survivors of the Astral Knights, few, scarred, weary, understand in their bones that they are no longer simply waiting for guidance. They are witnessing its embodiment.
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blukitty40k · 3 days ago
Text
From Rust and Bone pt.23
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to past background characters death
Word Count: 1095
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22 | pt 23 | pt 24 | pt 25
               The hold is quieter than it has any right to be. Not silent—never that, not in a place where machinery groans like distant beasts in slumber and the wind whispers through cracked bulkheads like a voice half-remembered. It is the hush of tension dispersed. Of aftermath. Of something vast just beginning to settle.
Dorn moves with slow purpose through the corridor; long strides reduced to a more measured pace. He walks as a commander would, with presence, but not yet command. His eyes take in everything: the structure, the wear, the adaptation. A soldier’s scrutiny, yes, but deeper too. The way one might study a scar.
Beside him, Kessa keeps to his left, silent. Watching not just the hold itself, but the way the air bends around him. The way every shape responds to his passing, the faint shifting of shoulders, the snap of postures straightening even among those who think themselves too tired for ceremony. She doesn’t need to understand what a primarch truly is to feel the current Dorn leaves in his wake. It isn’t reverence, not exactly. It is gravity.
Passing beneath a high gantry where cabling hangs like jungle vines, swaying faintly with filtered wind. Ahead, a converted corridor opened into a wide space, part forge, part armory. The walls are pitted with old plasma scarring, sanded down but still visible beneath the matte-gray coats of paint. Racks of weapons stand arranged with ritual precision, some clearly relics, others hammered into shape by hand. At one table, a neophyte kneels polishing the grip of a bolt pistol, lips moving in silent catechism. Another adjusted a power pack beneath the guidance of an older brother, Alcaeus, Kessa thinks to herself, from earlier. The one who watches everything with a veteran’s caution.
As Dorn enters, heads turn. Helmets come off, gauntlets tapped to chestplates in sharp, soundless salutes. Eyes, those strange, intense eyes so unlike any she has ever known, seek him out like iron filings to a lodestone. Some full of awe. Others caution. One or two unreadable, but no less alert. He offers no grand reply, just a nod. A single, measured acknowledgment of their gesture.
Kessa lets her gaze drift over the space. There are no banners here. No relic shrines adorned in incense smoke and votive candles. But there is memory. She sees it in the small things, names etched into wall plates, tally marks carved with ritual precision into the edge of a transport ramp, a tattered yellow scrap of cloth pinned above a weapon locker. A child’s drawing, maybe. A sun with too many rays.
“This place was never meant to hold,” Dorn says at last. His voice wis low. Roughened, not with doubt, but with something older. A recognition of failure too long buried.
“No,” Kessa replies, eyes on a dented arch overhead. “But it did anyway.”
He looks at her, and for a flicker of a heartbeat, something in his gaze softens. They move on. Down the next corridor, they pass what had once been a stasis bay, now an infirmary of necessity. Through the wide blast-hatch, Kessa glimpses a marine laid out on a reinforced slab, half his torso unarmored, bandages stained dark with old blood. Two others work around him, efficient in their silence. One is clearly more skilled; his hands moved with the precision of a battlefield apothecary, even if the tools he uses are scrap-born and uneven. There are no sanitized apothecarions here. No standard kits. Just will, and bond, and the ghost of training meant for a different kind of war. Dorn pauses in the doorway. His shadow falling across the threshold like a curtain.
“They should have had relief,” he says.
“They didn’t,” Kessa answers. “Yet they found a way anyway.”
“They shouldn’t have had to.”
“No,” she says. “But they’re still here.”
For a long moment he says nothing. The sound of the medics’ work fills the silence. A rasp of breath. A muted grunt. The hiss of a cauterizer. Dorn steps away, and they continue down the hall. They reach a place where a side ramp has been converted into a memorial. The walls bear no statues, but names, hundreds of them, carved in rows with powered blades and burning irons. Some full rank and honorifics. Some just first names. Some only symbols. Near the bottom, someone had scrawled in charcoal: There is no death in the shadow of the wall.
Dorn stands before it. Kessa, quiet at his shoulder, lets her eyes trace the same rows. The marks are uneven, some reverent, others raw. There had been no script here, but the kind made in grief and flame.
“I saw sons die on Terra,” Dorn says, at last. “Watched walls fall that were never meant to fall. Buried brothers beneath cataclysms that shattered stars.”
Kessa doesn’t speak.
“I thought that was the end. That what came after would be a slow decline. Rot in the guise of order.”
Turned from the wall then and looks toward the distant scaffolding where neophytes are rearming under dim lighting, where laughter, brief and real, echoes from a corner workbench.
“They survived,” he says. “And they built again. Not because of the Imperium… but in spite of it.”
She meets his eyes. “And what does that tell you?”
“That duty,” he says slowly, “may still live. Even when the dream has broken.”
A long silence follows.
“They’re waiting,” Kessa says.
He looks at her.
“For you. For what you’ll be to them now.”
“I was meant to die,” Dorn says. “Sacrificed to the storm. That was supposed to be the final act.”
“It wasn’t,” she says. “You’re here. So are they.”
“They don’t need who I was.”
“Maybe not,” she says. “Maybe they need what you could be now.”
He looks at her for a long time. Below them, through the grated floor, she can barely see movement. Marines assembling. The soft thump of ceramite boots on metal, the hushed gestures of brothers in communion. A gathering.
“They’re waiting,” she said again. “But not just for a commander.”
Dorn looks down at the gathering below, at Erastes standing in a ring of flickering lumen-flares, Jarn quietly speaking to two scouts near the edge. The survivors of a broken crusade, standing in the shadow of something older than them all.
“No,” he says at last. “They’re waiting for a father.”
With that, he turns from the memorial and begins down the stairs. The bell tolls once above them, raw, mechanical, and resonant. Calling them to him. Calling him to them.
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blukitty40k · 4 days ago
Text
From Rust and Bone pt.25
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: minor reference to past struggles, allusions to remembering dead background characters
Word Count: 1654
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie @vithralith
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22 | pt 23 | pt 24 | pt 25
The chamber Dorn has claimed as his quarters lay deep within the ship’s broken carcass, a compartment once lined with conduit and bulkhead plating having been long since stripped bare by the Astral Knights. The air is cool and carries the faint tang of old oil and rust. What light there is comes from salvaged glowlamps rigged into the walls, their pale halos pooling across the scattered maps, charcoal sketches, and fragments of metal plating that serve as makeshift tablets for his plans.
Dorn stands over a slab of reinforced decking that has been dragged in to serve as a table. Upon it, the rough outline of the settlement takes shape, the hulk of the ship sketched as a central bastion, the outer shanties clustered at its edges, and the vulnerable gaps between them marked in his careful hand. The silence pressed close, broken only by the faint rasp of his knuckle against the surface as he sketches out fault lines and weak points.
Kessa works beside him, crouching at his chair where the lamplight falls across the crude prosthetic. Her hands, calloused but deft, adjusting the leather bindings, easing where they have rubbed raw against scar tissue.
“You’ve gone too tight,” he rumbles.
She gives the strap one last pull before easing it. “Better to keep it from slipping. Unless you’d rather it falters the first time you lift one of those sky-giant blades.”
The faintest curl of his mouth suggests amusement, but it fades quickly, like a candle guttering in wind. Silence pools between them. She notices the way his gaze has drifted, not to her, not to the prosthetic, but to the wall beyond, far away and weighted with something unseen.
“You think of them again,” she says softly.
He blinks, dragged back, and his jaw tightens. “Always.”
Kessa leans back on her heels, wiping her hands on her patched trousers. “These ‘them’ you speak of. Your master. Your kin. I’ve heard you mutter it in your sleep.” She hesitates, then adds, “Is he the same one from the stories? The sun-king? The fire-bringer who hurled giants down from the stars?”
Dorn’s head tilts, and for a long moment he doesn’t answer. The word rises in him, as heavy and sacred as the chains of duty that bind him still: Emperor. But when he speaks, it is only, “Yes.”
She studies his face, scarred and unyielding as stone, and then shakes her head. “I’ve never seen a king of suns. Only storms that choke the air and earth that eats men whole. If such a master ever ruled the sky, he has long since forgotten us.”
