The Dream Stone (Short Story)

[The Neverborn]

Craftworld Yiel-Yan
The Halo Stars
Circa M34
 

Farseer Valdrien checked his Ghosthelm for a second time.

Its weight was reassuring—but only when it rested against the plates of his neck in precisely the manner to which he was accustomed, its pressure distributed evenly across his collarbones. It was a minor ritual, one he had observed since first being permitted to wear the helm. A habit shared only with his partner.

Superstitious?

No. Valdrien was meticulous.

He rose and left the meditation chamber. As he crossed the threshold, he raised one index finger by the smallest fraction.

The gesture was almost imperceptible, but its meaning was clear.

The two Guardians waiting outside reacted instantly. Though they had caught only a fleeting glimpse of the motion through the opening chamber door, they straightened to attention and fell into position behind him. Together, they began the walk towards the warhost awaiting his command.

Valdrien had already scried the skein. He had not been surprised when the mon-keigh first set a clumsy boot upon the maiden world. Every preparation had been completed months before the first of their vessels entered its atmosphere.

The warhost was small, scarcely two hundred strong.

It would be enough.

Valdrien was certain of it.

A needle, placed with precision, was all that was required.

A beacon that would never be activated.

A record that would never be entered.

A settlement that would never be founded.

A stronghold that would never be raised.

A world that would never be defiled.

That was the way of things.

He had seen it.

The hallway was long and silent, tranquil in precisely the manner Valdrien preferred.

There was space enough for twenty Aeldari to walk abreast, though it had never been intended to accommodate more than five. Such was the design of the craftworld: generous without waste, elegant without excess, shaped according to principles that lesser minds might mistake for extravagance.

Even through his Ghosthelm, Valdrien could hear the air moving along the corridor.

The walls were formed in muted greys, blues and greens, their surfaces flowing into one another like stone beneath deep water. Teal curtains hung between the sweeping arches, stirring gently in the artificial breeze.

Here, at least, he had time to think.

Time to compose himself in peace.

Personally, he would have preferred the curtains removed.

He had considered doing so for some time. Their constant movement interrupted the tranquillity of the corridor. Perhaps he would have them taken down when he returned.

Valdrien smiled faintly.

For all the breadth of his intellect, he could no longer remember precisely how many times he had entertained the thought.

He had been bonded to his partner for five hundred and sixty-one annual cycles. The idea had first occurred to him sometime between their union and the birth of their first child. Of that, at least, he was reasonably certain.

His firstborn would reach three hundred and fifty-five cycles at the next turning.

So perhaps he had been considering the matter for four centuries.

There was no need to rush.

Brash action made his stomach turn.

For a moment, he contemplated reaching into the skein to determine whether the curtains would ever be removed—and, if so, when.

No.

That, too, required consideration.

It would be foolish to consult the skein over so trivial a matter without first devoting sufficient thought to the consequences. Better to reflect upon it further before resorting to such excess.

Valdrien centred his mind and continued onwards.

He was almost halfway to his destination.

There was just enough time remaining to empty his thoughts of such distractions before he reached the end of the hallway.

 

 

[The Neverborn]

“Farseer.” 

Valdrien knew the speaker before he turned. 

Jsistal. 

The Autarch had a way of pronouncing the title as though it rhymed with mud, despite the two words sharing no such resemblance. 

Valdrien did not like Jsistal. 

The feeling was mutual. 

He was wise enough to recognise that neither of them had ever wronged the other in any meaningful fashion. They simply did not sit well together. There were souls whose temperaments met and flowed around one another without effort. 

Theirs collided. 

Valdrien composed himself before turning. 

“Jsistal.” 

He made every effort not to descend to the Autarch’s level of pettiness. 

Nevertheless, when he spoke the name, he contrived to make it rhyme with waste. 

“Did you remember to appraise the four new Warlocks following their latest progression along the Path?” 

It was a valid question. 

It was not discourteous, and as Autarch, Jsistal had every right to ask it. 

Even so, the manner in which he asked made the fine hairs at the back of Valdrien’s neck rise. 

Valdrien had not completed the appraisals. 

He already knew the accusatory look that would follow. No consultation of the skein was required. 

