#or descriptive geometry | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lcatala · 2 months ago

Text

Inspired by this post by @thanergetic-hyperlinks, I present to you

Tessellations of the Nine Houses

(Or "I can't really draw figurative art so my Locked Tomb fanarts are geometrical vector drawings")

"A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps." — Wikipedia.

Making tilings themed after each necromantic House seems obvious: for each House you pick a tile with the same number of sides as the number of the House; but this does present some challenges for some of the Houses.

note 1: this might give the impression that I first decided on the symbols and then found patterns to match them in a very organized and motivated manner; in practice it was much more chaotic and multidirectional, the patterns informing the symbols as much as the symbols informed the patterns; this is fine since symbolism is entirely associative and arbitrary anyway

note 2: I added alt-texts for all the images, but I have no idea of how to properly describe abstract geometric art; if you feel you can do a better job than I did, feel free to put your fingers where your mouth is--wait, hang on-- I mean feel free to provide better descriptions if you can

note 3: looking forward to the geometry nerds explaining to me how I got basic geometric details wrong, friggin nerds

The First House

The First House seems obvious, as a shape with one side is an ellipse (of which the circle is a special case). There's just one problem: ellipses do not tile the plane. No matter how much you stretch them and deform them, the very nature of ellipses means you'll always have gaps or overlaps.

So we cheat and we work with overlaps: turns out there is a history of tilings that use circles as a construction pattern, then turn the overlapping sections into the actual tiles. Such patterns have been used extensively in European and Middle Eastern art, and have also been associated with the New Age movement, so it fits Jod's style perfectly. And so we get this:

The different cells correspond to different House colors, with the resulting gothic stained-glass appearance quite in line with the Roman Catholic Empire vibe Jod is going for. The overlapping circles convey the intricacy of the relation between the First House and the eight other, both autonomous from it yet intrinsically part of it.

The Second House

There's a variety of geometrical shapes that have two sides, but most of them don't tile the plane, altho there is one that does — if we take a crescent shape and slightly thicken it so that the inner and outer curves are identical, we can do this:

The waving pattern is of course evocative of the flag of conquest which the Cohorts of the Second House have planted on many worlds.

The Third House

With the Third House things get a lot easier, because equilateral triangles are one of the three regular polygons (where all sides are the same length and all angles are identical) that tile the plane all by themselves without needing any other shape! Which however doesn't mean we have to be boring; we can have a little bit of fun:

Flowers for the beauty and ionizing radiation warning signs for the rancid vibes.

The Fourth House

Squares are the second regular polygons that tile the plane by themselves, so again our job is easy here, altho we still want to not go for the easiest option in order to be able to work in some symbolism:

The four big navy squares with a small white square at the center of course evoke the number five and the shadow of the Fifth House's regency over the Fourth.

The Fifth House

Regular pentagons do not tile the plane, so we have to use a more unusual shape — there are many options, but obviously we want to again pick one that offers some interesting numerical symbolism:

The cross-like patterns of course bring up the number four and the hold of the Fifth House over the Fourth. As for the crosses themselves and the fact that they appear to be made of wooden stakes, well uh… Abigail Pent, Vampire Hunter??? She does have Van Helsing vibes.

The Sixth House

Hexagons are the third and last regular polygons that tile the plane on their own. But this is the Sixth House we're talking about, things need to look orderly but in a convoluted way. So how about multiple levels of recursion:

The apparent complexity of the pattern is created by different orientations of a small number of elements, either 3 irregular hexagons, or 1 patterned regular hexagonal tile, depending on how you look at it, in line with the kind of hermetic scientism one imagines the Sixth House indulges in. The result is those apparent three-dimensional elements and emerging higher-order patterns, including that of ꙮ, the Multiocular O found in exactly one word of one 15th century Old Church Slavonic translation of the Book of Psalms ("серафими многоꙮчитїй" many-eyed seraphim).

The Seventh House

Regular heptagons do not tile the plane, but they don't need much tweaking to work, which is fine since for the Seventh House we want something deceptive yet simple (deceptively simple? deceptive in its simplicity?):

Hearts for the beauty, snake scales for the poison [the Seventh House is on Venus, the planet named after the Roman Goddess of love, but etymologically "Venus" is actually the same root as "venom", and of course "Septimus" resembles "septic" — tho in that case there's no etymological connection, it's just a happy coincidence].

The Eighth House

Octagons do not tile the plane, but they come pretty close, so we can give the Eighth House a simple, stern, but slightly threatening pattern:

Boring sterile bleached temple mosaic, with just a little bit of passive-agression, a perfect fit for Evangelical Christians Tumblr puritans the Eighth House.

The Ninth House

And so we reach the Ninth House. Now the thing about the Ninth House is that, even by imperial standards, they're huge freaks, like they're completely unhinged heretical weirdoes. So, when it comes to their tiling, we need to get weird, like, a lot weirder than we've been so far, and this will require some context, so get ready because now we're officially going on a wild tangent.

So far all the tilings we've seen were periodic. That is, they were drawing a pattern that repeats itself indefinitely in all directions.

But starting in the 1960s, mathematicians began to study aperiodic tilings, tilings that don't repeat; you can keep expanding them forever and never exactly find back the original pattern you started with. The first mathematical proof of such a pattern was made in 1964 and theoretically required 20,426 distinct tile prototypes… This was soon refined to just 104 tile prototypes, then a mere 40. By 1971, it was mathematically demonstrated that you could make such a pattern with just 6 tile prototypes.