A silence lingers, deeper this time. Dorn’s eyes lower. In her words, he hears a fracture of truth that burns, for it mirrors the fear that haunts him: that all his loyalty, all his sacrifice, might have bought only ash and silence in the end.
Kessa reaches out, laying a hand briefly on the harness strap, steady and human. “Whatever debt you think you owe him, you have paid it in full and more.”
For the first time, his gaze shifts fully to her. The burden doesn’t lift, but it bends, just slightly, as if he can imagine, for the span of a breath, that there might be a life not wholly shackled to memory and oath. Though the thought is dashed away fast by the memory of the lives that were extinguished to uphold his duty. His sons. His brothers. Tearing his gaze away from her, staring at the paper before him instead.
She says little, deciding to give him a brief reprise. Though her glance flickers once to the tangle of lines and symbols scrawled before him.
“You chart as if the whole of the world must be ordered,” she murmurs, adjusting a strap.
“It must be,” Dorn replies, voice low. He doesn’t look at her, but his gaze lingers on the sketched walls and palisades. “A place left unfortified is an invitation. The foe will come; it is only a matter of when.”
Kessa’s brow knit. “You speak as though the land itself is your enemy.”
Dorn allows himself the faintest breath of something like a laugh, though it held no mirth. “The land is honest. It tells you when it will kill you. Men, beasts, the unknown… those strike without warning.” His jaw tightens, and for a moment he is no longer looking at the maps before him but at memories only he can see.
She finishes the last adjustment and sits back on her heels. “And where do you stand, then? Among the land, or among the myths?”
His eyes met hers again, shadowed in the glow of the lamp. “Once, I was a son. A builder. A commander of countless souls beneath the banner of a father who sought to bind a galaxy.” He exhales slowly, a sound that rasps through the quiet. “Now… I am a relic in a ruin, trying to teach order to a people who should never have needed me.”
Kessa studies him, her hands still resting lightly against the straps of his prosthetic. “The people here don’t care what banner you served. They’ll care if their walls hold when the storm comes. If they can feed their children. If the ‘sky giants’ walk with them instead of above them.”
Dorn regards her in silence, then inclines his head, a gesture more formal than he perhaps intends. “Practical wisdom. It seems I will need to summon you again when the council speaks of placement and supply.”
She snorts faintly, half a laugh, half dismissal, and rises to her feet. “I’ll tell you what I know of soil and season. But don’t expect me to understand your wars.”
“No,” he says quietly, gaze falling back to the maps. “That burden remains mine.”
The sound of armored footfalls breaks the silence that had fallen upon them, echoing faintly through the warped corridors of the wreck. Dorn doesn’t need to look up from the maps to know who approaches, the rhythm is too steady, too disciplined, to be any scavenger, beast, or settler.
Alcaeus appears in the doorway first, helm clipped to his belt, scarred features unreadable in the glowlamp’s light. Erastes follows, his dark eyes catching on Kessa before settling on his primarch. The chaplain inclines his head respectfully.
“Father,” Erastes says. His voice is measured, but there is an undercurrent of urgency. “The brethren gather in the hold. They wait for your word.”
Kessa glances between them, sensing the shift in gravity. She steps back from Dorn’s side, brushing dust from her hands. “I’ll leave you to your ‘sky-giant’ councils,” she mutters, though there is no mockery in it, only an understanding that whatever passed between these men isn’t hers to share.
Dorn gives her the briefest nod of acknowledgment. “You have my thanks, Kessa. I will call on you again.”
She slips from the chamber, her footfalls fading into the dark belly of the ship. Silence lingers in her absence, broken only by the faint rasp of Erastes’ gauntlets against one another.
Alcaeus steps closer to the map-strewn slab. “They need more than scraps of hope, Father. They need direction. We all do.”
Dorn regards the rough lines of the settlement sketched on the paper. His voice, when it comes, is calm but iron hard. “Then let us give it to them. Come, we will announce the plan, and the sons who remain will know the shape of what we build.”
The three of them move deeper into the ship, until the narrow passages open into the gutted hold. Once, it had borne the weight of gene-coffins and wargear racks; now it is the heart of their refuge, its ribbed bulkheads blackened and split by fire. Salvaged banners of the Astral Knights, tattered, smoke-stained, hang from jury-rigged struts. Crude benches have been dragged into rough order, and on them sit the survivors. They rise as Dorn enters, the scrape of boots echoing like a ritual.
“My sons,” Dorn says, his voice carrying without need of volume. “Sit.”
They obey as one, the weight of their gazes never leaving him. For a moment, Dorn lets the silence hold. He studies them, not just the wounds in their armor, but the hollow places behind their eyes. Survivors, yes. But they have been forced to live as ghosts of a Chapter that may no longer exist.
He steps forward, spreading a hand across the crude maps that have been laid on a central crate. “This place will not be a grave. It will be a fortress. We will make it so. But to do that, every hand, every mind, must be set to the task.”
Alcaeus stands beside him, pointing to one of the sketched routes. “Scouts here, Father. We’ll sweep east for water and metal salvage. I’ll lead them myself.”
Erastes’ gauntlet taps another line. “And I will take the brethren south, to recover what caches remain. The Guild’s claim is tenuous; our blades will make it nothing.”
Dorn inclines his head, then looks out across his sons. “Others will remain to oversee the walls. Trenches here. Bastions here. The people will work alongside you. You will show them what it means to build as warriors, not only to fight.”
A murmur of assent ripples through the Astral Knights. It isn’t the thunderous cry of a Chapter at full strength, but it is the one of the first sounds of resolve these warriors have uttered in years.
Dorn lets it stand. Then, softer, he says, “You are fewer than you should be. Less than you were meant to be. But you are not broken. You are Astral Knights, and you are my sons. So long as we endure together, this ruin will become our fortress, and from it, we will rise.”
The hold fills with the sound of armored fists striking breastplates, a rolling thunder against steel.
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blukitty40k · 28 days ago
Text
From Rust and Bone pt.22
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to prosthetics, reference to past background characters death
Word Count: 1030
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22
               Standing on one of the ship’s ruined observation decks, long since stripped of its view. A ragged break in the plasteel shows only the black silhouette of the valley below, jagged with ruins and pale smoke trails from distant storm vents. The moons have risen, two pale ghosts riding the clouds.
Kessa leans against a bent support beam, arms folded against the cold, her cloak drawn tight. Dorn stands beside her, unmoving, his eyes on the horizon.
“They look to you like you're made of iron,” she says softly, watching the way his jaw remains set. “But that man. Erastes. I saw the way he looked at you. Like someone who’d found something lost.”
He says nothing for a long moment. The wind stirs the ends of his hair, silver-pale gold catching in the moonlight.
“They called me ‘Father.’”
“You didn’t seem surprised.”
“I wasn’t,” he says. “Not truly. But it… struck deeper than I expected.”
She shifts, saying nothing. Letting the silence hold him open.
“I have buried legions,” he says quietly. “Watched sons burn. Watched their names be used as weapons by men who never knew what they meant. When I fell, I thought that was the end of it. My line broken. My bloodline scattered to memory.”
Kessa’s gaze stays on him, steady. “And now?”
“They are still here,” he says. “Scattered. Lost. But not broken. These Primaris, born long after I vanished, still carry the gene-seed forged from me. They are mine. Even in all that’s changed… they are mine.”
His voice doesn’t rise. If anything, it sinks lower, as if he feared the truth would vanish if spoken too loudly.
“I am not the man I was,” he confides. “I doubt I ever will be again, but they don’t need a symbol carved from stone. They need someone to stand. To show them what remains worth building. Even if my hands are empty.”
She looks down at his missing arm, at the stump wrapped in cloth and leather. He had for the night unhooked the prosthetic. Then looks toward the other hand, calloused and scarred, resting lightly against the warped railing.
“Your hands aren’t empty,” she says. “You just carry different weight now.”
That makes him turn to her. Slowly. The thin scar across his cheek catching pale light.
“Do you believe that?”
“You already saved one life that shouldn’t have been saved,” she says.
His expression doesn’t change, not much. Though his gaze lingers on her longer than it has before. In the distance, thunder rolled, slow and low, like breath drawn in the lungs of the land.
“We ride into something larger than either of us,” Dorn says. “I don’t know what it will ask of me. Or of you.”
“I never asked for safety,” Kessa replies. “Only a path that I choose.”