One of the four Warlocks might soon be assigned to a Guardian squad without Valdrien having judged whether they were prepared. For three of them, this would be their first experience beyond Yiel-Yan since taking the Path of the Seer. 

For all four, it would be their first battle. 

Valdrien braced himself. 

“No,” he said. “I have not.” 

Jsistal gave him the look. 

Nothing more was required. 

The two Guardians accompanying Valdrien were fully unhelmed. They exchanged a brief, uncomfortable glance. 

“I shall attend to it when we return, kinsman.” 

Valdrien inclined his head by precisely the amount required to suggest either deference or mockery. 

One of the Guardians tightened his mouth in an effort not to smile. 

Jsistal looked at him. 

The expression vanished. 

They continued into the adjoining chamber. 

Two hundred Aeldari knelt around the Shrine of the Harvest of Souls. 

Only fifteen were Dark Reapers, but such numbers were not unusual aboard Yiel-Yan. The craftworld maintained several shrines dedicated to the Path of the Destroyer, and many of its people chose to walk beneath their shadow. In some warhosts, the Reapers outnumbered even the Dire Avengers. 

In this host, there were no Dire Avengers at all. 

Every Aeldari within the chamber had walked either the Path of the Seer or the Path of the Destroyer. Those who presently followed neither path had taken up arms as Guardians, their armour painted in the cold, icy blue of Yiel-Yan. 

The chamber fell silent as Valdrien entered. 

He passed between the kneeling warriors and approached the raised platform at the shrine’s centre. 

When he ascended its first step, every gaze settled upon him. 

The time had come. 

[The Neverborn]

With a single gesture, Valdrien awakened the webway gate.

Icy blue light flooded the chamber, matching the armour of Yiel-Yan’s gathered warhost. It spread across the walls and shrine floor in shifting bands, casting every kneeling warrior in the cold colours of the craftworld.

A few eyes turned towards the opening.

The Aeldari now stood in ordered formations, waiting in perfect stillness for instruction.

Valdrien went first.

That was his way.

Every soul in the warhost had been placed under his authority. Therefore, the first moment of danger belonged to him.

He stepped towards the gate.

The reports had already been committed to memory. Approximately four thousand mon-keigh had landed upon the continent and established what they believed to be a secure perimeter.

The planet’s webway structures were not especially well concealed. The humans had examined them and possessed enough intelligence to recognise that they were not of human manufacture.

They did not possess enough to understand what they were.

The colonists were armed, but exhausted. Their provisions were failing, and many were already malnourished after months spent searching for a world whose atmosphere their bodies could endure.

This would be a simple operation.

Valdrien did not need to kill every one of them.

The beacon must never be activated. Their communications machinery must be rendered useless. Their means of leaving the planet must be crippled beyond repair.

After that, the world itself would complete the task.

Its weather, its fauna and its flowering poisons would reduce the remaining mon-keigh to bones within a single planetary cycle.

This was the best possible outcome.

Somewhere within the archives of their distant empire, a record would eventually mark the expedition as lost.

There would be no triumphant enemy to avenge.

No alien threat to pursue.

Only an unfortunate colony destroyed by chance, poor judgement and an environment less hospitable than it had first appeared.

Perfect.

Valdrien entered the webway.

One stride later, he stood beneath an alien sky.

The air was warm against his armour. Strange vegetation moved in the wind beyond the ancient gate, and somewhere in the distance an unfamiliar creature gave a low, resonant cry.

Behind him, the warriors of Yiel-Yan emerged in disciplined silence.

Within moments, two hundred Aeldari souls had joined him upon the maiden world.

Within minutes, the warhost had entered engagement range.

No grand briefing was required. Every movement, objective and contingency had been communicated hours before.

Now, only execution mattered.

In his mind’s eye, Valdrien perceived the warriors of theHarvest of Souls taking position along the crest of a gentle ridge. They lay four hundred metres from the mon-keigh command centre, their dark forms almost motionless against the vegetation.

As one, they raised their Reaper launchers.

They opened fire.

The command structure vanished beneath a storm of detonations. Its roof was torn free and hurled into the air, tumbling through smoke before crashing into the undergrowth beyond the compound.

The humans panicked.

Many had been sleeping. They emerged disoriented, half-armoured and uncertain of where the attack had come from.