Except that was a lie.

Note that I said mathematically demonstrated. As it turns out there was an aperiodic pattern with just 5 tile prototypes, known as Girih, that had been used in Islamic art… since at least the 13th century — but it had historically been treated merely as an element of architectural design, and its mathematical properties weren't studied until 2007.

Then in 1973 this guy Penrose came along and demonstrated you could make an aperiodic tiling with just 2 tile prototypes. So now the goal was to find the ultimate aperiodic tiling, the one that would use only one tile prototype. Given how fast the field had progressed so far, it seemed that this discovery was imminent.

It took 50 years.

Not only that, but it was the work of amateur mathematician David Smith who accidentally discovered a 13-sided polygon that could make an aperiodic tiling all by itself (he then had his discovery checked by and co-authored a paper with a number of professional mathematicians).

EXCEPT THAT WAS A LIE AGAIN.

In turns out an aperiodic tiling using only one tile prototype had already been found… in 1936. But since the study of aperiodic tilings only started in the 60s, its significance in that domain wasn't understood at the time. It was seen as significant, but for an entirely unrelated reason: it was the first demonstration of a polygonal shape that needed only two copies of itself to completely enclose the original one — many mathematicians before that point thought the minimum possible was 3 (think of the Triforce from Zelda, with one equilateral triangle completely enclosed between three other identical triangles).

And coincidently, that shape happens to be a highly-irregular nonagon [yes "enneagon" is """technically""" more correct but "nonagon" has been used since the 17th century and is more common and it has Nona in it and Nona loves you]. So here it is, the Voderberg tiling, the freakish freakish tessellation of the Ninth House:

Like you see this and you're like "what is this, what is that thing, that's not a tiling, what the fuck is that" — but it is, it is a tiling, you can keep adding the freaky polygon and it keeps expanding outward forever, with no gap, no overlap, and with an ever-changing pattern. A double-spiral radiating outward, for Anastasia and Samael, Anastasia and Alecto, Alecto and Harrowhark, Harrowhark and Gideon.

And if you were thinking that this last one must have been significantly harder to draw than the other ones, you would be correct.

#the locked tomb #the locked tomb fanart #tessellation #tiling #geometry #vector art

447 notes · View notes

elkement · 7 months ago

Text

Traditional descriptive geometry ...

... work in progress!

"Cathedral of Math, version 2, work in progress 1"

I am (again) drawing a tower-like structure, from contour lines like look like clover leaves.

I had explored this before with code - now I am going old-school!

I've done a freehand drawing like this before, but I am hitting the limit of (in)accuracy when I want to add more contour lines. So, back to ruler and compass this time!

#art #drawing #geometry #descriptive geometry #traditional art #work in progress #science and art #portfolio #mathart

23 notes · View notes

second-wife-playbook · 8 months ago

Text

@nebula-gaster

Coronis hung to the curtains in the main ballroom of the estate, and watched.

Watching was all a little girl her age could do. Stella was twelve and already showing off her dancing lessons during parties, and Andrealphus was fourteen, speaking in lengthy terms on his studies in geometry and mathematics, the basis of his education as a scholar and future noble already advanced for a boy his age. Coronis in comparison, was still too childish. She was still being taught the airs and graces, but her teacher often lamented that she was still too demure to be truly "noble".

Her mother frowned at such descriptions, and when Coronis saw her face twisted in disapproval, she had learned to hide away. The ballroom was busy and crowded as it was. After all. Grandfather Forneas was visiting.

When Coronis saw her grandfather for the first time, he was led in by two tall imps by the arms, gently guided to a cushioned chair. She had never seen an "old" looking Goetia before him. His dark feathers were speckled with grays, his eyes sagging and glazed over. And stranger still, he kept murmuring under his breath. She'd heard from Stella that he'd been a "nutcase" for centuries.

Mostly, Coronis thought he was simply frail.

So her family glided and presented themselves with grace. What a happy union they were, looking after their sickly grandfather, with such excellent children. They did not mind the missing third, shying away in the corner, and watching with her big, scared eyes.

#nebulagaster #the gambling noble; rp #leaving the nest; foster au

265 notes · View notes

saintsylestine · 5 days ago

Text

Ash and Silence

gn!reader x Grey Knight

A/n: who's surprised I hyperfixated on this since mentioning it (*ﾉ▽ﾉ*) but ooooooh boy do I have some fucked up plans for the reader. Also note, I wrote this in 3rd person at first so you're named Alarice, nicknamed Al (gn!). I love a good 2 letter nickname. It's only mentioned once but idk warning lol. Enjoy!

Cw: Canon adjacent descriptions of gore, suuper slow burn (mostly just plot), tryna build some yearning/pining, maybe some vulnerability

Banner credit - support the artist!

You don’t remember when the manufactorum stopped screaming.

Maybe it was after Jex vanished into the floor. Maybe it was when Merek’s bones turned inside out in front of you, or when Thessa’s hands started bleeding eyes. Doesn’t matter. There’s quiet now.

That’s what counts.

You sit with your back to a slagged pillar, one leg stretched, the other drawn up. The rebreather’s filter is half-clogged with soot, and every breath feels like swallowing warm grit. You let your lasgun rest across your thighs. You stopped aiming it at anything hours ago. It’s a gesture now. Like a prayer. Or a superstition.