She steps beside him, side to side, eyes forward again. Watching the moons. Watching the night stretch. For a little while, they stand like that. Just two figures in the dark, each bearing what the other could not.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
               The Hall of Broken Steel, as they’ve come to call it, had once been a cargo hold, now refitted into a makeshift chapel and war council chamber. The ceiling still bears scorches from when the ship broke atmosphere, and the cracked Aquila above the far bulkhead had been repainted by hand. Crude, reverent.
Erastes kneels at the front, helm held in both hands. Around him, a dozen others, brothers in cobalt and silver, maintain a solemn hush. Veterans and neophytes alike. Those who had survived the warp breach and the crash. Those who had kept the gene-seed alive not only in body, but in doctrine.
Brother-Ardent Alcaeus moves slowly through the rows, checking each marine’s armor, laying a gauntlet on their pauldron in silent blessing. His once-pristine Mark X armor bears deep gouges—burns, scoring, a missing vent on the right greave. Though he walks upright, proud. The oldest among them.
He pauses beside Erastes. “You knelt longer than usual,” he says, voice like gravel scraping steel.
Erastes doesn’t rise. “I was… remembering the day I was given the blade. It was passed to me by Vassilion before he died. Said it had come from the hands of a brother who remembered what it meant to stand beside a primarch.”
“You stood before one today,” Alcaeus says.
A murmur of acknowledgment passes through the hall. Even among giants, that had not gone unnoticed.
Brother Varan, a heavy-set warrior with a long scar across his scalp, let out a breath. “He’s different than I imagined.”
“He’s alive,” mutters one of the neophytes, Navici, still in training plates. “I didn’t think a primarch could be.”
Alcaeus turns toward the younger marines. “You thought him myth?”
“I thought you were myth,” Navici says. “Before the ship fell.”
That earns a quiet ripple of amusement. Bitter-edged, but warm beneath it.
Erastes finally rises, slipping the helm back into its clasp. “He didn’t speak to us like a ghost. Or a god. Just a man.”
“Just a father,” says Varan.
They let that word hang for a moment. Alcaeus crosses to a stone slate near the center of the hold. Tapping one of the etchings on it with a finger. The original record of battles. Dozens of names, many now carved through with a line—lost.
“This,” he says, “was a Chapter near broken. When the warp storm took us, we were to be the reinforcements, new blood for a weary lineage. But we were cut adrift. Half-grown. Half-trained. We survived by remembering our lineage… not because we understood it. But because we believed it was greater than the void.”
Turning to face them all. “Now the void has returned what it took. And he stands among us again.”
A pause before Alcaeus speaks the old words, not as command, but as conviction. “Imperator vult.”
The responses came back in one voice.
“So, we endure.”
Their voices fill the chamber. Not shouted, not roared, but spoken with the gravity of oaths long buried and now dug free again. In the silence that follows, they stand, not as a fragmented remnant, but as sons, waiting to be reforged.
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blukitty40k · 28 days ago
Text
From Rust and Bone pt.21
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to prosthetics, reference to past background character death
Word Count: 1689
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22
               As they set out again the sun barely crests the ridge, following Varan down a winding descent of fractured slate and half-buried supports. The signal tower shrinking behind them, a broken tooth jutting from the earth. The path leads into the bones of a scar the crash had torn through the valley, where blackened stone gave way to slag glass, and slag gave way to scorched hull plating. A graveyard, half-swallowed by time and ash, the land folding in around it like a wound trying to close.
The Aegis Mendicant had been a mighty thing once. A Primaris reinforcement cruiser meant to carry gene-augmented warriors to the Astral Knights’ front, but the warp had other plans. Now it lays shattered across the basin like a titan’s carcass. The prow is gone, either disintegrated or buried beneath the ridge. The aft had broken open against a cliff face. What remained has been fortified with stubborn, desperate ingenuity. Scrap plating and melted armor had become walls. Camo-nets stitched from survival tarp stretched between bulkheads. Stormglass canopies, once part of a hangar bay, served now as crude skylights.
Kessa slows beside Dorn as they take it in, brow furrowing. “You made all this work?”
“We made it last,” Varan says, glancing back. “Work is… generous.”
They pass into a sunken cargo bay, now reimagined as a kind of holdfast. A perimeter had been built from salvage, half-burned wreckage, fractured rhino armor, and bulkhead braces. Guards stand at the breach: two neophytes in partial armor, their helms clipped to their hips, bolt pistols resting in easy reach.
“They with you?” one asks, eyes lingering on Dorn.
“They are,” Varan replies. “And… he’s the reason the signal was answered.”
Dorn says nothing, but steps forward. The neophyte’s eyes widen slightly. He straightens without another word and steps aside. Inside the broken hold, the air is warmer. Not comfortable, but survivable. Faint geothermal venting hisses through patched piping. Glow coils buzz overhead. The scent of old oil, boiled rations, and ceramite linger beneath everything.
More survivors are here than Dorn had expected. A few bear full battleplate, worn thin, repainted by hand. Others move in undersuits or scavenged armor, stripped down for repair or survival. Most are young. Two bear the signs of grievous injury, limbs replaced with servo-harnesses that hadn’t come from Mechanicus supply chains. All of them turn as Dorn and Kessa enter. Silence following suit.
At the far end of the hall, an older figure rises from where he knelt before a makeshift shrine, an Aquila re-painted in white on steel. His armor is darkened, a skull helm distinctive to a Chaplain is affixed to his hip. Turning to see what has caused the silence to fall over his brothers before he freezes. The quiet in the chamber grew denser, like a breath held too long.
“…My lord,” the Chaplain says, voice rough with disbelief. “Rogal Dorn.”
Kessa feels the air shift around them, not awe alone. Not fear. Something deeper. The stunned recognition of a truth too long buried.
“I am Brother-Chaplain Erastes. Keeper of Oaths.” He steps forward slowly, reverently. “If this is a trick of the warp, I will kneel to it nonetheless.”
Dorn’s voice is calm. Quiet. “It is no trick.”
“You live.”
“I endured.”
Erastes lowers his head. “Then the line did not break. We were not… forgotten.”
Dorn glances around the makeshift chamber. Young warriors. Reforged tools. Lives stitched together from wreckage. A legacy barely breathing.
“No,” he says. “But you were abandoned.”
Kessa looks at him sharply but says nothing. Erastes only nods.
“We held, my lord. We remembered. After the crash, the forward company died securing the perimeter. The shipmaster sacrificed himself to ground the ship clear of a civilian vent city. Of the hundreds aboard… only a handful remain. Scouts. Tech-marines. A few battle-brethren. Neophytes, mostly.” He looks toward Varan. “They grew up in the wreck.”
Dorn lets that settle in the air for a moment, his gaze sweeping back toward the entrance. “The signal?”
“Rigged by one of our Tech-marines using fragments of pre-Imperial relay code. We’ve been lighting it in cycles, hoping… someone would hear.”
“And no reply?”
“Until you.”
Dorn turns slightly, taking in the hall again. The Neophytes. The scraped symbols. The effort not just to live, but to hold to something greater.
Erastes takes a breath. “Now that you’ve answered… what do we do next?”
Dorn looks down at his prosthetic hand, then to the warriors before him.
“You survive. And you rebuild. That’s the first step. After that…” He looks to Kessa, then back to Erastes. “We decide what comes after. Together.”
The quiet holds a beat longer.
Varan steps forward, standing straight. “The Astral Knights will follow.”
Dorn’s gaze is heavy, but steady. “Then we walk forward from this place. Not as remnants. As Father and sons reunited.”
The light from the shrine flickers across faces that many had never seen the Imperium, but remembered it in their blood.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The makeshift sanctuary gradually returns to motion. Quiet acknowledgments. Muted oaths. Neophytes stepping back to stations or gear with glances cast Dorn’s way. Kessa stood near the entry, silent but observant, her gaze moving from face to face, from cracked plasteel to scavenged supply crates, taking in the weight of it all. Erastes steps beside Dorn and gestures toward a half-collapsed corridor branching from the main hold.
“Walk with me, my lord. There’s more to see than what we’ve managed to clean.”
Another Space Marine joins them, his armor scorched and unevenly repainted, but the marks of a veteran clear in the bearing of his shoulders. A power blade hangs at his hip; its casing fused along one edge. The white laurels painted on his helm mark him as a sergeant.
“This is Brother-Sergeant Jarn,” Erastes says. “He led most of our salvage sorties.”