That, too, had been anticipated.

The Dark Reapers continued firing. They made no effort to conceal their position.

They wanted to be seen.

The mon-keigh response was predictable. Those who survived gathered whatever weapons they could find and rushed towards cover. Even at this distance, Valdrien could hear their shouting.

He did not understand every word.

He understood what was being communicated.

Confusion. Fear. Anger.

Most importantly, aggression.

The mon-keigh would answer the attack as they so often did: by advancing towards the most visible threat with whatever force they could assemble.

One hundred Guardians waited ahead of Valdrien, their shuriken catapults held ready.

When the charge came, they fired.

The air filled with the shriek of monomolecular discs.

The human advance disintegrated.

Within twenty seconds, a hundred mon-keigh lay dead or dying among the broken vegetation.

The first stage was complete.

Now came the destruction of everything the colonists might use to survive or signal for aid: transmitters, generators, vehicles, stores and atmospheric equipment.

The warhost surged forwards with inhuman speed.

Two hundred pairs of armoured boots struck the earth in near-perfect rhythm as the Aeldari raced towards the settlement.

Thousands of mon-keigh still remained nearby.

Speed was no longer an advantage.

It was a necessity.

[The Neverborn]

The Aeldari spread out.

Valdrien knew this would be the most dangerous phase of the operation.

He was prepared.

He was also considerably more formidable than he appeared.

By the standards of his kin, Valdrien was unremarkable in stature and build. His ghosthelm added nearly a head and a half to his height, lending him a severity he did not naturally possess. In battle, he preferred a staff to either witchblade or singing spear.

Some Farseers favoured such weapons, and with good reason. They offered considerable advantages in close combat.

Valdrien believed those advantages were outweighed by the slight loss of focus they demanded at the most crucial moments.

A staff better suited his way of war.

With twenty Guardians following close behind, he entered the first structure.

It appeared to have been improvised from the hull of one of the mon-keigh voidcraft, its interior stripped and repurposed into a crude shelter. Somewhere within it stood one of the settlement’s water-filtration systems.

It had to be destroyed.

There were nine humans inside.

Valdrien knew they had heard him enter.

He did not care.

They carried simple weapons that propelled bolts of metal through chemical force. Crude things. Brutal things.

He almost admired their simplicity.

The nine had concealed themselves behind the ship’s internal partitions, weapons clutched tightly against their chests as they prepared to spring what they imagined was an ambush.

As Valdrien rounded the corner, an opportunity presented itself.

It had not appeared within his visions.

His mind adapted at once.

The nearest mon-keigh was still struggling with her weapon. Her frantic movements told him she was attempting to disengage some primitive safety mechanism.

She looked up.

Her eyes widened.

Valdrien reached into the skein.

Lightning arced from his outstretched fingers.

It crossed the short distance in an instant and struck the woman in the chest, hurling her against the wall. The current held her there, limbs shaking with violent palsy.

The other eight stared.

Valdrien understood what would follow.

Without further action, their horror would paralyse them for perhaps five seconds.

He increased the current.

The woman rose four feet from the floor. Her body convulsed. Smoke curled from her clothing as the air filled with the stench of scorched fabric and flesh.

Valdrien swallowed.

He did not enjoy her suffering.

He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty.

But horror would hold the others for fifteen seconds rather than five.

Fifteen seconds was enough.

Behind him, the Guardians moved through the chamber with disciplined speed, separating into flanking positions while the surviving mon-keigh remained transfixed.

By the time the humans recovered themselves, they were already surrounded.

Thirty seconds later, the chamber was silent.

One of the Guardians reached to his waist and drew three haywire grenades. He forced them deep into the rattling filtration machinery and activated them.

The group withdrew.

A moment later, Valdrien heard the familiar, concussive clap of the grenades discharging.

One system destroyed.

Seven remained.

From elsewhere in the settlement came another clap.

Then another.

Then another.

Four remained.

 

From his right came the sound of approaching humans.

Valdrien dropped into a crouch and moved behind a slab of wreckage. The twenty Guardians accompanying him reacted with equal speed, scattering into cover as shots tore through the space they had occupied a heartbeat before.

Resistance was not unexpected.

The plasma bolt was.