Ash clings to your armor in soft gray drifts. It coats the edges of your lashes, it fills the seams of your gloves. Even the blood’s gone dry. Just another layer of dust. The dead don’t rot here—they desiccate, freeze-dried in horror.

The wind occasionally shifts the air, stirring the high-hung cables that sway like broken chimes. Somewhere, a cogitator ticks faintly, its logic looped beyond meaning. Nothing else moves.

Your vox is dead. Your squad is gone. You’re not sure why you aren’t.

Maybe the Emperor forgot to cross your name off the list.

You tilt your head back and look through the broken slats in the roof, up at the red-bloated sun bleeding through the ashfall. The light turns the world to rust and bruises. You don’t blink. You’ve been awake too long for blinking to be useful.

Then—

A pressure. Not sound. Not sight.

Weight.

It pushes into your sternum like a breath you didn’t take. Subtle. But wrong.

The air tightens. As if it remembers what’s about to happen before you do.

Your fingers twitch against your lasgun’s grip, but you don’t raise it. Not yet.

Another pulse. Closer. Like the beat of a second heart.

Then the world cracks.

Not thunder—not explosion. Something deeper. Internal. Reality groans like old steel. The air in front of you folds inward, not out, collapsing into a fist of silver light. You flinch, reflexive—half-expecting daemonic fire, teeth, the shriek of warp-born laughter.

Instead—

Stillness.

Ash stops falling midair. The wind holds its breath.

And then the thing steps out.

Eight feet of silver plate, bearing a blade that glows with script older than your understanding. The armor is covered in sacred geometry and high Gothic—names of saints you’ll never know, fragments of prayers etched into ceramite like scars.

You don’t breathe.

He is impossibly solid. Like someone carved a war-god from moonstone and set him walking. The air around him hums with psychic charge, like the moment before lightning strikes—but colder.

He doesn’t look at you. Not at first.

His head scans the scene, slow and deliberate. Tactical. Efficient. His gauntlet twitches. You don’t know what he sees—your dead squad, the daemon-scarred walls, the warp-tear where Thessa bled out screaming?

Probably all of it.

You try not to stare.

But you do.

Because nothing about this is normal. This isn’t a Commissar or a Chaplain. This is something else. Something that shouldn’t exist in the same space you do. His presence makes the inside of your skull itch, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s not daemonic. It’s worse. It’s clean.

He turns, finally. His helm pivots. Not fast. Not deliberate.

A glance.

And maybe it lands on you.

Maybe.

You feel it—not on your body, but somewhere under your ribs. The sensation of being seen without being understood. Like a surgical light over a wound. No judgment. No emotion. Just exposure.

You don’t move.

He doesn’t either.

You tell yourself it’s nothing.

Just a sweep. A battlefield check. A reflex. He’s cataloguing the living. Not noticing you. Not really.

But even when his gaze moves on, the feeling lingers.

Like fingerprints on your skin.

Like something is different now, and you don’t have the words to name it.

You don’t rise when he moves.

There’s no ceremony in it. No reverence. He doesn’t gesture. Doesn’t pause to observe the fallen or make the sign of the aquila. He steps past the bodies like they aren’t there—like you aren’t there.

Because of course he does.

You’re not part of this equation. You're the afterimage of someone who mattered, maybe. A survivor. Collateral. You’re not his.

Your heart hammers in your throat all the same.

He moves like weight incarnate. Measured. Unhurried. As if time will pause for him, not the other way around. The ash moves around him, shifting like it knows better than to settle on his armor. Even the blood on the ground seems to recoil.

Your dead squadmates lie in pieces beside you. Names you whispered under your breath for days now—some you prayed for. Some you didn’t. He doesn't look at them. He doesn’t look at you.

And yet…

When he passes, something changes.

Not in him. In you.

That presence—that gaze—even if it only flicked over you for a heartbeat, it stays. Like static under your skin. Like the hum of a lascoil still cooling after discharge. You feel... watched. Touched. Branded.

No words.

No gesture.

Not even a nod.

He walks into the ruin, deeper into the dark, his blade low and humming, his psychic aura flaring like the distant memory of a star. You watch him disappear down the corridor where no one else came back. No guardsman. No tech-priest. No mortal.

Just him.

The whispering in your skull fades. The daemonhost’s voice gone.

He didn’t even speak a rite.

You’re alone again.

Only now, the silence feels… different.

Like the echo of something that almost noticed you.

...

You don’t follow him.

Not because you aren’t tempted. You are.

There’s something about the way he moved—weightless in all that armor, as if the world had already yielded to his presence. Something in you wanted to stay close, to be where the silence bent around him, where the warp didn’t whisper anymore.

But that silence wasn’t meant for you.

You’re not part of his war.

So you pull yourself upright, muscles dragging behind your thoughts. You feel like someone else’s body. The suit’s weight is doubled by dried blood, grit, and the smell—Emperor, the smell. Burned wiring, spoiled meat, ozone. Every breath tastes of it.

You’re still alive.

But barely.

You shoulder your lasgun. You check the charge out of habit—it’s fine. Mostly. Then you turn down the eastern corridor, toward the secondary signal beacon. The one Tech-Adept Sero had been crawling toward before he stopped responding.

It’s stupid.

But it’s something.

The manufactorum stretches around you in towering halls of broken servitors, collapsed data-stacks, and rusted shrines. Every wall is layered in once-glorious purity seals, now curled and blackened with warp-rot. The cogitator screens still flicker, but they speak in tongues—long strings of binary gibberish and broken prayers.