Dorn gives a small nod. Jarn inclines his head in return but doesn’t speak. They move together through the interior wreckage, their boots echoing against groaning plates. The walls creak with the strain of long burial, frost-laced seams giving soft metallic sighs as the hull adjusts to the warming day. Overhead, bulkheads sag beneath the weight of shale. Light filters in through shattered viewports patched with synthmesh and patch worked armaglass shards.
“We lost the primary manufactorum in the descent,” Jarn says, voice low and even. “Power grid fractured along the dorsal spine. We rerouted through auxiliary cores and scavenged what we could from the forward vaults before they collapsed.”
Erastes leads them through a corridor where every third support beam has been reinforced with ferrocrete bricks and las-welded struts. Prayer strips fluttered in the stale breeze from a cracked vent.
“Everything we’ve used was stripped from what the ship could give,” Erastes adds. “The Apothecarion mainly functions as a sickbay. The armorium is barely functional. Gene-seed reserves faced heavy losses, but some stabilization vials survived in a stasis box.”
They pass a small chamber where two neophytes sit working in silence, hand-grinding ration paste to be repurposed into a medicinal compound. One wears a patch over his eye, the other a servo-frame supporting a shattered leg.
“They’re young,” Dorn says, quietly.
“They grew up here,” Jarn replies. “Most had no battlefield experience. Just fire drills and reinforcement exercises. We taught them from the old records. Some were even recruited from this planet. The Librarian before he died gave them as many memories as he could.”
“Memories?” Dorn asks.
Erastes turns to him. “Of the Chapters. Of you. He was a keeper of Legion lore—kept recordings, stories, fragments of the Book of the Seven Shields. He believed… you might return.”
They turn into a longer hall, the floor marked by faded kill tallies. One wall bears a painted mural, crude but reverent, Astral Knights standing shoulder to shoulder across the stars, beneath a looming Imperial Aquila.
“And did you believe it?” Dorn questions, voice unreadable.
Erastes doesn’t answer immediately. “I believed we would die with the memory of you. Not that you’d walk through our doors.”
Ahead, they reach the wreck’s former chapel, long since collapsed but where someone had cleared the debris and laid a new floor of scavenged panels. Here, candles flicker in welded holders, and the sarcophagus of a fallen dreadnought rests upon an iron slab, painted with the oaths of the fallen.
“This is where we swear them in,” Jarn says. “Still. Even now.”
Dorn stands in silence, gaze sweeping the hall, resting on the names scratched into the walls, names of the lost, of the remembered.
“You held to duty,” he says at last. “Even when the Imperium didn’t answer.”
“It’s what you would have done,” Erastes says.
Dorn doesn’t reply. His gaze drifting toward the flickering flame. Toward the youth repairing guns with bare hands. Toward the broken, still-standing hull.
Kessa’s voice echoes softly from behind, just outside the doorway, having been quietly following “You didn’t build a base here. You built a legacy from wreckage.”
Erastes turns. “We kept our faith. Even when it was only us.”
Jarn nods once. “And if we had fallen, the signal would’ve burned a while longer. Not a cry for help. A reminder that we were.”
Dorn looked toward the corridor they had come from.
“Not all is ash,” he says.
Erastes regarded him, his voice steady. “What happens now, my lord?”
Dorn turns back toward the others in the chamber, toward the firelight and the flicker of eyes that still dared to hope.
“That depends,” he says quietly. “Do my sons still have the strength to rise?”
Jarn’s shoulders straighten with purpose. “We do.”
Dorn steps forward, the shadows casting long across the wall behind him. His presence, once a question, now a fulcrum.
“Then we begin again,” he says. “Not as ghosts. Not as castaways, but as the fire that remembers what the Imperium forgets.”
Erastes lowers his head, not in grief, but in oath renewed.
“Yes, Father,” he says.
The others followed. Beneath the broken ship that once carried their future, something deeper stirs—the first breath of purpose drawn after too long buried in silence.
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blukitty40k · 28 days ago
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From Rust and Bone pt.20
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to prosthetics
Word Count: 1697
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19 | pt 20 | pt 21 | pt 22
               Standing by the broken window long after the last light has faded from the clouds, after the basin has fallen into shadow and the cold creeps deeper into the bones of the ruin. Below, the mounts shift restlessly, tails sweeping the frost-dusted ground. The air is still, but the silence isn’t empty, not with the signal blinking like a second heartbeat in the far dark.
Kessa’s voice is the first to break it, low and thoughtful. “You ever wonder if some things are better left buried?”
Dorn doesn’t look at her. “Yes.”
The single word hangs between them, quiet but heavy.
She leans forward on her elbows, eyes tracing the ridgelines. “Sometimes I think everything that survived out here did so because no one came looking. Because the storms buried the bones, and the ghosts learned to keep their heads down.”
Turning his head slightly, studying her profile. The way the firelight below brushes gold into the edge of her hair, the faint line of strain near her eyes. She doesn’t look afraid. Just tired of beginnings.
“You’re not wrong,” Dorn says. “But we didn’t survive just to bury ourselves, either.”
Kessa gives a faint, mirthless breath of laughter. “You really think that?”
“I have to,” he says, simply. “Otherwise, all that’s left is endurance. And endurance without reason is just another kind of dying.”
She is quiet at that. The wind shifts through the broken supports above, whispering like old voices.
“I’m not afraid of what’s out there,” she says finally. “Not the machines, not the ghosts, not even the Imperium if it’s still clinging on in the dark somewhere.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
She looks at him. “That it’ll take you back.”
He stills and, in that stillness, something settles between them—unspoken, but real. Not just concern for what might wait at the signal’s source, but fear that it will unmake what has grown here, quietly, stubbornly, against all odds.
“I’m not the man I was when I fell,” he says at last. “And I’m not the weapon they made me.”
“No,” Kessa replies. “You’re something else now. And they might not want that.”
Nodding once, a slow, deliberate motion. “Then they’ll have to take what’s left. Because I won’t give it up freely.”
They stand in silence again, watching the flicker far across the basin.
“It could be bait,” he says. “Could be a trap left by something clever, or by something desperate.”
“Or it could be someone waiting. Someone holding on,” she answers. “Long enough that they never stopped hoping someone would come.”
Flexing the prosthetic again, feeling the servo pulse against his wrist joint. “You’re sure?”
“No,” Kessa says. “But I want to know. We need to know.”
That truth surprises her as she says. Not because she yearns for the Imperium or its ghosts, but because she’s lived too long among the ruins of what was lost. Maybe, just maybe, some part of her still wants to believe that not all calls go unanswered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
               The stars are still out when they break camp. Only the faintest bloom of gray on the far edge of the horizon, casting a dim pallor over the shattered ruins around them. The wind having softened to a whisper, and the world holds its breath beneath a sky still bruised with night. Frost clings to the edges of collapsed beams and old rail lines, catching what little light there is and turning it to dull silver.
Kessa moves without speaking, her breath misting as she checks the mounts. The younger ridgeback shifts under her touch but doesn’t protest, used now to these early rides and the quiet rhythm of departure. Arravox stands steady as ever, ash-laced hide glinting faintly beneath the saddle blanket Dorn secures with methodical hands. He flexes the prosthetic once, adjusting the strap of his cloak to fall over the limb.
They don't speak much. There is nothing more to say that hasn’t already been spoken in firelight and silence. Just the soft clack of gear being packed, the subtle crunch of boots over frost-hardened stone, the occasional snort of the beasts. Kessa mounts first, adjusting the slate-reader strapped to her wrist.
Dorn climbs onto Arravox, his weight settling into the saddle with a quiet, practiced motion. The great beast shifts once, then stills, eyes glowing faintly in the pre-dawn gloom. They turn their mounts toward the far side of the basin. Toward the bluff. Toward the pulse.
The ruins fall behind them, their outlines reduced to jagged silhouettes against the graying sky. The signal tower doesn’t blink from this angle, but they both know where it is. Dorn carries its position in his mind now, like a point drawn across a battlefield. Kessa rides slightly ahead, shoulders squared against the wind.
Riding in silence, save for the sound of clawed feet over loose shale and the slow creak of harnesses. As the ridgebacks climb the slope leading toward the bluff, dawn finally begins to break, not golden, but a cold, pale light that washes over the rocks and dust them in a colorless glow.
