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horuslupercal · 1 year

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Burning on Reentry

(ao3 link)

or: Vulkan Gets Traumatized

or: @luwupercal activated adhd focus help

CWs for: very graphic violence, Drukhari As A Whole, child death, suicide, referenced torture, mercy kills

Vulkan meets the Drukhari a little earlier than canon. He just wants to go home. Unfortunately, he gets to take an adventure first.

Vulkan's first hell-dawn strikes on a mundane day. It almost feels wrong, like the most recent arrival of the greatest fear of the planet as a whole should occur on a day that forbodes it, but instead the horns sound in the middle of him trying to complete an errand for his father.

He was buying steel, simple as. It's something he's done multiple times in the past year, finally reaching an age where his father is more comfortable sending him out on such tasks alone, and hell-dawn strikes right in the middle of it.

The terror and panic that it spawns is immediate and all-consuming, merchants abandoning their stalls, everyone within sight fleeing to their nearest points of refuge. Ataan, who he had been talking to, immediately pulls him along with her. Any protest that he should find his father is dropped, Ataan just assuring him that they'll find N'bel later.

Even if he was particularly inclined to run away from her and into the chaos — he's not, he's known every merchant in Hesiod since he was young enough to cling to his father's leg and he's more than aware that they would never let anything happen to him — her grip is iron when she wants it to be. But, fine as he may be to be bundled along to safety, he is less fine to do nothing. Vulkan finds himself insisting that they stop to help.

Something in his face must be convincing enough, because not only does Ataan release his arm, she comes right with.

He's always liked her.

She doesn't even start insisting that they really, no wiggle room, don't have any more time and will be heading to the tunnels immediately until he finishes helping M'tan up from where he had fallen and probably sprained his ankle. She lays down the hammer then. It's reasonable, even if it chafes at him.

The dusk-wraiths are not reasonable.

They make it so close to safety, the three of them, when Vulkan sees the first dusk-wraith of his life. He had never known that anything that looks so much like a person could be so quiet. It's wrong, like a predator in a jagged, two-legged form.

Ataan quakes, but he's always liked her. She holds her ground, shuffling to the side until she's directly between him and the not-human creature. It looks amused.

…

The first time Vulkan sees another human die, it happens right in front of him.

Ataan keeps side-stepping, keeps trying not to let the thing see him, and the wraith just inches closer and closer. Vulkan ushers M'tan on to go the rest of the way to whichever bolthole he knows. He stays with Ataan himself.

With a speed he didn't know a person-shaped thing could have, the wraith almost teleports into their faces. Ataan flings her arm over Vulkan, pushing him back, and is rewarded for entertaining the dusk-wraith with a split spear to the gut.

Vulkan is pretty sure he screams. He's also pretty sure he doesn't think at all before smashing his fist into the wraith's face. It comes surprisingly naturally, swinging his entire body into the blow before he's even realized he's going to punch it.

He does not actually know what to do after that, brain suddenly torn between the fact that the thing looks like it wants to kill him next and the fact that Ataan is hurt, but the choice is taken from him by a second wraith raking clawed gauntlets across his arm.

It occurs to Vulkan that his only experience with fighting is right now. He's hunted, but much as the dusk-wraiths are wild predators on two legs, they're much more dangerous than any game in the Pyre Desert, and he's fighting two of them.

Fighting is a strong word. He's summarily losing.

He manages to make one back off for just one second, but all it does in that time is pull a dagger from its sheath along its side and watch as the other one knocks him over.

Vulkan kicks out, catching the dusk-wraith in the back of the leg. It stumbles but there is no relief, another gangling wraith stepping into its place and grabbing his leg. The razor spines along its forearms dig into his calf when he twists, drawing long, burning streaks of red. It's not enough to stop him from struggling, trying to yank his leg free, but the earlier wraith has recovered by now and grabs his face roughly. The clawed ends of its gauntlets press into the soft fat of his cheeks so sharply he feels as though they reach his teeth, pushing and forcing him to tilt his chin up.

