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The vox-bead clicked once as the channel closed. Chaplain Urraca remained motionless, helm inclined, as though awaiting a response that doctrine insisted would not come. The report had been delivered precisely: identification, coordinates, mission status. All brothers deceased. Objective secured. Requesting retrieval. There was no benediction. No acknowledgment rune. Only silence. He lowered his hand. The void station was cooling. Heat bled from fractured conduits and ruptured housings, leaving behind a thin metallic chill that crept through the seams of his ceramite. Something dripped nearby at an irregular interval—coolant, blood, something else. He did not look. It did not matter. Beyond the breached hull, the asteroid field pressed close. Jagged stone and slow-rotating masses hemmed the station in on all sides, too dense for a strike cruiser to risk passage. The Verdant Oath would remain distant. Only small craft could reach this place. Urraca turned and took stock. The dead lay where they had fallen. Purity Wardens, every one of them. He did not name them yet. Names came later, during the rites. For now, they were positions: breach point, advance, rear guard. He counted them as he would ammunition and reached the expected total without error. His crozius lay in fragments near the center of the chamber. The haft had snapped cleanly. The head—once sacred geometry of adamantium, sigil, and oath—had been crushed inward, its edges folded like thin plate. He knelt and gathered the pieces with care, arranging them by break, by force, by failure. The sight stirred no anger. Only certainty. It had failed. That thought weighed more heavily than the loss of his brothers. They had died wielding the finest weapons their forges could produce. Relics sanctified by rite and lineage. Blades and bolters whose designs had endured ten thousand years of war. And it had not been enough. A faint creak echoed through the station’s frame. Urraca turned toward the sound, weapon already in hand. He did not remember drawing it. He only knew it was there—held low, angled away from his body as training dictated. He adjusted his grip without thinking, then paused. The balance was wrong. Not poor. Not awkward. Simply incorrect, in a way that demanded notice. His thumb slid along the handle and found a shallow groove that served no purpose. His gauntlet’s machine-spirit compensated automatically, tightening its grip as if to reassure him. He looked down. The blade was plain. No sigils. No inscriptions. No marks of forge or creed. Its edge was straight and unadorned, neither serrated nor curved. It might have been forged yesterday or ten thousand years ago. There was nothing to tell him. The handle was the problem. Six shallow depressions ran along the grip, worn smooth by use. His fingers filled five. The sixth remained empty—a narrow channel beneath his palm where no finger belonged. He could feel it even through ceramite, a negative space that refused to be ignored. Urraca loosened his grip at once and let the blade’s tip rest against the deck. It did not fall. It did not resist. It simply remained, balanced without effort. The silence closed in. Without the sound of battle, the chamber felt vast and hollow. He became aware of his breathing, the whine of his armor’s systems, the way his hearts refused to slow. He reached for a litany— —and stopped. The words felt wrong. Not forbidden. Not heretical. Ill-fitted. Like armor forged for a different war. Only then did he look to the far end of the chamber. The Custodian of the Vault lay broken there, its armor breached cleanly through the torso. A single cut remained where a weapon had been buried deep within it, driven where his crozius had shattered again and again. Understanding settled with brutal clarity. Every sanctioned blow had failed. Every strike of faith and rite had glanced away, useless. This weapon had killed it. A thing without name, without ornament, without place in any litany. What Man did not make, Man must not need. The creed rose in his mind—and faltered. The blade had done more than his brothers could. More than their relics. More than the Chapter’s forges. He did not remember sheathing it. He only realized it was no longer in his hand when the low klaxon sounded—extraction. A Thunderhawk threading carefully through stone and shadow. ☆☆☆ Brother-Artificer Verdug entered the chamber, optics sweeping the wreckage. “Void station Five of Nineteen secured,” Verdug questioned. Urraca inclined his helm. Verdug’s gaze lingered on the smooth cut on the xenos. “And the weapon that ended the engagement?” Urraca’s hand rested at his side. The blade was there—sheathed. Plain now. Unremarkable. Its grip smooth and familiar, indistinguishable from a standard Astartes combat knife. He could not recall when it had changed. Only that it fit. “Secured,” he said. Verdug studied him for a moment longer. “Curious. I did not recall you carrying your old combat knife into battle anymore.” Urraca did not answer. He followed the boarding ramp as the Thunderhawk lifted free of the station, slipping between drifting asteroids. The blade rested at his side, silent and compliant, shaped to his needs. He had held it. He had killed with it. And he was bringing it home.