It struck one of Valdrien’s kinsmen as he crouched behind a piece of debris that was not quite broad enough to conceal him. The Guardian fell without a sound.

The entire right side of his helmet had vanished. Wraithbone and flesh had been melted together around a gap the width of a dinner plate.

Valdrien’s gaze went immediately to the spirit stone set into the Guardian’s left breastplate.

The seer within him felt the soul enter it.

Pain.

Fear.

Then relief.

The familiar succession of emotions passed through Valdrien in an instant.

Then came another thought.

They were about to be engaged.

Valdrien rose just in time to meet the first human.

The man stood nearly equal to him in height but was perhaps twice his breadth. Valdrien shifted his footing, brought his staff across the man’s advance and redirected his momentum with exacting precision.

The brute toppled backwards.

For the brief moment in which the human lost his bearings, Valdrien drew his shuriken pistol and administered the coup de grâce.

He was forced to duck again.

The woman wielding the plasma gun advanced through the wreckage, teeth bared beneath the rim of her helmet. She fired rapidly from the hip, filling the air around Valdrien with incandescent bolts.

It was a desperate gambit.

It was also the correct one.

The woman was not stupid, at least not in the most literal interpretation of the word. Given the circumstances, aggression offered her the greatest chance of survival. It forced Valdrien to respond to her actions rather than impose his own.

He took his place in the dance.

His body turned and folded around the incoming fire. The shots were clumsy, discharged from the hip by a weapon poorly suited to such use, but Valdrien respected what even a glancing plasma bolt could do.

The distance between them collapsed.

This would be hand-to-hand.

Valdrien raised his pistol.

At the final moment, the woman fired with unexpected accuracy. The bolt passed close enough to force him off balance, and his answering shuriken struck her helmet at an oblique angle before skipping harmlessly away.

For an instant, they studied one another’s posture.

Both understood what came next.

Valdrien swung his staff.

Holding the plasma gun in one hand, the woman caught the haft against her forearm and drove herself bodily into him. Her free hand seized his pistol wrist before he could bring the weapon to bear.

Valdrien felt the force of her immediately.

She was combat-trained and running on the last reserves of adrenaline left to her. Months in the void had stripped away much of her strength, but desperation made dangerous use of what remained.

Even so, Valdrien was slightly stronger.

He needed only to survive her assault for another twenty or thirty seconds. By then, exhaustion would claim her.

He glanced around.

Every Guardian nearby was occupied in a struggle of their own.

For the next few moments, he would have to rely upon himself.

The woman maintained good control of his pistol arm. Her other hand still gripped the plasma gun, though at this distance the long weapon was too unwieldy to aim. Valdrien’s staff was equally ill-suited to the grapple.

They strained against one another.

Her strength was already fading.

Valdrien saw calculation enter her expression.

She had recognised the same truth.

Despite fatigue clouding her mind, she was still controlling her breath, adjusting her footing and maintaining the grapple simultaneously. There was discipline in her movements.

Then her eyes shifted towards the plasma gun.

They betrayed her intention.

She attempted to turn the weapon towards him. Valdrien wedged his staff into the hollow of her shoulder, blocking the motion, but she continued to force the barrel around.

He released the staff and pressed his palm against the weapon’s casing, pushing it away from himself.

Sergeant Vanessa Cazzon felt the strength draining from her limbs.

She knew she had one chance.

She threw her entire weight behind the plasma gun. One shot—anything. A direct strike, a glancing hit, even a moment of panic might be enough.

With every fragment of strength left to her, she forced the weapon against his resistance and pulled the trigger.

Within the plasma gun, a chain of reactions began.

Power surged through systems whose principles mankind could reproduce but no longer fully understood. The weapon sought to create and contain the fury of a captive sun.

But there were imperfections.

The surrounding pressure was not quite correct.

The cooling coil had not fully discharged.

The power cell returned a fraction too much energy into the containment chamber.

Any one of those faults might have been tolerated.

Together, they were not.

The weapon overloaded.

Cazzon never understood what had happened.

Valdrien did.

His mind moved quickly enough to recognise the failure in the instant before containment collapsed.

He felt heat travel through his hand.

Up his arm.

Into his chest.

His robes ignited.

His flesh followed.

In that final fraction of existence, five thoughts passed through his mind.