He should never bare his throat. He should never bare his throat. Baring your throat is how you turn from hunter to hunted against the beasts of the wilds and the dusk-wraiths are no different (except for the fact that they're winning). He grits his teeth and tries to force his head back down, but this time he can feel acutely as the creature crouched by his head legitimately reaches bone, pressing the heel of its palm against the bottom of his chin.

The feeling of talons scraping his molars is so deeply unpleasant it makes his head spin. He can barely hear as the thing speaks, not that he can understand its sharply hissed words.

The wraith by his feet sighs in response, idly digging a blade into the back of the leg it's holding when Vulkan twitches. It's actually helpful — his head clears.

The wraith kneeling on his arm, fingers dug into his face, gets the other fist to the side of the head. It yelps, hand flying to clutch at its ear with such urgency that its talons rip their way out of Vulkan's cheek. The other wraith pushes against the back of his knee, pressing him into the dirt with its bodyweight, and he reaches forward to grab at it with enough force the armour plating beneath his hands cracks. It stumbles back and Vulkan lurches forward, ripping the dagger from his leg.

The first wraith grabs him by the back of the neck and he spins, slamming the dagger he's holding into the soft inner portion of its elbow with as much force as he can manage, and then his back explodes with pain.

The feeling of hitting the ground is distant and muffled compared to the burning spreading through his body with the all-consuming speed of a wildfire. His limbs are so heavy he can barely move them, fingers spasming, and there's nothing he can do as the first dusk-wraith slams a boot into his side, rolling him over. Through blurred vision, Vulkan recognizes that two more of the things have come to the aid of their fellows.

The one with the now-broken arm stands back but the two new ones do not, shouting in their barbed tongue for more creatures, brandishing weapons.

Vulkan's mind helpfully provides half an idea, a conversation between the adults that he was not meant to hear. Just the effort of curling his fingers into a fist is the hardest thing he's ever done, anything more should be impossible, but no one ever returns from the place the dusk-wraiths take people to.

His father should at least have a body to grieve.

Vulkan grips the dagger and slams the blade through his side with as much force as he can muster.

His vision blinks out.

…

He drifts for a while, seeing only changes in light levels. Black, the faint rays of the sun that he can't feel the warmth of, what feels like an eternity of black, a million shades of grey, and then blinding white. He wakes in successive stages after that, feeling the cold metal beneath him, around him, the lingering sparks through his limbs. Something hisses to his right, above his head. Something shuffles to the left.

When Vulkan opens his eyes, he can see properly but he can't balance himself well enough to sit up. His limbs are too heavy to make the task easy on him and twisting to try and free his trapped arm reveals that both his forearms are linked together behind his back.

Other than himself, there's not much else in the room. A sconce, a vent much too small for him to fit in, and… someone else. She's human too, with the dark skin of Nocturne, though it lacks the sort of tan she should have, so he assumes she's been here longer than him.

"Hi," He says. He doesn't know what else to say yet, so he leaves it at that. Starting strong.

She doesn't respond, though her eyes snap to look in his direction. Not directly at him, but she's at least heard him. Vulkan sighs and lets his head rest on the floor again for a moment before returning to trying to kick the net off. It's like the world's worst blanket situation, when he can't get it to lay flat at night, except sharper. In short, it sucks. And it doesn't even work.

Vulkan huffs, thrashes in uncharacteristic frustration, and catches sight of the girl again. She's moved closer, though she still hovers a little bit away, and he makes himself calm down and lay still. His efforts are rewarded by her crouching by his side and starting to pluck at the net, far more familiar with it than him.

Vulkan takes a closer look at the girl in front of him. He thinks she's a younger teenager, maybe, somewhere ahead of him developmentally though they're about the same height. He's never been good at estimating age.

She doesn't meet his eyes or speak as she works, and Vulkan tries to keep his voice quiet. Noting the wave-like tattoo across her jaw and chin, though scarred over so many times he'd have to focus to count them all, he tries, "You're from Epimethus, right?"

A pause. She nods.

"What's your name?"

She just shakes her head, pulling the net off his torso.

Vulkan warns her before sitting up, fine with it on his legs right now, and sets himself to making the best of his newfound arm movement. The cuffs around his wrist aren't necessarily poorly made, but Vulkan knows metal and he knows his own strength. Several moments of flexing later, part of the chain wrapped around his palm, they fail with the sad cries of failing metal.