The further you go, the quieter it gets.

Not normal quiet.

The kind that listens.

Your boots crunch over glass. Something behind the wall shudders—something deep, something alive. The metal groans like it’s breathing.

And the shadows move.

You stop cold.

Not far ahead, a lumen flickers. Then dies. The corridor beyond is a throat—dark and slick, humming faintly.

You’ve seen what comes from places like that.

Warp ghosts. Machine-possessed. Crawlers.

You reach into your belt pouch, fingers closing around the last vial of sacred oil. Still sealed. You make the sign of the aquila across your chest—silent, fast, half-habit, half hope.

And you move forward.

Every step is louder now. The ash muffles little. Your breath hisses against the mask.

Then you hear it.

Not footsteps.

Not speech.

Just metal on metal. Long, dragging. Inhumanly slow.

You freeze again, back flattening against the wall of a servo-rail. You aim down the corridor, lasgun steady, vision dancing between red emergency lights and dark. Your heart pounds—but you’ve learned to breathe through that. Long ago.

The sound stops.

Silence.

And then—wet clicking. A sound like teeth, or bone.

You don’t call for help.

You don’t pray.

You wait.

Because whatever’s down that corridor?

It’s closer than the Grey Knight.

And it knows you’re here.

...

You move through the dark with your finger resting light on the trigger. The lumen strips overhead flicker in broken bursts—strobing the world into fragments. Each breath rasps through your mask, each heartbeat a countdown.

You’re two levels below where the Adept’s last ping came from.

The corridors here are tighter. Thick with condensation and the stink of sacrilegious coolant. Cables hang like viscera from burst wall-panels. A servitor floats face-down in a coolant trough, its flesh gray, half-melted, still twitching. You don’t look too long.

The signal beacon’s light grows stronger the deeper you go—an automated pulse, weak but consistent.

You round a corner and freeze.

He’s there.

Adept Sero.

Or… the thing that used to be him.

He’s hunched over the beacon, data-jack spliced directly into its core. Tubing runs from his neck into the wall. His mechadendrites twitch spasmodically, weaving through the air like snakes in oil. His back is bare, his robes torn and soaked with some black, glistening fluid that moves too slowly to be blood.

The machine around him is alive in the wrong way.

The steel breathes.

You hear the cogitator singing—not binary, not code. A low, wet hum. Like a heartbeat shaped into prayer.

The Adept lifts his head. You freeze again. Lasgun steady.

His face is smeared with ink, ritual script running from eye to jaw. His eyes don’t blink. Don’t focus.

And his mouth moves.

"I am Sero. Sero is inside. Inside is warm. Inside is light."

You don’t speak.

The beacon pulses. The same phrase plays back in a broken voice—looped over and over: In Omnissiah’s name, purge complete. In Omnissiah’s name, purge complete.

But nothing here is purged.

The Adept takes a step toward you. Limbs stiff. Neck clicking as it turns. The data-jack yanks free with a wet pop. The black tubing slithers back into the wall like a retreating tongue.

He raises a hand toward you.

"You’re cold," he rasps. "Come inside. We kept a place for you."

You shoot him in the knee.

It drops him fast.

He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t bleed.

He giggles.

You take three steps forward and shoot him again, this time through the chest. His torso caves inward, but the grin stays wide, eyes glowing faintly with something else.

"You don’t want to be alone," he gurgles.

And the walls respond.

The beacon shuts off.

The lights die.

The hallway groans around you—flesh-rip and iron-scream.

Something behind the Adept’s body opens. A hatch. A mouth. A door that was never there before. Inside, the dark breathes.

You back up fast, lasgun trained.

But something crawls out.

Too fast.

Too low.

Too wet.

You fire again.

And again.

And then you run.

Not because you're afraid.

Because you're not done yet.

...

You don’t look back.

The moment you cross the threshold of the last lit hall, something in the walls closes. You feel it. Hear it. Like wet stone grinding shut behind your boots.

The thing that used to be Sero—whatever came out of him—is moving. Not fast, not loud. But persistent. Confident.

It doesn’t have to chase you.

It just has to wait for you to slow down.

You push yourself harder. Down one corridor, then another. The pathways twist—spiral—grow unfamiliar. You passed this junction before, didn’t you? No. No, this one has a different shrine inset in the wall. This one’s eyes are gouged out.

You turn again.

Dead servitors line the walls, some fused into place. The ones that aren’t dead twitch when you pass. One reaches out for you, vocalizer sputtering a hymn warped into static. You shoot it through the skull and keep running.

Your shoulder slams into a doorway. Pain blossoms. Doesn’t matter.

You flick on your underbarrel torch—half expecting to catch a silhouette in the beam.

Nothing.

Only the sound of scraping. Behind you. Or in the vents. Or under the floor.

The hatch ahead is half-jammed. You slam your body into it three times before it gives. It opens into a maintenance crawlspace—low-ceilinged, damp, full of cable bundles like exposed nerves.

You drop to your hands and knees.

You crawl.

The air tastes like scorched plastic. Your shoulder throbs. The torch flickers.

Then, behind you—

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Like claws. Or bone.

The tunnel breathes. You hear the wet hiss of a mouth too close.

You move faster.

There’s an access panel ahead. A climb. A vertical shaft with an emergency ladder. Half-rusted. Greased in black oil. But it’s up. It’s out.

You wrench the hatch open, half expecting something to grab your ankle.

Nothing.

You climb.