Closer now. The shape of the signal tower begins to resolve through the haze. Blackened metal. Angled structure. No banners, no signs of welcome. The kind of place that keeps itself quiet, forgotten by intention, not accident.
Arravox slows near the base. Dorn raises a hand and Kessa halts beside him, having midway changed to be side by side. From here, the signal’s pulse is visible again: slow and even, like a heartbeat barely strong enough to keep something alive. No movement. No figures. Kessa exhales softly and dismounts, scanning the area with narrowed eyes.
“Still no tracks,” she says, voice low. “But the wind’s been clearing everything.”
Dorn dismounts wordlessly, his gaze fixed on the tower’s upper module. Something about it sets his teeth on edge. Not the design, it is standard enough, if archaic. But the intent. This isn’t a beacon of warning or welcome. This is a memory. One someone wanted to survive. Drawing closer, his ears are met with a faint hum. The power source is still active. Old, but not failing. Glancing back at Kessa, who gives a silent nod. They advance together. Up close, the structure looms less like a signal and more like a tomb. Whatever waits inside, they are ready to face it.
               The corridor narrows as they head inside, following the signal deeper into the tower. Kessa moves ahead, her lantern casting an amber glow along the corroded walls. Every surface bearing the wear of long winters and ancient heat, streaks of soot, fractured lines with old frost. Behind her, Dorn follows, his footfalls measured, the hiss-click of his prosthetic arm marking time like a second heartbeat. The bare metal of his wrist catches the light, a pale imitation of the gauntlet he once wore.
They step into what remains of a data-vault. The ceiling has collapsed in parts, revealing a ribbon of wind-washed sky. A comms-dish jutting through twisted beams, half-buried in slag. The signal source pulses from its center, steady, gold, and old. It blinks like breath, not an alarm. They stand in stillness for a moment, letting the air settle.
“Don’t move.”
The voice rings out sharp and young, from above. Dorn shifts without thought, placing himself between Kessa and the source, one hand lowers near his belt. But there is no weapon to draw, not anymore.
A figure emerges from a broken catwalk. Slender, armored, poised. A short-barreled boltgun aimed steadily in his hands. The armor is rough in places, matte gray and cobolt, worn at the edges, field-repaired. One pauldron bearing the faint shape of two swords clashing.
“Step back. Hands where I can see them.”
Kessa lifts one hand slowly, the other still gripping the lantern.
Her voice is calm. “We’re not scavvers. We’re not here to steal anything.”
“You crossed the perimeter.” The figure’s aim doesn’t waver. “That signal—wasn’t meant for you.”
Dorn’s voice is low, measured. “Who was it meant for, then?”
The figure steps down cautiously, metal creaking beneath his boots. Dust stirring. Up close, he is young beneath the helm, his movements cautious but practiced. Armor scuffed.
“Astral Knights,” the youth says at last. “I am Scout Neophyte Varan. Out from Hold Aegis-Six.”
Kessa blinked. “You’re not from here.”
“No.” He almost smiles. “We fell here, years back. Or days. Time’s strange, through the warp.”
Dorn processes this information. The name means nothing. Astral Knights. A Chapter that must’ve been born long after his fall. Another link in a chain he no longer recognizes. But Varan is watching him, closely. Almost reverently.
“You don’t remember us,” he says softly. “But we know you.”
Kessa glances sideways. “What?”
“Our Chaplain… he taught us to remember. Said if we ever saw Rogal Dorn again, we’d know. Not by armor. By bearing. By silence. By the weight he carries.”
Dorn’s expression doesn’t change. He says nothing.
Varan looks between them, gaze lingering on Dorn's prosthetic as he lowers his weapon. “That signal, we lit it after the crash. One of our old warriors found this place, said it was from before the Imperium even remembered itself. Said if we wired it right, maybe someone would hear.”
“But no one did,” Kessa says gently.
“Until now.”
She studies the boy. “You were hoping for reinforcements.”
“Or survivors. Even just a voice.”
Dorn steps forward, approaching the dish. Running his fingers, flesh and metal, along the edge of the cracked relay frame. The light blinks against his skin.
“This tech… it’s older than your ship.”
Varan nods. “Great Crusade–era, maybe earlier. We patched it with what we had. Lex-code bindings. Power fed from scavenged cell cores and geothermal lines.”
Kessa squinted toward the dish. “A call left burning in the dark.”
Varan’s voice softens. “We didn’t expect you to answer it.”
For a moment, silence takes the room again. Dust drifting through the ceiling gash above. The wind carrying distant echoes, low and mournful.
He steps closer and whispers, “They said if we found you, everything would change.”
Dorn, not looking away from the signal, replies “Then it already has.”
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blukitty40k · 1 month ago
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Hey so who plans on reading the new Dawn of Fire book? I know it came out this week but I listened to the audio book while driving for a work trip and I have opinions lol
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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Tumblr media Tumblr media
ok well im gonna go kill shit on Space Marine 2 bye
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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From Rust and Bone pt.19
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to prosthetics
Word Count: 1371
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18 | pt 19
The spire still creaks in the aftermath of the storm, old metal groaning like bones in protest as if reluctant to let them go. Kessa moves through the central room of the spire with practiced purpose, cinching shut bundles of supplies, checking for dryness, sealing each satchel with hardened ties. Dorn works nearby, adjusting the harness fittings with quiet efficiency. His movements, still deliberate, have grown smoother with each use of the arm. The quiet hiss and hum of servos now marks his work, no longer foreign to the space. Neither say much, it is a morning of shared rhythm, not words.
They step outside as one. The world beyond has softened in the wake of the storm. Ash lies in shallow drifts, the sky still a bruised gray, but the air carries clarity instead of suffocation. Light reflecting off the glassy ridge above, casting long, slanted shadows across the access trail. Making their way down toward the steam caves, where the herd has weathered the worst of the cold. The creatures shift uneasily when the wind touches them as they part the tarp to come in—some still are curled against geothermal vents, others lifting broad heads as Kessa approaches with a soft click of her tongue.
Arravox stirs first, rising with a low chuff and an echoing hum that resonates through the stone. The great beast blinks, luminous scales dulled with dried ash and nudges her shoulder once before moving to Dorn. Unflinching at the contact, he lifts his hand and touches the creature’s scaled side, feeling the pulse through its hide. Moving to adjust the saddle, tightening straps with the new prosthetic.
Kessa checks the second mount which stands beside Arravox. Running her hand along the younger mount’s flank.
“He’s grown,” she murmurs. “Storm’s been good to him. Stronger now.”
“He kept still when it mattered,” Dorn replies, watching the creature’s stance. “That matters.”
Kessa offers a faint smile and begins strapping down the smaller mount’s pack saddle.
“You’ll take Arravox,” she says without looking up. “He knows your weight now and he’ll forgive you for making him climb again.”
Dorn moves to the older beast and runs his hand across its frilled neck. Arravox exhales heavily, a sound more felt than heard.
“Forgiveness,” Dorn murmurs. “Something I’ve been learning.”
By the time the sun’s weak light crests the upper ridge, the mounts are loaded, the remaining supplies packed. They lead the mounts out of the shadow of the cave, and for a moment, both turn to look back at the agri-spire, its silhouette sharp against the fading storm. Smoke no longer rising from the vents. The shutters are closed and what little warmth remained inside belongs to memory now.
“You ever think we’d leave it?” she asks quietly.
“No,” Dorn says, “But I never thought I’d find something worth staying for, either.”
She doesn’t answer, just steps forward and mounts her beast with fluid ease, cloak drawn close. Arravox lowers himself, allowing Dorn to mount with a practiced grip.
Ahead of them, the valley opens in long, snow-dusted ridges and fractured stone corridors. A landscape is neither fully dead nor fully alive. Laced with uncertainty, buried signals, and lost sons. Behind them, the spire fades into the distance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Riding till the valley begins to narrow. Ash drifts in pale swaths between the windbreaks, moving like old ghosts that refuse to settle. The ridgebacks cast long, uneven shadows over the trail, and beneath the softening light, the world seems more ruin than wilderness—like the bones of something once alive, picked clean by time.
The mounts move carefully. Their claws click on frost-slick rock, tails swaying for balance as they descend into a basin fractured by erosion and industrial scarring. Meltwater runs thin and bitter through rust-choked gullies. From time to time, a broken pipeline juts out of the earth like a snapped limb, venting only cold air and silence.