He rubs at his raw wrists, setting the broken cuffs down to avoid too loud of a clatter, and takes the time to properly remove the rest of the net. He feels much better already, less burn-y, and he wonders if it has something on its barbs.

Probably.

The girl walks so quietly it's almost hard to keep track of her when she's behind him, looking at the removed cuffs and net, and Vulkan turns to keep her in his field of vision. He finds not being able to hear her makes him nervous.

"I'm Vulkan." He offers out both hands between them, palms turned up. "If you give me your hands, I think I can get the chains off. If you want."

Another nod. Her movements are somewhat hesitant, almost pulling her hands back to herself, but after that brief moment she lays the backs of her hands over his palms. She still doesn't look at his face, gaze somewhere around his shoulder. Vulkan preoccupies himself with testing the metal links between her wrists as he speaks, looking at them instead. Her posture relaxes a little.

"I'm from Hesiod. I'm going to get out of here and back home. You could come with." He twists the links, watching them ball up until the point they immobilize each other, and warns, "Might be loud."

Vulkan sees her nod in his periphery and then pushes the chain up and against itself, applying a twisting pressure until the metal fails with a loud SNAP! She flinches, retracting her hands, and Vulkan drops his own. He doesn't think he can get the actual cuffs off without hurting her wrists anyway.

A pair of boots make noise down the hall. His companion's ears must be well-attuned to the sound because she whirls around to look at the doorway at the same time as Vulkan, shrinking back almost to the point of bumping into him. Vulkan casts his gaze around the room for any kind of plan, seeing no other exit.

When the dusk-wraith steps through the previously barred doorway, some faint beep it had produced making the bars retract, he meets it with a metal sconce to the head. It whips around, halfway falling to one knee, and Vulkan uses both arms to bring the candlestick down again. The wraith's skull cracks wetly, legs buckling, and he hits it a third time for good measure.

Given the fact that the second and third blows had been hard enough to expose the squishy matter inside its skull, Vulkan assumes it's dead and crouches down to pry the curved dagger from its hand.

He really hopes it's dead, but he doesn't want to look too closely. He just holds the dagger out to the girl and she takes it, curling the handle into her palm with an almost white-knuckled grip. A check reveals no other weapons so Vulkan keeps his own hand around the stem of the candlestick.

As Vulkan steps out of the door, he holds out his free hand and she takes it.

…

They come up with a system very quickly, mostly because Vulkan can't stop talking and he's pretty sure she can't talk at all. One squeeze of their linked hands means "yes" and two means "no". Simple enough.

His first order of business after that is finding out her name, which occupies them through several hallways as he lists out every sound he can think of until the process of elimination tells him how to say it.

"Aksa?" Finally gets a yes and then a no when he asks if there's any more to it. "I like it."

Aksa squeezes their hands once.

After that, it's a matter of asking if they should go through this door or that door, if she heard that, if she'll be okay if they get in a fight. In the spaces between his questions, he just rambles.

With his wonderful powers of process of elimination, he learns that she has a favourite colour — it's green — and that at least one section of her tattoo is because she did something cool while sailing. He can't figure out what it is she did because Hesiod doesn't have enough water to sail, he doesn't know anything about it, but at least now he knows Aksa can sail. She's been hunting, but not more than once. She's never been to Hesiod.

She wants off this ship, too.

He has to kill three more wraiths, shoving down whatever his forebrain says about it, before he finally finds a proper weapon, one that he can use without letting go of Aksa's hand. He would've liked a choice between weapons, maybe, but the metal of the sconce had been starting to crumple in on itself, not designed for this purpose. That leaves him with a falchion.

Aksa lets go of his hand in the next fight and he doesn't panic, exactly, but a lucky blow catches him through the gut when he's trying to figure out where in the scuffle she is. It's not deadly but it sure isn't pleasant, and it slows him down considerably.

He makes it as far as cutting down two of the thin creatures before his blade gets caught. The time he takes to yank it out, lodged as it is in-between both vertebrae and segmented armour, proves too much because a less lucky blow has him waking up flat on his back in the hallway. He can't quite feel his legs and, while he waits for the feeling to come back, Aksa just keeps an eye out.