You hear something laugh below you. No words. Just the sound of amusement shaped by meat.

You climb faster.

By the time you slam the top hatch shut and weld it with the last of your torch’s charge, your hands are shaking. Your arms are numb. And your mouth is full of copper.

The hallway beyond is mercifully silent.

The beacon’s signal is gone. The Adept is dead. Or something worse.

But you’re alive.

Alone.

In a place that doesn’t want you.

You sit against the wall for a moment, helmet tilted back. Your breath steams. Your shoulder aches.

And beneath your skin… you swear you can still feel the pressure of cables. Like something watching from behind your own eyes.

So naturally, you move.

...

You hear them before you see them.

Voices.

Human.

Too human.

Not the clipped vox-speak of officers. Not the static-blurred panic of a dying comm line. These are low murmurs, pacing back and forth, like rats arguing over whose turn it is to chew.

You move quiet. Low. Gun angled. Breath tight.

Light flickers ahead—not the red of emergency strips. White. A lumen lamp, weak but steady. It’s set behind a barricade of broken servitors and half-melted rebar. You count four figures. Maybe five. One’s bent over a dataslate. One clutches a lasgun that looks older than you. One is just… rocking.

Then someone turns.

And the world shifts under your feet.

“Alarice?”

You don’t recognize her at first.

The left half of her face is metal—rushed work, brutal and incomplete. Grafts like panic medicine. Still twitching. Her eye there glows cold-blue in the dark, wide and wrong.

But the voice is familiar.

And the right side of her mouth still curves into that half-smirk you remember.

“It’s you,” she says again. “Emperor, you look like hell.”

You freeze.

Lasgun steady. Heart hammering.

You don’t raise it. Not yet.

“Jenna?”

She nods. Casual. Like you’re back in the mess hall.

“They pulled me out. Didn’t think they could. But I was still breathing. And they said I could be… better.”

That last word stumbles—too many syllables in too little air.

You look past her. One of the others mutters binary in a human tongue. Another’s fingers tap the metal of their own jaw like it itches. None of them blink.

None of them breathe right.

Jenna steps closer.

“You made it this far. That means something. They’ll see that.”

You don’t lower the gun.

“Who?”

She doesn’t answer. Just keeps walking.

“Come inside. It’s safer. You’re shaking. Let me help.”

You should say something.

Anything.

Beg her to stop.

Ask her to come back.

But nothing comes.

Because deep down, you don’t believe she ever left.

You’d seen her dragged under a munitions hauler six days ago. She was screaming.

She shouldn’t be standing.

But she is.

Mostly.

“You’re not Jenna,” you whisper.

Her smile flickers. For a heartbeat, something tries to feel human in her eyes. Then it hardens.

“Don’t be stupid, Al. I remember you. I chose to remember you.”

That’s worse than forgetting.

You aim.

Not because you want to.

Because this is what comes after hope dies.

“I’m sorry.”

You fire.

Once. Twice.

Her body jerks, convulses. But she doesn’t scream.

She just looks… disappointed.

The others twitch.

One speaks—not in their voice. In hers.

“You should’ve come inside.”

Another’s mouth moves, syncing to her last words.

“You should’ve come—”

You open fire.

Ash kicks up, mingled with oil and smoke and wet metallic steam. The barricade erupts with movement—half-lunges, aborted charges, servo-limbs scraping against stone.

You run.

And something breaks behind you.

Not a door.

Not a barricade.

Something in the air.

The pressure drops. The air goes soft.

Like something just started listening.

---

Elsewhere—

The purge was complete.

The manufactorum tower lay in ruins—its upper levels gutted by orbital fire, its lower corridors cleansed in flame and blade. Smoke lingered in the steel arches like a ceiling of ghosts. The red emergency strips along the walls still flickered, sputtering beneath layers of soot and congealed ash.

In the center of the chamber, where a generator shrine had once pulsed with sacred voltage, now there was only blood and silence.

Brother-Captain Rhael Uthorion stood in the stillness.

His armor—adamantium-gray, carved with a hundred sacred sigils—was marked with impact scoring and warp-burns. The purity seals along his greaves fluttered in the acrid wind of a vent fan still struggling to breathe. His helm remained sealed, his visor lit from within with a faint, unreadable glow.

Around him, three Grey Knights moved through the aftermath with ritual precision.

Brother Dhael, youngest of the four, knelt beside the corpse of a warp-scorched astropath, whispering the Litany of Cleansing as he drove a sanctified dagger into the base of the skull.

Brother Carvion moved among the daemonic dead, his warding incensor hissing with blessed myrrh, sprinkling each dismembered husk with sacred oil. He did not look down. He did not need to.

Thur Vox, the oldest among them, stood with bolter lowered but not holstered. He was still. Watchful. An empty threat, held in reserve.

They did not speak unless ordered.

That was the way of it.

Command is not dialogue, Rhael had once told an Inquisitor.

It is containment.

Now, he walked slowly through the center of the ruin, halberd lowered.

The weapon’s haft had scorched the stone where he had planted it minutes earlier—when he’d severed the final tether between the daemon and this place. Its blade still glowed faintly, faint traces of holy residue humming through the runes etched into its core.

He paused beside what remained of the warp gate.

Once, it had been a junction altar—where the tech-priests of this manufactorum had offered prayers before engaging the core-matter reactors. Now it was a blackened circle of fused ceramite, the walls above it warped into spindled shapes that did not belong in a real world.

Rhael stared down at the ruin.