Kessa rides ahead. Her frame low in the saddle, every motion one of quiet vigilance. The slate-reader is strapped to her wrist, a patchwork thing kept alive by scavenged parts and stubborn care. A single green light blinks at steady intervals. Not strong but not failing either, persistent. The kind of signal that isn’t looking to be found by many, just by the right ones.
Behind her, Dorn sits upright on Arravox, the great beast huffing warm breath into the chill. The wind ruffling the edges of Dorn’s cloak, brushing ash into the seams of his tunic and the joints of his new arm. He flexes it occasionally, testing weight and balance. The motion is still stiff but becoming less so. Each hour gives him more control; more trust in the limb. They don’t speak much. The silence between them is full—of shared days, of hard-won survival, of things endured without explanation. Trust built not from words, but from action. From being there. From staying.
By late afternoon, they crest a shale ridge and pause. The basin below suddenly widening, surrounded by broken hills and scattered relics of dead industry. The remnants of what must have once been a transit hub sprawled across the valley floor, arches shattered by subsidence, steel bones twisted into strange, skeletal shapes. Rusted pillars rise at irregular intervals; their original purpose long lost to weather and time.
Kessa comes to a halt and taps the slate, the signal blinks faster here. Closer.
“That direction,” she murmurs, nodding toward a low shelf of rock on the basin’s far side. “Signal’s steadier now. Stronger. Could be the source is inside that bluff, maybe old infrastructure. Or a relay someone scavenged into working.”
“Recent activity?” Dorn asks, eyes sweeping the terrain. His voice is quiet and alert.
“No tracks I can see,” Kessa replies, scanning the ground. “But the basin’s still settling after the storm. Could’ve wiped signs clean.”
She doesn’t add what they both already know: no tracks didn’t mean no one is watching. They cautiously press on. The ruin greets them like a mausoleum. Not empty of presence, just of the living. Arches yawn over them, blackened and rimmed with frost. Cracks split the ferrocrete walkways, and sagging rails hint at a time when trains once moved here, grain, ore, people. Now there is only cold, and the slow breath of wind through the girders.
Dismounting at what might once have been a station entrance, half-choked by frozen vines twisted by chemical storms and years of neglect.
“We bunker here for the night,” Kessa says, eyeing the walls. “There’s a watchpoint up top. Might give us eyes on the relay, if the roof’s intact.”
“I’ll check,” Dorn says, and takes the slate from her without needing to ask.
Inside the ruin, the world grows quiet again. Their footsteps echoing in the long corridor, soft, but unmistakable. The stairwell is half-collapsed, but passable. Dorn carefully climbs it; aware it could easily give under his weight.
The top level has mostly caved in, but one side remained. Through a fractured viewport, he sees it. There, on the far side of the basin, half-hidden against the cliff face, stands a signal tower. Angular. Blackened by fire and stained by chemicals. Its top module pulses gold. Faint. Intermittent. Not an Imperial distress call. Not any standard mark he remembers.
Kessa joins him a few minutes later, breath fogging the air.
He doesn’t turn as he speaks. “You see it?”
“I do.”
“It’s been burning a long time.”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice quieter now. “But who left it lit?”
Standing side by side, wrapped in wind and silence. The signal blinks once more—steady, insistent.
“Could be automated,” she offers.
“Could be bait,” Dorn replies.
“Could be a call for help,” she says, quieter still.
He doesn’t answer. After a moment, she draws her scarf tighter and leans on the broken frame beside him.
“We don’t have to decide now,” she says. “Not tonight.”
“No,” Dorn said. “But tomorrow.”
Because it isn’t just about a signal. It is about what it means to follow it. What it might awaken. What it might ask of them. Below, their mounts shift in the dusk. Above, the stars emerge dim, veiled. Distant. Across the basin, the golden pulse continues. Waiting.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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I just finished book 2 of the Night Lord’s trilogy last night and ya know what, I see it now. These books are definitely living up to the hype. I just know the third book is going to have me crying in the work truck again.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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Okay. I am starting to see why the Night Lords Trilogy makes people big fans. Started the first book as someone who didn’t like the Night Lords and now I am starting to see the appeal.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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From Rust and Bone pt.18
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: reference to the death of background characters
Word Count: 2138
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17 | pt 18
Outside the spire, the wind weakens. Not entirely. Shifting, like a held breath finally let go. An amalgamation of ash and snow drifts down onto the metal structure, like sand dragging across metal by retreating tides. For the first time in weeks, the storm no longer sounds like a beast trying to carve its way inside. The sky is still lead-colored and low, but there are breaks between the worst of it. Kessa rises early to watch them from the upper slit window, counting seconds between gusts, tasting the shift in pressure with each inhaled breath.
Moving with purpose, pulling on her heavy cloak, tucking something wrapped in cloth into her belt pouch. She doesn’t speak, not at first. Dorn stirs from his place near the fire, the prosthetic resting beside him like a shadow still finding its shape. He watches her in silence.
“It’s the day,” she says.
He sits up straighter. “What day?”
Her hands still on the edge of her collar, jaw set. “There was a breach. A spill in the old lowline shafts.” She glances at the window, at the pale light pressing thinly against ash-frosted glass. “Toxic flare. My parents were working the vent throttles when the lockseal blew. Safety system engaged. Shut them in to keep the chemical backflow from escaping. They died before anyone could override it. Sealed in with the gas. Nothing left but their tags and what didn’t melt.”
Words dropping flat, without drama. Just fact, honed by years of quiet carrying.
Pulling on her gloves. “I go up the ridge for them. I leave something behind. I don’t talk to ghosts, I don’t chant. Just… leave something. Something of mine. Something clean.”
She starts toward the exit hatch.
Dorn stands. “Should I come?”
Kessa hesitates in the doorway, the wind scratching gently at the outer seal.
“You can. Or not. It won’t change it either way.”
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Behind the spire, resides a ridge that once had been part of an access route for upper agri-shafts. Now it is a broken shelf of rusted beams and frost-caked moss. Near the edge, a length of an old vent pipe juts from the earth, sealed and burned black where the spill had once leaked.
Kessa kneels beside it. She unpacks a small ceramic bowl, hairline-cracked but carefully cleaned, and lays a coil of red thread inside. A token. A symbol. Something salvaged from her mother’s old gear harness, preserved through years of travel and storm. Taking a small breath. Then, wordlessly, she pricks her thumb with a bone needle and lets a drop of blood fall into the thread’s hollow curve. Not a sacrifice. A tether.
Behind her, Dorn approaches—quiet, respectful. He doesn’t speak. Kessa stares at the old vent.
“I remember the first time I tasted the chemical haze,” she murmurs. “You can’t explain it. Just… heat and sharpness. You feel it before you breathe it. I was six. They wouldn’t have wanted me there, but there was no one else left.”
Looking down at her gloved hands.
“They died so a quarter-sector wouldn’t suffocate in its sleep. No one remembers that now. Just me.”
Dorn finally moves to her side, kneeling down beside her. He doesn’t reach out. Doesn’t intrude.
“You remember,” he replies. “That’s enough.”
She nods; eyes still fixed on the rusted pipe.
Softly, almost without breath she says “I hated the way it smelled after. The vent metal, the seals. They never cleaned right. It stayed in the walls.”
Pressing her hand over the bowl “Let it stay here now.”
The wind shift again—no longer bitter, just cold. Ash drifting sideways and down, falling like old snow around them. After a long moment, Kessa stands. Dorn rises with her. They don’t speak again on the walk back. But at the threshold of the spire, she glances up at him.
“Thanks. For not asking too many things.”
His answer is quiet. “You told me what mattered.”
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Outside, the ash still drifts in ghost-thin veils, luminous in the dying light. Inside, the spire feels smaller, warmer. The hiss of boiling water, the occasional creak of old metal under strain—these are familiar sounds now, signs of survival. Not comfort, not safety, but enough.
Kessa moves slowly around the hearth-ring, stoking the fire with a scavenged iron hook, her shoulders heavier than they’d been that morning. A faint smudge still lines the edge of her sleeve, dark from the ritual. Dorn is seated nearby, a battered pot between them on the table, hand resting on a split board as he cut moss-root with deliberate care. His prosthetic hand lays still beside the bowl, connected but unmoving—he hasn’t yet tried to use it without cause. It sits like a waiting thing, not yet named.