The third wraith had been killed by her, apparently, and its head is a pulped mess of brain and blood and hair and skull fragments. After a second of searching while he practices wiggling his feet again, he spots one of its eyeballs a meter away next to a cast-aside, bloodied rifle. It's…

It's nauseating, to say the least, even though Vulkan had been the one beating the wraiths to death with a candlestick half an hour ago, but Aksa tugs idly at the cuffs still locked around her wrists so he doesn't say anything. It takes a couple more minutes to be able to move and Aksa immediately links their hands again once he's up.

…

Vulkan really wants off this ship, particularly by the time it starts moving. Neither he nor Aksa actually know the pathway and, if the symbols on the walls indicate anything as to where they should be going, they're very little help to two people who can't read them.

He really, really wants off this ship.

At least Aksa is proving a great companion despite her silence, sharp-eared and surprisingly skilled with a dagger despite being from Epimethus. They start separating more in fights and it cuts down both the time spent and the number of injuries to Vulkan by a not-inconsiderable amount. It occurs to him that maybe he's just made his first friend, and he reveals as much.

"I haven't figured out how we're going to get down," He admits, peering around a doorway. There looks to be another hallway on the other side and Aksa squeezes his hand yes, so they step through it, letting the backs of their close shoulders touch so they can see the whole room. "But the dusk-wraiths don't wait for the ship to go down the whole way, right?"

No.

"So those skiffs of theirs have to be able to fly to some level. If we stole one, we could get back to Hesiod. These wraiths are pretty dumb, I bet we could fly one."

Yes. Aksa huffs a laugh behind him.

"My father could get the cuffs off, too. He's a black-smiter, best one I know, and I know he'd love you."

The room is empty and nothing moves in the shadows as they step into the next hall. Vulkan continues rambling.

"I've never been to Epimethus. I imagine it's strange. Hesiod is rock and stone, no water, not like your home. You can even see Mount Deathfire from the city if you go to the right spots."

A door shifts open, the faintest of sounds, and Aksa pulls them into a shadow against the wall. The dusk-wraiths that exit, two of them, head the opposite direction without noticing the escapees. Vulkan holds his breath, counts to ten before they start moving again. He waits until twenty to continue talking.

"I would like to see all of the cities, one day. Epimethus would be a nice start. I'd walk all the way with you."

Yes.

"My father would insist on coming with. He's teaching me to hunt but he doesn't want me going out on my own, yet, it's too dangerous. He will not be happy when he finds out I was here."

Aksa shrugs.

"How long have we even been here?"

Three squeezes, to admonish him for a question she can't answer. Then no, because she doesn't know. Vulkan blows out a breath.

There are five minutes of silence before they walk right into a group of five dusk-wraiths.

…

Luckily, the wraiths are as startled to see the human escapees as Aksa and Vulkan are to see them. It's the only bit of luck in the situation, but anything helps.

One wraith shouts and Vulkan jams his elbow into its gut. He and Aksa let go of each other's hands at the same time, just in time as one of the wraiths throws something hooked at them. Vulkan grabs it, ignoring the little barbs, and yanks. That wraith stumbles, off-balanced, but it's nothing he can take advantage of because something crashes into his back.

He stumbles right past a two-bladed knife, which slices open his cheek more easily than he'd like, and grabs wildly for the creature wielding it. They go down together, the wraith coughing as the air is forced out of its lungs by the impact of the ground. In any other moment, Vulkan might feel proud that he had winded the same wraith twice, but a different one grabs him and rips him off before he can do anything with his falchion.

It gets the falchion to its arm, but Vulkan gets punched in the face. He staggers back, stepping on a hand. Whichever hand he had stepped on belongs to a dusk-wraith, not Aksa, because it shrieks indignantly in its strange tongue, so he stamps down, feeling something crack under his boot. The wraith grabs at his pants and he steps back to avoid it, ends up getting grabbed anyway when a flailing weapon forces him to stop.