There was nothing to read. No message. No symbol.

Just damage.

And yet his gaze lingered.

He did not kneel.

But he reached up, and slowly unsealed his helm.

The hiss of pressure loss was soft, reverent. He placed the helm beneath his arm, letting the oily air of the manufactorum touch his skin for the first time in three hours.

The silence was deeper now. Not absence. Something else.

Like the end of a breath.

“Captain,” came Dhael’s voice, quiet. “All confirmed. No hostile signs remain. No bio-signatures left in the sector.”

Rhael did not turn.

“You're certain.”

Dhael hesitated a beat.

“The auspex reads clean. If anything survived the purge, it left before the gate collapsed.”

Rhael let his eyes drift closed.

He tasted ash and steel and warp-burn on the air. Beneath the chemical stink of corrupted machine-oil, there was another scent—

Blood.

Familiar, human blood.

Fresh.

Something was here.

But he said nothing.

Behind him, the other Knights gathered into loose formation. Silent. Waiting.

This was the part where a lesser unit would speak. Would exhale. Would mark the kill, or allow themselves a breath of something close to relief.

But Grey Knights did not breathe like other men.

They held.

Until they were told otherwise.

Rhael opened his eyes.

“Reconvene in three minutes. Prepare for meditative sanctification. No words until the rite begins.”

The others nodded and dispersed without question.

He turned once more toward the warped altar.

Watched the light flicker across the black glass.

And for the first time in hours—

He felt something he didn’t have a name for.

It was not fear.

It was not pain.

It was something quiet.

And unwelcome.

...

The sanctum was buried forty meters below the manufactorum’s throat—below the ash drifts, the warp-burned shrines, the machines that still screamed in binary static.

This far down, there were no more servitors. No cables. No light that hadn’t been brought by hand.

The air tasted of null-ash and sanctified oil. Every breath filtered through triple-blessed rebreathers. No psychic bleed was meant to survive down here. That was the point.

Rhael entered alone.

His armor had been removed with precision. Each plate laid on the ritual frame by servitor-handlers, then sprayed with micro-seraphim dust. His scarred skin gleamed with residue, sweatless and pale in the lumen-stripped dark.

He wore only the plain black robe of post-engagement cleansing—unmarked, unadorned. A Grey Knight is not supposed to bring anything of battle into this place.

Not memory.

Not pain.

Not pride.

Only discipline.

Only silence.

He knelt on the meditation slab. Stone. Cold.

The room was bare, circular—eight meters across, sealed with wards no living hand could draw. High above, incense smoke curled in slow, deliberate spirals from a burning censer suspended by chains.

He placed his hands on his thighs.

Closed his eyes.

And spoke the litany.

“From shadow I purge. From memory I cleanse. Let the mind be still. Let the echo break.”

He exhaled.

A single breath.

Then waited.

Stillness.

Nothing moved.

For twenty-one heartbeats, the ritual held.

Then—

It came.

Not a scream.

Not a vision.

Just… words.

Half-heard. Half-felt.

Not from the warp.

Not around him.

From within.

You should’ve come inside.

The voice was soft. Not mocking. Not daemonic.

Human.

He opened his eyes.

The sanctum did not change.

But the pressure behind his eyes pulsed like heat through ice.

He rose, slowly.

His hand rested on the slab’s edge.

He was not supposed to feel this. Not here.

Not now.

“Brother-Captain.”

The voice came from the archway. Librarian Thareon, helm under one arm, stood beyond the wards. He did not enter.

“Your psi-profile wavered.”

Rhael turned to face him. His voice did not tremble.

“Residual bleed.”

“It lasted eleven seconds.”

Rhael said nothing.

Thareon stepped closer, stopping just shy of the sanctum threshold.

“Do you want to know what it was?”

“No.”

A pause. Then:

“You will.”

Thareon’s tone held no emotion. But the weight behind it was real.

“Do you remember a name?”

Rhael stared at the burning censer.

Smoke twisted overhead, forming nothing.

“There was no name.”

“But there was something.”

The Captain didn’t answer.

Not immediately.

Then:

“A sentence.”

“What did it say?”

Rhael’s jaw tightened. Not visibly. But he felt it.

He looked back at the stone. The stillness. The fire.

The silence.

“You should’ve come inside.”

Thareon nodded.

“I’ll begin the trace.”

Rhael’s hands curled at his sides.

“It’s not daemonic.”

“I know.”

"Then it shouldn’t exist.”

“I know.”

Neither moved.

Neither breathed in the way mortals do.

But the silence between them was no longer clean.

It remembered.

---

You’ve been moving for… minutes?

Hours?

Time’s gone soft at the edges. It doesn’t track properly anymore. There are no clocks here. Just the hiss of pressure lines and the slow throb of machine hearts beneath your boots.

Your shoulder’s bleeding again.

The bandage—stitched with one hand, sloppily wrapped—is already soaked. You press it tighter against the seam of your armor, breathing through your teeth, counting heartbeats to avoid screaming.

You’re not thinking about Jenna.

Not right now.

Because if you do, you’ll have to decide whether or not to count her corpse with the rest of your squad.

And you can’t do that. Not yet.

The corridor narrows. The light’s dimming. No lumen strips down here—just the pale red pulse of reserve emergency systems, casting long, pulsing shadows that move even when you don’t.

You step into a wider chamber. Storage, maybe, once. Racks of disassembled drones. A broken servitor crucified across a diagnostic rig—half its body carved open, organs replaced with placeholder circuits that never got filled.