The stew simmers low. Tubers and dry spice and cured strips from the last hunt thicken the water to something almost indulgent. Outside, the cold presses in close, seeking cracks. But here, inside the battered ribcage of the old spire, there is heat. Enough to speak softly. Kessa doesn’t speak at first. She stirs, tasting, adjusting. Her eyes flicker now and again to the frost-fringed windows.
He finally breaks the silence. “You’ve done this every year?”
A beat. Then she nods. “When I had the time. Or a place where it was safe. Some years, it was just lighting a burner in the wind and hoping it stayed lit long enough. Other years…” She gives a dry breath that might’ve been a laugh. “I carved their names into an old vent pipe once. It got smelted two days later.”
He looks at her but says nothing. Just lets the words settle.
“They died in the cold season, just before spring came,” she says. “Years ago now. There was a leak—one of the deep shafts. They knew it was bad. It wasn’t some safety system that locked them in. They knew sealing it meant staying inside. But they did it. My whole sector lived because they didn’t come back out.”
Silence blooms again.
Dorn stirs the pot once with the blade of his knife, slow and deliberate.
“They were brave,” he says quietly.
“They were workers,” Kessa replies, but her voice is softer now. “Brave didn’t come into it. Just… the job. Just life.”
He hands her a bowl. She ladles the stew without speaking, hands it back, then fills her own. They ate slowly, the warmth crawling back into limbs gone stiff from the storm and ritual alike.
“The signal.”
Her spoon pauses. A bit of steam coils upward between them, and she looks down into her bowl as if it holds the words she doesn’t want to find.
“You think it’s real,” she says at last.
“I know it is,” he retorts. “I know how the old tongue sounds. How it feels. That wasn’t some trader’s scrap transmission or an echo out of broken sky. That was deliberate.”
Shifting her shoulders, as if trying to physically shrug the thought away. “You don’t think it could just be old? Something bouncing between towers, automated, dead men speaking without knowing they’re dead?”
Dorn’s brow lowers. “There was intention.”
Kessa doesn’t argue. Not really.
“I heard that, too,” she admits.
The flickering light catches on the prosthetic between them. It casts a jagged, segmented shadow across the table. Dorn glances at it.
“You want to follow it,” she says, more statement than question.
He doesn’t answer right away.
“When the storm breaks,” he says. “Yes.”
Kessa nods slowly. “I figured.”
He looks at her. “Will you come?”
Her mouth opens slightly, then closes again. Setting her bowl down and leans forward, arms on the table.
“I’ve been running all my life,” she says. “Running toward something or from something, never sure which. But this place… I haven’t hated staying. That’s rare for me.”
He doesn’t interrupt.
“I don’t know what’s out there,” she adds. “I don’t know if it’s hope or another storm. But I’ve got reasons to stay. And maybe… reasons to go.”
Their eyes meet in the low firelight. The silence thickens.
“Then we make the decision when the snow melts,” he says. “Not before.”
Kessa allows herself to slowly exhale. “We’ll need packs. Maps. Terrain routes the herd can’t follow.”
“And tools,” he adds. “To repair what we leave behind.”
“And a way back,” she says. “In case it all burns.”
He nods once. “We’ll leave nothing behind that we can’t rebuild.”
Outside, the storm still whispers. But inside, between firelight and the hush of something fragile taking root, the decision hasn’t broken them. When their hands brush clearing the bowls, this time neither one pulls away.
That night, neither of them bring up the signal again. It is still out there, true. Still pulsing. But now it has become part of their silence. A second fire waiting to be fed. Tomorrow the journey might begin, but tonight is the choice to still be here.
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               Sleep doesn’t find Kessa that night. The wind had quieted to a hush, but the silence left in its wake is worse. A silence that lets old thoughts breathe. The kind that finds her even now, curled beside the dim warmth of the ash-bed fire with her back against the wall and a patched blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
               Dorn sleeps nearby. She can hear his breathing—steady, slower now than it once had been. She lets her eyes trace the outline of his form, broad shoulders stilled for once, the weight he carries less visible when asleep. He isn’t some myth here. Not a name out of buried history. Just a man who works, and bleeds, and slowly is remembering how to live. Just a man she’d saved… and who had saved her back.
Her fingers twitch against the blanket. The signal echoes still in her thoughts. The voice speaking in that strange, low tongue. Words that don’t belong to this world. And his face, when he’d heard it. Like stone cracking down the middle. Like something waking up behind his eyes.
Gaze shifting to stare into the dying embers. Her breath fogs in the air. Part of her wants to stay. Stay with what they have built. With the routines, the firelight, the herd in the caves, the stubborn survival they’ve carved out of a forgotten ruin. There is still warmth in the walls, literal and otherwise. Still time before the warmth fully leaves her bones. But part of her, quieter and harder, knows this isn’t the end. Not for him.
The wind shifts again, gentler now, more a breeze than a howl. Closing her eyes and leaning her head against the wall. If she has to leave this place again… it will be on her feet, not dragged by fate.
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When the storm ends it’s not with a roar, but with a sigh. A slow thaw creeps across the spire. Ash crusts slide from the upper girders in wet, frozen chunks. Outside, the air is still frigid, but clearer. Luminous glow from between the clouds bleed through the haze, giving the slopes and broken ridge paths an eerie sheen.
Dorn stands at the edge of the upper gantry, the makeshift cloak tight across his shoulders, the new limb now slotted into his frame like it always belonged. He flexes the fingers slowly as he watches the land emerge. Behind him, Kessa steps into view, her hair wind-tangled and her boots thick with melt-sludge.
“It’s clearing,” he says without turning.
“I see that,” she murmurs.
For a long moment they stand side by side, watching the new light crawl across the ruined land. Faint trails can be seen again—old caravan tracks, half-buried markers, the crumpled frame of what once had been a crawler hauler. The world has returned, bruised but not dead.
Kessa hands him a folded satchel. “I pulled what maps I have. Some old terrain charts from before the collapse of Ridgeway Ten, and a few Guild-passed weather routes.”
He accepts it with a nod.
“We’ll need more than this,” she says. “But it’s a start.”
“I can hunt. And carry.”
“I know,” she says. “But I’ll still lead. At least until we reach the old drop scars.”
He looks at her, and she meets his gaze without flinching. There is no contest in it, only trust. They walk back inside together. By the time the sun, what little of it pierced the clouds, reaches its zenith, their packs are lined by the door. Cookpots lashed tight. Tools bound. Her satchel of salves, tinctures, and field wraps rolled inside a bundle Dorn has reinforced with strips of leather. There are fewer words now. Just motions. Readiness. The signal still pulses faintly, waiting, wherever it came from. Not louder, not closer. But real. Enough to chase. And they will go, but not alone.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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From Rust and Bone pt.17
Chronicles of the Lost Primarch
Relationship: Rogal Dorn x oc/afab!reader
Warnings: minor allusion to an old injury
Word Count: 1766
Requested tag:@noncon-photobomb @beckyninja @blukitty40k @runin64 @ilovewolvezz @meriamarie
Masterlist
pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8 | pt 9 | pt 10 | pt 11 | pt 12 | pt 13 | pt 14 | pt 15 | pt 16 | pt 17
The fire crackles low, shadows shifting over the stone walls as the wind begins to rise again outside, whispering the slow breath of the storm. The radio lays quiet now, the voice gone but not forgotten, like a ghost still sitting in the room. Kessa is sitting close to the hearth, legs drawn up, her arms draped loosely around her knees. Dorn hasn’t moved much since the words had ended.
The silence between them isn’t empty. It is full—of years they hadn’t lived together, of truths unspoken, of the sudden pressure of a path neither of them had planned for. She turns something over in her fingers—one of the bone clasps she’s been shaping for his prosthetic.
“You’ve been quiet,” she says, not looking at him.
Her voice is low, steady, unassuming.
“So have you,” Dorn answers.
He is sat on the edge of the workbench, his back half-turned to the firelight, the cracked Aquila shard still resting at his side like a half-buried truth.
Kessa let out a breath. “Doesn’t feel real, does it? Hearing that voice. That kind of language. It’s like... like a dream walking in through the front door.”
“It’s not a dream,” Dorn says. “It’s a reckoning.”
Standing up slowly and crossing the room, the limp in his gait softened over weeks of healing. Pausing by the table where her scattered projects lay—resin-bonded wires, shaped bone, braided synth-cord—and his eyes linger for a long moment on the bundle she hadn’t yet given him.