It quickly becomes difficult to track what exactly is happening. He can barely tell where Aksa is, though he catches glimpses of her weaving out of the way of the earlier hook and driving her dagger into a different wraith's shoulder, and there's no way to make it to her in the middle of the chaos.

Two of the wraiths are cut down by him at about the same time a sixth arrives. Its arrival distracts one of the others, leaving it open to Aksa and her stolen dagger. For reasons unknown to either of them, two of the things piss each other off in the scuffle. Their… whatever Vulkan might call it (Argument? Outright fight?) gives him the opening he needs to clear the last obstacle.

He can barely even see Aksa, his head spinning from whatever witch-nonsense half of the dusk-wraiths in this place coat their blades with, but he recognizes her hand the moment he grabs it.

Vulkan runs, pulling Aksa with him. That scuffle was too loud, too big. If a wraith showed up mid-fight, dozens more of the spindly creatures could appear in the following minutes. And he really doubts the screaming entanglement of the two left alive will last long enough to guarantee an easy escape. Aksa pulls on his hand and he slows his pace a little, recognizing that he's faster than she is, but he keeps moving until she squeezes his hand twice, hard. He almost doesn't stop, but she yanks at his hand again with enough urgency that he pauses and turns to check the hallway behind them to see if they're far enough away.

Aksa curls halfway in on herself as she stands there, hand pressed to her side, and Vulkan freezes. Dark blood seeps between her fingers and down the razor-sharp blade of the dagger she's still holding between two knuckles, drip-dropping onto the metal flooring in steady, much too fast increments. Even as he watches, a small puddle begins to form by her left foot.

The hall is too open for them to stop, too exposed, but the unsteadiness of her breaths registers instinctively as a bad sign. She can't keep moving like this.

Vulkan swallows, tightening his grip on their linked hands before letting go entirely. Aksa's eyes snap up to somewhere around his left ear, alarmed.

"I'm not leaving, don't worry," He promises immediately, casting his gaze around until he finds a partly-open doorway a handful of meters behind them. He sprints for it, jamming his stolen falchion into the gap as though he's used it as a prybar for a previously closed pathway, and then returns. It's done with all the speed he can muster, pushing to the limits of his transhuman biology, not even checking if there's somewhere past that door that they could have gone, but Aksa is already listing to the left.

She blinks when he apologizes but otherwise doesn't protest when Vulkan scoops her up, tucking her against his chest so the wound faces upwards, making the best of gravity.

They end up in another room a couple minutes and three halls down, in a feat that makes the Primarch's legs ache, where Vulkan sets her down against a wall. He presses against the side of her hand until she moves it with a hiss, examining the wound.

It could be deeper, by technicality only, but any deeper would probably be at the point that it could be called a disembowelment. It's still bleeding, though perhaps marginally more slowly than before, and the beds of Aksa's nails are pale. Vulkan knows very little of these things, but he knows enough to tell it's bad.

He swears sharply, one of the stronger ones that his father never wants him to use but Breughar sometimes tells him the meanings of. Aksa huffs a silent laugh, tapping the floor once. Her head tilts back to thump softly against the wall, scars across her throat stretching with the movement.

After a moment's thought, he rips two long strips off the hem of his shirt, folding the first over Aksa's side and using the second to secure it there in the best approximation of a bandage he can manage. She catches one of his wrists loosely as he's tying the knot around her waist, watching him bind the fabric.

That task finished, he goes to lift her again, but she taps a no against the back of his hand. He waits.

Aksa offers out the dagger in her other hand, pushing it into the palm of the hand she's holding and curling his fingers around it. It makes sense, he guesses, his falchion abandoned and Aksa likely unable to fight anymore. But before he can start to get them moving again, she uses both hands to arrange his own until the tip of the dagger rests solidly in the middle of her chest.

Nope.

Vulkan tries to retract his hand but she's still surprisingly strong, holding him there, and he ends up having to use enough force that he stumbles backwards. Aksa chokes on an inhale as the movement pulls at her side, fingers still locked around his wrist hard enough for his fall to jerk her arm, and Vulkan scrambles forward with another swear.

"Sorry, sorry," He blurts, checking for any sudden spots of blood on the makeshift bandage. "But I'm not doing that."