A beacon that would be activated.

A record that would be entered.

A settlement that would be founded.

A stronghold that would be raised.

A world that would be defiled.

His lifeless body struck the ground.

[The Neverborn]

End of Act I 

[The Neverborn]

Act II

Valdrien felt his soul tear free of his body.

For one impossible instant, he was exposed to the warp.

To the Primordial Annihilator.

Fear consumed him.

It was greater than any sensation he had experienced in life.

Greater than the first moment he had looked upon the one who would become his wife.

Greater than the day he had finally achieved the millennia-long ambition of being named Farseer.

Greater even than the birth of his firstborn.

Those memories had once seemed too vast to be contained within a single soul.

Now they were nothing.

The fear paralysed him.

Valdrien knew what hunted beyond the veil.

She Who Thirsts.

The predator of his people. The doom that had stalked every Aeldari soul for six millennia.

She would find him.

She would claim him.

In that moment, Valdrien did not curse the human who had killed him.

He did not mourn that he would never again see his children.

He searched desperately for some fragment of knowledge—some overlooked detail, some final impression—that might tell him whether his spirit stone had survived.

It had rested at the centre of his breastplate.

Directly beside the weapon when it overloaded.

What if the blast had shattered it?

Every vestige of pride abandoned him.

Valdrien prayed.

To Khaine.

To Cegorach.

To Isha.

He did not care which of them answered.

His thoughts raced outwards in blind desperation, reaching for any power that might hear him.

Aeldari or alien.

Gork.

Mork.

The Emperor of Mankind.

Anyone.

He would accept any aid offered. He would pay any price. He would serve, abase himself, endure any indignity and suffer any disgrace.

There was no humiliation too great if it spared him from She Who Thirsts.

He remembered the sensation of his eyes closing.

Then something seized him.

Valdrien felt himself pulled away.

He opened his eyes—or remembered what it had once meant to open them.

There was no light.

There was no darkness.

This was not Slaanesh.

He felt safe.

The certainty came without evidence, yet he clung to it.

He attempted to observe the world around him.

There was nothing to see. Not in the manner to which he had been accustomed. He possessed no eyes, no ears, no flesh through which sensation might pass.

Instead, he felt presences.

A mon-keigh mind.

Another.

Then another.

Each was subtly different, moving at the edge of his awareness like pressure against the surface of deep water.

Emotion reached him more clearly than thought.

Panic.

Rage.

Terror.

Then something familiar.

An Aeldari mind.

Valdrien reached towards it, but could not determine whose it was. He sensed another nearby, and then another. Some carried impressions he almost recognised, but he could attach neither face nor name to them.

He could only perceive vague approximations of what they might be doing.

Movement without shape.

Intent without action.

Emotion without expression.

It was like attempting to understand a stranger solely through their handwriting, without being permitted to see the words they had written.

Valdrien reached farther.

Slowly, the truth became apparent.

His spirit stone had not been destroyed.

He was inside it.

[The Neverborn]

Around him, Valdrien sensed the hot blood of war.

As his awareness settled into the confines of the spirit stone, another thought struck him.

Once, it would have inspired visible fear.

Compared with the terror of standing exposed before She Who Thirsts, it felt almost muted.

Mundane.

He, the Seer Council and Jsistal had planned the attack together.

The warhost had never been intended for a prolonged engagement. A force of scarcely two hundred could not fight four thousand mon-keigh for any meaningful length of time. Two hundred Aspect Warriors might have endured such a contest, but the majority of this host had been drawn from Yiel-Yan’s citizen militia.

Barely one in ten had walked the Path of the Warrior.

Even had that not been so, the force lacked the composition required for a sustained battle.

The plan had called for a needle, not a spear.

A small number of carefully chosen targets—two or three assigned to each squad—would deprive the interlopers of everything they required to survive, summon aid or reveal the world’s location to their distant empire.

No more than two dozen objectives.

The decapitation of their command.

Then an immediate withdrawal into the webway.

Thirty to forty-five minutes.

That was all the time the operation had been expected to require.

Valdrien reached out as best he could.

He sensed his kin dying.

Other presences moved among them, bearing the distinct impressions of mon-keigh minds. Each species cast a subtly different reflection into whatever senses remained to him. Colour and shape were the closest words he could recall, though neither truly described what he perceived.

