He crouched in the alleyway, damp palms pressed against the crumbling walls on either side. There was something here; something that didn't belong in his world of narrow alleys, creaking shanty houses, and bellowing manufactorums. It wasn't the gangs like the Razor Kids, or the Pain-Jacks, wasn't any of the obscura-freaks or ghast-heads. 

No, this was something worse. It was here in the dark, the sideways tunnels that were avoided by the drug workers and the Lexmen. It had been here for more than a fiveday, back when the hive's power began to falter and the darkness descended everywhere. Whispers abounded in the tractworks- the Emperorer had condemned the high-ups, there were Xenos in the deep dark, that the suns were fading. Nothing was known but the fear grew and grew. Families huddled in their habs while the Lex patrolled in greater numbers. Gangers brandished outlawed fireblasters and blades at the slightest hint of danger.

Worse was coming thought it was bad enough already. He had seen the bodies of those who couldn't stand the ever-increasing dread and had killed themselves. Even worse were those that had broken entirely and begun to kill others. Spree-killers and serial murderers rose up from the ranks of the ordinary and dull, staining the factorums, cantinas, and holy shrines red with the blood of innocents.

He didn't feel one of them though. Not the hot, sharp pleasure of the spree nor the gloating satisfaction of the serial. No, this was different. A suffocation of life- tendrils of dark dread that rose from the bottom of the soul to strangle his very thoughts and feelings.

A faint buzz in the air, vibration in the bones and sinews. He saw a massive form pass by his hiding space, then another. Slow, heavy steps and a smell of old blood and burnt bones. One of the shadows turned and faced his alley with burning eyes.

"No..." came his whisper, then a flash of pain. Blackness claimed him as the steps moved away, unhurried and inevitable.

The Pale Wake

Legionaries of the Shrikeborn

“Where they pass, hope drowns.”

The Pale Wake are among the most feared Legionary squads within the Shrikeborn, an honor earned not through spectacle, but through the cold, drowning silence that follows in their path. Named for the funereal stillness they leave behind, the Pale Wake serve as the Shrikeborn’s executioners of inevitability. Where other squads revel in terror’s theatrics, the Pale Wake embody its quiet, suffocating certainty.

Their origins lie in the void-wreck of the Vesper’s Lament, a derelict Nostraman vessel whose surviving Legionaries were found drifting in stasis, their armor touched by centuries of radiation and frost. When revived, they spoke little of what they endured, only that “the dark remembers.” Lord Carrow folded them into the Shrikeborn, and they have served with unbroken discipline ever since.

In battle, the Pale Wake advance with glacial inevitability, their movements measured and unhurried. They do not sprint. They do not roar. They simply come, step by step, as if the outcome has already been written. Victims often report hearing nothing but the soft scrape of ceramite and the faint rattle of bone-trophies before their lines collapse.

The Pale Wake are a reminder that terror need not scream; it comes in a slow, rising tide that swallows the last light.