Aksa kicks his knee.

"Hey!"

She kicks his knee again. Vulkan grabs her shin.

"Kicking me isn't going to make me kill you. Come on, we need to keep moving." He turns to offer his back, still crouched. After a silent moment, Aksa loops her arms over his shoulders.

…

It takes maybe twenty minutes after that before Aksa pats his shoulder a handful of times.

"You want to stop?"

Yes.

"If we stop, are you going to try and get me to kill you again?"

The briefest hesitation, and then she taps another yes.

Vulkan readjusts his grip, hiking her a little higher on his back. "Then no. We can't be very far, we'll make it." He keeps walking.

Aksa sighs, pinches the junction of his neck and shoulder, but there's little force behind the action. Not with the unsteady little breaths she's still taking, the way she trembles. She gives another three taps and he ignores it.

Another two hallways. Vulkan almost feels like he's seen this section before, but that can't be right. The symbols aren't arranged in the exact same way as any place else, they're in a slightly new configuration, which means this intersection is new. Aksa doesn't offer her input, though he can feel her breathing, so he just picks a direction.

A minute into the new direction, he makes up his mind. Making it up is a strong word, but he decides to let that be the word. "... Aksa?"

A moment, like she's mad at him, and then she squeezes her arms around his shoulders. It's too weak a movement for Vulkan's liking.

"Do you still want to stop?"

He hopes she'll change her mind last-minute, say no.

Yes.

Vulkan is tempted not to listen, offer be damned, but he made up his mind. He starts looking for a good spot to sit down, nice and out of view of any potential dusk-wraiths.

"Aren't you scared?"

No.

"I'm scared," He admits. It's the first time he has. Aksa tightens her hold.

Yes. She knows.

"I'm supposed to have my friend I can brag about. I can't do this alone.."

No.

Vulkan finally spies a good spot, kneeling and shuffling Aksa from his back and to the floor. She leans against the wall behind her heavily, gaze somewhere around his shoulder. He tries not to cringe at the feeling of her blood plastering his shirt to his back, hating it particularly strongly in conjunction with how pale her face is.

Aksa holds out her hand. It shakes. He takes it in his own.

"What if it's easy?" He whispers.

No.

"It's already easy to kill wraiths. What if killing you… makes me a monster?"

No. No.

Vulkan fumbles with the dagger, almost drops it. "I don't want to do this."

Aksa pulls on his hand, leaning forward a couple inches and tugging him closer until she can rest her forehead on his shoulder. She lets go of his hand then, so he wraps both arms around her.

She hugs a yes around his neck, ends up not letting go. Vulkan presses his cheek against her ear.

"I don't want to do this," He repeats. He rests the tip of the dagger against her back, forces his hand not to shake with every bit of willpower he has so it's lined up for the most humane kill he can manage.

"I want to see Epimethus. Steal a skiff and use it to visit each other. We're supposed to be the first people to escape the place the Dusk-wraiths take you to."

Yes, maybe. Her hug just tightens even more and stays that way.

His shoulder is wet. He doesn't want to do this. He doesn't want to do this. He doesn't-

Vulkan tightens his arms around Aksa until the guard of the dagger is the only thing separating the side of his palm and her back. Her blood drips down his forearm in a slow slide, gathering at his elbow.

In the most pitiful of mercies, she dies quickly.

…

Everything is a bit of a blur after that, between the haze of his emotions and the number of times he dies. It's hard to even track how often that happens, trying to draw the line between hitting the ground and his heart stopping and the speed with which he gets back up, but he's beyond the point of caring.

All he has to do is get off this ship, and he will do it.

He finds the dusk-wraiths are a lot easier to scare when he's not playing smart and mortal. He doesn't have to. Nothing they can do can stop him for too long. He carves his way through every boney wraith until their blood slicks his hands too much to hold a weapon. His own blood might not help the matters, but he can't differentiate by that point so he blames it on them.

They gain a little confidence after he drops the dagger, but the first one he's ever seen flee does so after two spears fail to stop him from beating in one of their heads with his bare hands. He doesn't care enough to chase it.

He needs to get out. Everything else is secondary.