The Aeldari presences were withdrawing.

It was the only logical course.

Aeldari lifeblood was precious.

Every warrior lost might leave behind a grieving partner. Most would.

Yiel-Yan did not permit members of its citizen militia to undertake offensive deployments if they had no children, or if they were responsible for young offspring, except after lengthy consideration of each individual case.

The Craftworld was small.

Every potential mother and father was valuable.

Within minutes, Valdrien could no longer sense any of his kin nearby.

The emotions of the mon-keigh gradually changed.

Their panic diminished.

Their rage cooled.

Purpose replaced both.

Valdrien knew what they were doing. There was no need for sight.

They were tending to their wounded.

Assessing the damage to their equipment.

Searching the dead.

Contacting their distant empire would become a priority, as would the fortification of their perimeter.

Every surviving colonist was now, in one fashion or another, a veteran of battle.

Removing them would no longer be simple.

It would require a sustained operation.

If their professional soldiery arrived, it would become a campaign.

If their armoured Space Marines came—

Catastrophe.

Had Valdrien possessed knees, he would have sunk to them.

Then he felt himself moving.

For one wild instant, he believed his kin had returned.

He reached outward and found only mon-keigh minds.

They were carrying his corpse.

Panic surged through him anew.

His spirit stone remained exposed upon his breastplate.

A hundred possibilities passed through his awareness. They might recognise it as valuable. They might pry it loose. They might shatter it through ignorance, curiosity or spite.

Yet those carrying him paid it no particular attention.

To them, it was merely another ornament upon an alien corpse.

They bore him beyond the wreckage and lowered him into a pit.

Time became difficult to measure.

The minds above receded. Voices became vibrations without meaning. Occasionally he felt the distant passage of machinery or the tread of boots along the ground.

Then, perhaps a day later, his world grew darker.

The first weight of soil struck his armour.

More followed.

Earth spilled across his ghosthelm, filled the spaces beneath his limbs and gathered over the centre of his chest.

Over his spirit stone.

Valdrien could not move.

He could not call out.

He could only feel the world being placed above him, one shovelful at a time.

Until at last there was nothing but pressure, silence and the faintest distant impressions of the living.

Farseer Valdrien of Yiel-Yan lay buried beneath the world he had failed to save.

[The Neverborn]

For an age, there were only two things.

Darkness and pressure.

It was not darkness as Valdrien had understood it in life. That had merely been the absence of light. This was something deeper and lonelier: an emptiness without distance, boundary or horizon.

In the beginning, there had been the faint outlines of souls above him.

Then, one by one, they disappeared.

Valdrien was alone with his thoughts.

He attempted to approach his imprisonment with discipline. He had spent millennia mastering the architecture of his own mind. He could learn to meditate in this form.

And, in time, he did.

Yet the silence was relentless.

Meditation did not feel like sleep. He retained too much control over his thoughts for that. Time merely seemed to pass more quickly while he practised it. It was like drifting into inattention during a play, only to return ten scenes later and spend the next several minutes attempting to reconstruct what had happened.

Here, however, there was no play.

Nothing moved.

Nothing changed.

There was nothing to hold his attention and nothing from which it could be drawn.

Sometimes Valdrien panicked—or experienced whatever approximation of panic remained possible to him.

Sometimes he wondered whether the solitude would drive him mad.

At other times, he imagined what it might feel like when he was finally recovered and interred within Yiel-Yan’s infinity circuit.

He clung to that thought.

Grief became his constant companion.

Valdrien understood that he was dead, but he did not fully accept what that meant. Not in any useful or lasting sense.

He had eaten his final meal.

He had kissed his wife for the last time.

He had spoken his final words to his children without knowing they were final.

Those moments had already happened.

There would be no others.

The thought made his heart race—or rather, it awakened the memory of a racing heart, and his mind created a crude echo of the sensation.

Valdrien had never expected a swift rescue.

He knew there was a possibility that none would come.

Worse, he was never free from the thought that something might crack the spirit stone around him. The pressure of the earth might shift. A root might force its way through some unseen weakness. The mon-keigh might build above him and drive machinery into the ground.

He tried not to dwell upon it.