“You were going to show me this,” he says, gently.
Looking over, caught between weariness and something more vulnerable. “I wanted to wait. Until you felt more like yourself. Whatever that means now.”
He nods, just once. No anger in his eyes. No demand. Just a quiet understanding of all the things she’d been holding for him.
“I still don’t,” he admits.
The wind groans along the outer spire walls, and Kessa rises, setting the clasp aside. She crosses to where he stands, leaning her shoulder to the wall, facing him.
“You don’t have to answer the call,” she says.
“But it was meant for me.”
“That doesn’t mean it owns you.”
His jaw tightens. “I made a vow once.”
“And everything that came after?” she asks gently. “All this? Me? The herd? The long nights and quiet fires and the way we’ve carved something out of the bones of a dead world—what does that count for?”
He looks at her, then. Really looks.
“It counts,” he says. “It’s what kept me breathing.”
She reaches out then, callused fingers brushing the edge of his remaining hand. “Then don’t throw it away chasing ghosts.”
He closes his eyes for a long moment, the weight of his past and her presence pressing equally on his shoulders. When he opens them, they are softer, more tired.
“Maybe we wait,” he says finally. “Until the storm passes. Until we’re ready.”
Kessa nods. “Then we wait.”
Outside, the wind howls against the walls, but inside, the fire still holds. The storm would come. It always did. But for now, they are together. Still choosing, still holding on. Somewhere beneath the ash and silence, the sender of the signal waits.
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Over the following days the storm deepens, turning the world beyond the agri-spire into a shifting sea of gray and ash-laced howls. Ice-ridden winds screaming against old plating, rattling bolts and scoured seams. But inside, there is warmth. Heat bleeds from scavenged conduits and the soft glow of salvaged coils, all held together by the stubborn rhythm of two people who refuse to break.
They work at the table by firelight. The prosthetic lays between them now, no longer hidden. Shaped from salvaged plasteel, stripped servos, repurposed locking hinges, and pale ridge bone from a beast of the herd long gone—it bears the quiet weight of purpose. Some pieces have been polished, others etched faintly with lines and curves meant more for meaning than function. It is no relic of war. It is a piece of survival, shaped by a steady hand that understands necessity and something else: care.
“Move your shoulder,” Kessa says, voice low, as she adjusts a final tension cord. “Just like we practiced.”
Dorn obeys. The limb twitches faintly as components catch and respond. The movement is awkward and stiff, but it moves. He flexes again, jaw tight, breath sharp. Fingers shift with uneven grace. Not smooth. Not elegant. But deliberate.
Kessa crouches beside him, checking anchor points. “Pain?”
“No,” he says after a moment. “Not yet.”
She nods, allowing herself to breathe. “It’ll take tuning. You’ll hate it before it helps.”
“I already hate it,” he mutters, and the flicker of his mouth might’ve been a grim smile.
She huffs softly. “Good. Hate it now. Means you’ll learn to master it—not overly rely on it”
Turning to her, expression unreadable. “You could’ve told me. About this.”
“I did,” she says, meeting his gaze. “Eventually.”
Silence stretches between them again. Firelight flickering along the lines of metal and bone. Dorn flexes the hand once more—awkward still, but obedient.
“It’s not a warrior’s tool,” he says.
“No,” she replies. “It’s a survivor’s.”
Later, as the storm howls louder, they seal the windows and bury the fire deeper into its ash-bed to preserve warmth. Together they watch the flakes drift through thin cracks in the plating—ash like snow, glowing faint green before burning out in the dark.
Kessa arranges the ration pots tighter against the wall. Dorn adjusts the shielding panel near the vent intake. When their hands brush, neither of them pulls away. The signal is still out there—silent now but waiting, a heartbeat beneath the storm. But tonight, they don’t speak of it. What matters is the warmth they’d hold onto, the fire between them, and the strange new shape of a limb not built for war but made by someone who stayed.
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Outside the storm has become a second sky. Not just wind and grit now, but something heavier, denser—a world above their world. Every hour comes with its own vibrations: the low moan of pressure shifts, the sudden crack of ancient struts adjusting under the cold, the whisper of green-tinted ash filtering down through old seams in the metal.
Inside the agri-spire, life contracts. They ration their supplies carefully. The herd, bunkers deep in the steam-caves with heat plates and forage stacks, go largely unseen. The tower itself groans and shudders but holds. Heat lines remain warm, the fire still lit when they bury it in ash at night. Every small stability becomes a kind of victory. In the center of it all, the table.
There, Dorn practices. Not as he once practiced with swords or power fists or battlefield drills, but with a different kind of discipline—quiet, incremental, stubborn. The prosthetic has no name. It doesn’t need one. Kessa has adjusted the bicep twice and the wrist plate once. Dorn works each finger deliberately, forcing the imperfect servos through their paces again and again. The index and middle finger now respond almost cleanly. The rest follow, slow and juddering.
Kessa sits nearby, threading a torn boot seam back together. She watches him sometimes. Not intrusively. Just enough to check tension points with her eyes, just enough to mark progress. Her breath comes slower today. Tighter. Her movements are careful. While the flare-up has faded, but not its echo. The cold isn’t helping. She doesn’t complain, though. Never does. At one point, Dorn pauses and looks at the hand—then across at her.
“You knew it wouldn’t be perfect,” he says.
She nods. “Nothing out here is.”
“But you still made it.”
A faint shrug. “You were starting to reach for things with nothing there. That’s worse.”
He is quiet. Flexing the hand again, thumb and forefinger closing around nothing. He can just barely hold a blade now. Not wield it well. Not yet. But it is a start.
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That night, the ash whispers like waves around the spire. The storm is colder now—its grit finer, its hunger deeper. They cook quietly over the fire, scraping the last of a salt-root stew from the bottom of the pot. The thick root’s bite numbs her throat a little. Dorn doesn’t seem to notice the spice at all.
Light flickering low across the walls. The room is small but feels whole. As they eat, Kessa stands briefly, retrieving a fresh heat pack from the small wall compartment. When she returns, Dorn is sitting with his back against the storage wall, the prosthetic resting palm-up again. His remaining hand is curled loosely around the wrist.
“Pain?” she questions.
“Only when I pretend it’s natural,” he replies.
She sits beside him. “It’s not. But it’s yours.”
They sit like that for a while. She hands him the heat pack. He doesn’t argue. When the fire is down to embers, Dorn is standing near the radio. The light on its surface blinks steadily, slowly. The signal is still out there. Still waiting.
He doesn’t touch it. Just watches it again. The prosthetic arm hangs still at his side. Kessa joins him after a time; arms crossed under her coat. She doesn’t look at the radio, doesn’t have to. Its presence pressing on them.
“I keep thinking about what comes after,” she says.
Dorn’s gaze stayes on the light.
“After the storm. After this… pause. What do we do?”
Silence. Then, his voice low “You’ve built something here. I’ve only just started learning how to live inside it.”
She turns her head slightly, as if watching for something in his face.
“Then what if we let the rest pass us by? Let the signal scream into the snow, and stay quiet?”
Dorn doesn’t answer. His eyes are unreadable, a rare thing for him. Stillness wrapped in silence.
“You don’t owe them anything,” she says.
The words stay between them. Sharp-edged. True. Still, he doesn’t answer
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The next morning comes without sunlight. Just more of the same gray, streaked with green. Ice laces the inner walls in places where seals have loosened. Kessa moves stiffly, hauling insulation panels up from the lower supply room. Dorn joins her, tightening bolts with his good hand, the other now capable of holding a support bar in place without dropping it.
Small victories. Quiet moments. That is how survival feels, now. Less like war, more like maintaining the breath in your chest, the heat in your limbs. But the signal remains. They both know when the storm finally breaks, the world outside will demand an answer.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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Primarch doodles from yesterday
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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Forever cursing myself for deciding to change the color scheme of my Necrons from darker colors to lighter colors. Isopropyl alcohol will strip the paint, however it’s taking forever to work on the metallic base coat.
Guess I’m just gonna take my kill teams to Friday night paint and yap.
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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You can't keep doing this to me!!! You can't keep drawing the softest snuggliest astartes bellies and not have them be real. The desire to bury myself in them is huge!!!
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Hehee just imagine being able to sleep on top of one…
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blukitty40k · 2 months ago
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ave dominus nox, brothers
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