The sight of the largest door he's ever seen, set into a wall between the two largest windows, finally snaps Vulkan's awareness back into his head. His face tingles with saltwater, his hands are tacky with drying blood, and everything burns. As he pats around the door for any way to possibly open it, the pain in his right arm inexplicably feels like it's driving a spike through his skull.

When he finally gets the door open, he can't even remember how he did it. The red sky and thin beams of sunlight are like a lance, head pounding.

Nocturne is so, so small. Hesiod looks like a drawing in the dirt, grey stone against the black basalt it's built upon.

Nocturne is so, so close.

Vulkan closes his eyes so he can't be afraid.

He falls.

…

As soon as the sounds of chaos clear, N'bel sets himself to finding his son. It's good that Vulkan hadn't come to him, almost halfway across Hesiod when the dusk-wraiths appeared, but being separated in a time like this isn't the best feel for an old man's heart.

Nor, really, is running through the city when it's like this. Despite their high wall, sheltering them against the side of the mountain, and the tunnels beneath, the dusk-wraiths never leave without a casualty. Rarely do they take the dead, either, and currently those dead litter the streets. It is a small relief that they have not had to suffer whatever it is that happens to the taken living; it is no relief at all to witness the result of the wraiths' cruelty.

At least Vulkan is not among those he passes.

His son is known throughout the city — there is no subtlety in a child of his size, nor in a child whose skill in black-smiting has progressed to the level it has by two years of age — but the city is filled with the panicked and the grieving. There are many who have been lost in the frantic scramble to safety and many trying to find them.

It takes a while to find someone with any concrete idea of the last place they had seen Vulkan, and longer still to find anyone who had seen him after the horns had blown. News spreads like ash, though, and the information starts coming in more quickly after that.

Vulkan should have been closer to the east entrances, which is as much as N'bel expected. He and the merchant Ataan were helping those around them, which sounds so much like his son that N'bel's chest aches. Foolish but determined and all too persuasive. A handful of people approach just to tell him that they need to thank Vulkan properly, once the two have found each other.

In the distance, M'tan's nephews have found him and there is nothing but grief. For all that N'bel can gather, Vulkan just stopped existing somewhere between the merchants square and the tunnels.

That is how he finds himself just… sitting.

Vulkan is not the first that he has loved and lost to the dusk-wraiths. This is the story of Nocturne.

Vulkan is, however, the first child he has lost. The only child.

He cannot find any adequate name for the emotion scrabbling at his ribs. Instead his mind casts itself to the day when Vulkan, quite literally, fell into his life. It is too much, he cannot think on it, his son-

N'bel looks into the horizon at, coincidentally, the perfect time to see something plummet from the sky. He cannot possibly explain why this matters, the exact combination of nostalgia and grief and a perfect, unmarred memory that drives him to it, but he stands and runs.

Breughar shouts, running after him. He had not noticed his friend's presence, standing steady and silent next to him, but N'bel does not let the sudden recognition of that fact slow him. He has places to be.

Beyond the city walls, he slows, scanning what is visible of the desert. He's not even sure he needs to, something about a father's intuition, or perhaps just the gravity well effect that Vulkan's general presence tends to have, but perhaps it makes him look less insane to Breughar. He's not actually sure he cares.

The crater in the dirt some three hundred meters past the wall is certainly conspicuous, and N'bel pauses on the crest before he allows himself to even look inside. A spark of logic shouts in his mind, telling him to stay his enthusiasm and consider that whatever it was had fallen from well into the sky. Breughar pants a little at his side, something about how an old man can be so fast.

They descend the slope together, Breughar's hand a steady weight on his shoulder. Maybe he's guessed.

…

It is Vulkan.

N'bel's first and only child is many things, but capable of surviving a second fall from the stars, he is not. This situation is so unlike that very first day, when Vulkan had had the safety of whatever metal egg had brought him.

Neither he nor Breughar say anything, but N'bel will not leave his son at this moment and Breughar will not leave him to suffer this alone.

…

"N'bel," Breughar says quietly. He is still standing by his friend's side. His voice is not the one of someone who has spotted danger, so N'bel allows himself to remain where he is. It is the first word he has said since stepping into the crater.