That made no difference.

Then, at some unknowable point, something appeared within the darkness.

Life.

A thin root had reached the earth surrounding whatever remained of him in the material world.

Valdrien turned his awareness from it.

When he looked again, it had grown thicker.

He stared at it in fascination.

The root broadened slowly, winding around stones and forcing itself through narrow spaces. Its growth was almost imperceptible, yet whenever Valdrien withdrew into meditation and returned, it had changed.

Over what might have been seasons, it pushed aside pebbles and displaced the soil around his armour.

Then it withered.

It contracted, dried and died.

Another root eventually took its place.

Then another.

Plants grew above him and perished. New ones emerged from the remains of the old. Their roots spread, thickened and withdrew in cycles he could feel but no longer measure.

How long had he been buried?

Valdrien could not remember.

Then a thought occurred to him.

He could count.

He began recording each new root and each death.

First there were dozens.

Then hundreds.

Still the number grew.

Throughout it all, Valdrien forced himself to remember his wife’s face.

A head and a half shorter than him.

Red hair tied into a topknot.

Alabaster skin.

Her eye shadow always matched the lacquer upon her nails.

Usually green.

He recited the details again and again.

The words did not lose their meaning.

That was almost worse.

They became the description of a stranger.

Valdrien knew each detail was true, but he could no longer assemble them into the person he had loved. He remembered the colour of her hair but not how it framed her face. He remembered the shade around her eyes but not the expression those eyes held when she looked at him.

Then, with sudden horror, he remembered that he had once performed the same ritual for his children.

He could no longer recall the details.

He searched for them.

A voice.

A gesture.

The shape of a smile.

Nothing came.

The darkness continued.

Another generation of roots passed above him.

Then a dozen more.

Valdrien began to weep—or experienced what his imprisoned mind understood weeping to be.

He had never considered himself a saint.

Even so, the punishment felt excessive.

Then the pressure above him changed.

It was unlike the slow movement of roots or the settling of ancient earth.

Something disturbed the soil with purpose.

Roots bent and tore in unnatural directions.

The accumulated weight of millennia shifted.

It rose away from him in great sections, each movement sending unfamiliar vibrations through the ground.

Then, suddenly, the pressure vanished.

For the first time in an age, Valdrien felt nothing above him at all.

Edited August 5 by The Neverborn

[The Neverborn]

Serf Hurl Kavan squinted into the freshly turned earth.

Something glinted there.

A gemstone.

Burgundy, red, orange and yellow moved beneath its surface, each colour flowing into the next as the light struck it. In nine years of amateur lapidary, Hurl had never seen anything like it.

It was only natural that the hobby had found him. He was far from the only member of the work gang to practise it.

Upon Stanley XI, ten billion souls toiled in the name of the distant Emperor, who had endured upon the Golden Throne of Terra for ten millennia. The nature of that sacrifice was never clearly explained, though its importance was reinforced upon every feast day.

Stanley XI paid its Imperial tithe in minerals and, when required, soldiers.

In such a civilisation, mining was the most common form of serfdom.

Lapidary came with it.

The private collection of unusual stones was not strictly legal, but most overseers made little effort to enforce the prohibition. A single overseer might be responsible for six hundred labourers—or twelve hundred, if quotas were high and staffing low.

Inspecting every pocket, boot and bodily cavity among them required more patience than most overseers possessed.

Hurl performed the familiar routine.

He walked five paces forwards with his shovel in hand, then removed his metal work-helm and waved it towards the serf operating the mechanical excavator that had uncovered the gem.

“Hard rock!” he shouted.

The excavator ground to a halt.

Hurl drove his shovel into the earth as though testing for a fragment of ancient granite or the hardened root of some long-dead native tree.

Then he bent down and picked up the stone without looking directly at it.

There was no reason to draw attention to his scheme.

He would examine it later and decide whether it should be sold, traded or added to his collection.

He hoped it could be sold.

The stone entered his pocket.

Valdrien felt his world move.

The sensation was sudden but, for an instant, he could make  sense of it.

He was being held.

Then the contact vanished, replaced by darkness, motion and the coarse pressure of fabric around the spirit stone.

A mon-keigh was carrying him.

Valdrien reached out towards the nearby mind.