You brace your back against a wall and slide down slowly, breath shallow.

Too quiet.

No whispers.

No warpshade slithering in the vents.

Just… silence.

And heat.

The temperature’s rising.

You don’t know why. Nothing’s running down here. No generators. No core access. But the air is thickening like furnace breath, and your skin crawls with static that’s not quite pain.

You close your eyes.

Not sleep. Just rest.

Just—

---

[Flash / Not a Flash]

Something moves.

But not around you.

Inside.

Your arms are heavy.

But not your arms.

Gauntlets.

Ceramite gauntlets.

You can feel them.

Clumsy. Heavy. Perfectly balanced.

You try to flex your fingers—and feel metal respond.

There’s no pain.

Just weight.

Just war-readiness.

You open your eyes.

You’re not where you were.

The walls are clean.

Silver. Carved with script you almost understand.

You hear chanting.

Voices. Male. Unified. Beautiful in a way that makes your throat hurt.

High Gothic.

Not the battlefield bastard dialect.

The real thing.

The kind of speech you’d need three lifetimes to pronounce.

And you’re speaking it.

You feel it in your throat.

Perfect. Cold. Conviction in every syllable.

And your voice is—

---

No.

No, no, no—

You’re back.

You choke on a breath that doesn’t belong to you and gag.

Your mouth tastes like iron. Like burning.

Resolve. Cold, blinding resolve. Not yours.

Then it’s gone.

You curl forward, shaking, bracing yourself on the floor of the manufactorum as your stomach turns. You don’t vomit. There’s nothing left in you.

The gauntlets are gone.

Your hands are yours.

Your voice is quiet.

But your eyes are wet.

And you don’t remember why.

---

You sit there.

Alone.

Longer than you mean to.

Eventually, the heat fades.

But it doesn’t cool.

It withdraws.

Like something pulling back from your skin.

Like it touched you. And didn’t like what it found.

---

You are not a psyker. You are not a seer. You are nothing.

But something inside you is opening.

And you don’t know how to close it.

...

Manufactorum Sector—Substructural Overlap 9-A

...

You shouldn’t still be moving.

Your shoulder’s seizing up again—nerves pulling tight around something wet and broken. You’ve run out of bandages. You’ve run out of water. You’re running out of you.

But your legs keep going. Not out of hope.

Out of stubborn, empty habit.

The corridor ahead is split—one shaft leading down into the coolant crawlways, the other banking toward a support spine. You take the upper path. Instinct, not strategy.

The air’s thinner up here. Dryer.

But the pressure’s rising again. Like the world is holding its breath.

You don’t stop.

---

The vox ghosts are louder in this section—old machine-spirits echoing combat logs, static-warped prayers, the screams of men who might’ve never existed. You tune it out.

Mostly.

But when you reach the next chamber, you stop cold.

A kill zone.

Recent.

Las-scorch across the walls. Broken crawler limbs. Blood sprayed in two long arcs, like someone was cut from neck to groin and kept walking.

You step around it.

The bodies are missing.

Or they were never here.

You keep moving.

---

At the junction, you pause.

Only a moment.

There’s a flicker in the emergency lumen to your left—a clean one. Not flickering red. White.

It shouldn’t be on.

You blink hard.

Pain shoots across your temple. You’re running hot—fever, probably. You don’t care.

You move toward the light.

Not because it’s safe.

Because it’s different.

And nothing else down here has changed in hours.

---

The corridor narrows again—structural reinforcements added at some point during the war, maybe. Redundant load-bearing. Dense enough to block auspex.

You pass a bank of old vox repeaters. They’re warm.

Active.

But saying nothing.

The wall breathes when you touch it.

You keep going.

Just beyond the last support beam, the floor drops into a wide transition ramp. Shallow incline. Signs of movement—fresh. Bootprints, scored against ash and melted sealant.

Not yours.

Too heavy.

Too clean.

---

You freeze at the edge.

There’s noise below.

No voices. Just weight.

Metal on metal. A slow exhale of something living in the armor.

You duck behind the edge of a broken pump housing and listen.

Three footsteps. Then stillness.

Then two more.

Measured. Unhurried.

You peek.

It’s him.

---

The Grey Knight moves like there’s no war. His halberd is sheathed across his back. His head is bare. His armor still sings with quiet purity, like the hymn of a cathedral lit with fire and silence.

He’s not looking at you.

He’s tracking something.

You can feel it in the way he shifts—not cautiously, but with psychic calculation. He's close to something. Closer than he’s been in hours.

He steps beneath the red lumen flare and pauses.

His head turns slightly.

Toward you.

And you freeze.

You’re not in full view. You’re not breathing loud.

But you’re there.

And something in you knows—

He’s not looking for you.

But he still found you.

------------to be continued------------

I hope you guys enjoyed :)) I have a plan, this may be my first completed story lol.

Tagged: @incrediblethirst @druidwolf21 @thisuserislilsilly @kit-williams (yall want some plot?)

#warhammer 40k #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k x reader #grey knights #x reader #reader x grey knight #space marines #my writing #slow burn #thrilling #fiction #reader insert #astartes x reader #space marine x reader

71 notes · View notes

amorimato · 2 years ago

Text

More descriptive geometry. Here are oblique projections and their proportions.

(Originally posted Jan/2022. S.)