"N'bel," Breughar repeats when there is no response, "Look at Vulkan again."

"I have seen him," N'bel rasps. "That is my son who lies dead, and I don't think I shall forget what I have seen. Particularly not within the span of five minutes."

"Need I smack you-" Breughar cuts himself off, sighs loudly, and then just says: "Have you seen him glow?"

That gets his attention. N'bel steels himself for whatever he might see (as if it could somehow be worse than the first sight of his son's broken body) and opens his eyes.

Breughar… wasn't wrong. Vulkan is glowing, a soft golden colour like the rays of dawn, on the days when the clouds of volcanic ash are sparse and the sun can shine at that early hour. N'bel has lived many years, witnessed that early sunlight in many places, and the feeling of every dawn barely compares.

"No, I cannot say I have," He manages, witnessing for the first time as Vulkan's body begins to bring itself back to its proper structure. Breughar lays a hand over his shoulder, squeezes it once, and then retreats with a quiet assurance that he'll stay nearby.

N'bel is still watching Vulkan's chest knit itself back together when the boy's transhuman hearts decide enough has been repaired for their tastes. One beats, then the other, the force of the first kicking the other into action before delivering a rather shocking waking signal to his diaphragm.

With a strangled gasp, Vulkan lives.

He bolts upright, almost immediately settling into a crouch if it wasn't for the fact that one of his legs is still broken. His fingers claw gorges in the dry earth, restless, and it's only after N'bel presses on his shoulder and urges him to just sit still that his gaze lands on his father rather than darting across the landscape. His chest heaves, flesh still not entirely repaired, but the rest of him is almost perfectly still. Tensed to the point of immobility, prepared to either fight or flee.

For a long, long moment, N'bel wonders if this is actually his son. Vulkan's red eyes are more akin to chips of volcanic rock, hard, the barely cooled result of a deadly eruption, than the warmth of gemstones that he would usually compare them to. Neither of them move, N'bel unsure if he should lessen the pressure of his hand and Vulkan simply staring blankly, and then, with all the building speed of a flow of magma, Vulkan's face cracks.

Before N'bel can fully register what's happening, Vulkan has flung himself into his arms with a desperate cry of, "Aba!".

He nearly knocks N'bel over in his haste and, when N'bel releases him to steady himself with both hands on the dirt, Vulkan's hand comes to clutch at his apron with enough force it nearly tears, leaving a bloody smear across the leather. It's as though he almost expects him to leave and N'bel hurries to wrap his arms back around his son, instinct driving him to comfort even as his mind struggles to come to terms with the situation. Vulkan's breath hitches every time N'bel runs his palm across his back, no doubt the result of however many injuries, but the simple cry he makes when N'bel attempts to create some distance and take a proper look shoves that thought aside roughly. Not in this moment nor any other would he leave, no matter improbable returns from death, and he sets himself to promising as much in low, repeated whispers. Everything else can wait.

For a while they just sit there, Vulkan sobbing into his father's chest as N'bel rocks them. Eventually though, as the panic and chaos fade, a crowd begins to form. N'bel can faintly hear the whispers — of his miracle child, only survivor of the dusk-wraiths, star-sent, lucky beyond reason — but they leave nothing but a bitter taste in his mouth. This is not the time.

After a moment to weigh his options, N'bel chooses the simplest path of standing with Vulkan still held in his arms. He's not exactly the lightest child, already much taller and broader than expected for both his age and the youthful fat on his face, but N'bel isn't a master smith nor a father for nothing.

"I can walk," Vulkan whispers, his face still tucked into N'bel's apron. N'bel just tightens his hold.

"I know. Let's go home."

#warhammer #writing #vulkan #n'bel #drukhari #oc tag #aksa #<< i made her up literally just for this fic and then got SO attached #everyone thank @luwupercal this idea HAUNTED me until it was written #[traumatizes ur primarch]#tell apart the areas where i skimmed bc they were frustrating to write and the areas where i skimmed it bc it felt better tonally challenge #do NOT ask me about the logistics of some of the stuff in here. it just works. todd howard voice.#my writing #eisw

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