#descriptive geometry #architecture #tutorial

0 notes

pandapetals · 9 months ago

Text

First Day Jitters

Flashback before you two got married. It's Logan's first day as a teacher and you give him a lucky pen since his nervous.

professor logan howlett x professor fem!reader - established relationship (y'all married), cute, fluff, teasing, no y/n used, no reader description, your an english professor, logan is a history professor - imagine days of future past logan with the white streaks in his hair

read on ao3 or find more parts for the series: here

divider credit: @enchanthings

Logan never thought he’d end up teaching, let alone standing in front of a classroom full of students eager to learn about history. Hell, he still wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. He’d lived through more of it than most textbooks could cover, but that didn’t mean he knew how to explain it in neat, digestible lessons. Yet here he was—Xavier’s latest idea, no doubt convinced by the same reasoning that had gotten him to stick around the mansion in the first place.

It was his first day as a professor, and Logan hated to admit it, but he was nervous.

He frowned at his reflection in the mirror, rubbing the back of his neck. The white-gray streaks in his hair were a little more noticeable than he’d like today, not that he cared much about appearances. But something about standing in front of a bunch of fresh-faced students made him feel older than he usually did. He tugged at the collar of his shirt, already regretting the stiff, buttoned-up look. This wasn’t him.

Storm and Scott—hell, even you—made teaching seem like the easiest thing in the world. You had the confidence, the charisma. You could talk about Shakespeare or Hemingway and have a classroom hanging on your every word. Logan, on the other hand, could barely imagine keeping their attention long enough to get through the syllabus.

With a low grunt, he gave his reflection one last, unimpressed look. He had no idea how the day would go, but at least there was something to look forward to: you.

Your classroom was right across the hall, and despite having known you for a while, Logan hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to make a real move. The two of you had always had this easy back-and-forth, full of teasing and subtle glances that lingered just a little too long. He could sense you liked him—he was good at picking up on that sort of thing—but something held him back. Maybe it was the thought of disappointing you. Or maybe it was the idea that someone like you, with all your grace and cleverness, deserved better than a gruff old man.

As he shrugged on his jacket, the door to his office creaked open, and there you were, leaning against the doorframe with that easy smile of yours, the one that always managed to throw him off his game just a little.

"Nervous?" you asked, your voice teasing but gentle, your eyes bright with amusement. You knew him well enough by now to see through his gruff exterior, especially on a day like this.

Logan scoffed, turning to grab his bag. "Nah. It’s just teachin’. Nothin’ to it," he grumbled, though the tightness in his jaw gave him away. He slung the bag over his shoulder, trying to play it cool, but his hand lingered on the strap, betraying the anxious energy simmering beneath the surface.

You stepped further into the room, crossing your arms as you watched him. "Right, of course," you said, your voice laced with sarcasm. "Because you’ve clearly got this whole professor thing down on day one."

He shot you a look, half-amused, half-annoyed, but didn’t argue. You took a step closer, your tone softening. "You’re going to be fine, Logan. You know more about history than anyone I’ve ever met. Besides, if Scott can manage to teach teenagers about geometry without setting himself on fire, you can handle this."

He huffed out a laugh, but it didn’t completely shake off the tension in his shoulders. You caught it, your eyes narrowing slightly as you gave him that knowing look of yours.

"Here," you said suddenly, reaching into your bag. "I’ve got something for you."

Logan raised an eyebrow, curious despite himself, as you pulled out a pen—a sleek, simple one that looked a little too fancy to belong to someone like him. You held it out to him, grinning. "This is one of my lucky pens. Take it with you. You know, for good luck."

He stared at the pen, then at you, his eyebrow inching higher. "Lucky pens, huh? Didn’t peg you for the superstitious type," he muttered, but there was a flicker of something softer in his gaze.

You shrugged, still holding the pen out toward him. "I’m not, really. But it’s worked for me in some tight spots. And, besides…" You leaned in just a little, lowering your voice. "It’ll give you something to think about when you’re in there, pretending not to be nervous."

Logan felt his lips twitch into the beginnings of a smile, but he kept his gruff demeanor intact. "I don’t need luck," he grumbled, but after a moment, he took the pen from your hand, his fingers brushing lightly against yours. He pocketed it quickly as if the small, intimate gesture had caught him off guard.

You gave him a knowing smile, stepping back, clearly pleased with yourself. "Sure, sure. Keep telling yourself that, tough guy."

Logan shook his head, trying to suppress the warmth that spread through him at the sight of your smile. "You should get to your class before I regret takin’ that pen."

You laughed softly, the sound light and easy, before heading toward the door. "Good luck, Professor Howlett," you teased over your shoulder, winking at him as you disappeared into the hallway.

Logan stood there for a second longer than he needed to, the room feeling a little emptier now that you’d left. He patted the front pocket of his jacket, feeling the smooth edge of the pen nestled inside. He scoffed under his breath—luck, yeah right—but his fingers curled around it, holding onto it just a little tighter than necessary.

As he made his way to his first class, Logan kept his usual stoic expression in place, but he couldn’t quite shake the small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. The students waiting inside the room wouldn’t know it, but tucked in his pocket was a little piece of you, a reminder that maybe he had more going for him today than just his knowledge of history.

If he was being honest with himself, that was all the luck he needed.

#fluff #logan howlett #wolverine #logan howlett x you #x men wolverine #x men logan #james logan howlett #logan x reader #hugh jackman #professor logan #professor reader #marvel #mcu #x men movies #x men #one shot #one shot series

189 notes · View notes