It was crude, but not chaotic. Humble. Cautious. More focused than Valdrien had expected from one of its kind, even after all this time.

Then a thought came to him.

This mon-keigh was not dangerous.

Not intentionally.

Others might be.

Valdrien gathered what remained of his will. He pressed against the walls of his prison, forcing thought outwards with a strength he had not attempted to wield in millennia.

Three commands entered Hurl Kavan’s mind.

Do not discard me.

Do not break me.

Do not surrender me to your priests.

Hurl paused.

For reasons that vanished almost as quickly as they appeared, he reconsidered his original assessment.

Perhaps the stone’s lack of any recognisable classification made it unsuitable for sale.

Perhaps a merchant would ask questions.

Perhaps an overseer would confiscate it.

No.

Better to retain it in his personal collection, at least until he understood what he had found.

Hurl pressed one hand against the pocket to ensure the gem remained there.

Then he replaced his work-helm, lifted his shovel and signalled for the excavator to continue.

Within the darkness of the pocket, Valdrien felt the machinery resume its work.

He had escaped the earth.

For the first time in millennia, his fate now moved with the living.

[The Neverborn]

Hurl arrived at his habitation at the end of his day’s labour.

The journey home took a little over an hour.

That was a relief.

Twenty-four months earlier, the same journey had taken four hours. Chairman Ivan von Krauzer had since been removed after repeated warnings concerning Stanley XI’s declining productivity and inadequate tithes. His cousin Cassius had reassigned labourers to hab-blocks closer to their workplaces, one of several reforms that had proved unexpectedly popular.

An hour spent travelling was still an hour added to the working day.

But it was not four.

Hurl opened the hab-block’s outer door with a simple metal key.

Beyond it lay a long, windowless corridor lined with identical doors at regular intervals. Each opened into a shared four-man habitation unit. Only unmarried labourers were housed in this section.

Hurl stopped at the first door on the left and selected another key from the chain.

He heard movement as soon as he entered.

Victor was already home.

The unit consisted of a cramped central space with four private sleeping cells opening from it. The ration heater, lavatory and shower were shared. Each sleeping cell was separated from the common area by a curtain rather than a solid door.

Neither man acknowledged the other.

It was not that they were unfriendly. The dwelling simply felt larger when its occupants did not acknowledge one another’s presence every time they crossed the common space. Unless someone was heating nutrient paste or waiting to use the sanitation cubicle, privacy was best maintained through mutual pretence.

Hurl did the polite thing and walked directly to his own cell.

He pushed aside the curtain.

Beyond it lay the sum of his privacy.

The cell was only just long enough to contain his narrow single berth and wide enough to cross in two steps. A combination locker had been built into the wall beside the entrance. A tiny table stood beside the bed, while a shallow storage compartment ran along the wall above it.

Standing in the centre, Hurl could almost touch both side walls without fully extending his arms.

It was not much.

It was his.

He removed his boots, sat on the edge of the berth and reached into his pocket.

The strange stone rested in his palm.

He remembered considering whether to sell it. He also remembered changing his mind, though he could not quite recall why.

Perhaps he would reconsider.

At the very least, he could have the stone appraised or identified. He certainly lacked the expertise to classify it himself.

Hurl placed it on the tiny table and reached towards the storage compartment above his bed.

The motion reminded him how grateful he was not to be a tall man.

He retrieved his lapidary kit and placed it on the bed.

Hurl was more collector than craftsman, but on Stanley XI, lapidary had become a general term for anyone who collected, polished, cut or quietly traded interesting stones.

He unpacked a magnifying lens and a polishing cloth.

Taking the stone in one hand, he began to rub its surface gently with the cloth.

It was unnaturally smooth.

Only then did Hurl notice his anxiety.

The inspection should have been routine, yet some unexplained tension had been gathering within him since he had first removed the stone from his pocket. It faded the moment he began polishing it.

For several seconds, he felt entirely calm.

Then came the sudden conviction that he should stop.

Hurl lowered the cloth.

Another impulse followed.

Hide the stone.

He obeyed the first.

The second irritated him.

Hide it from whom?

He resisted the urge and placed the stone back on the table. Perhaps he was merely nervous because it might be valuable. A sufficiently unusual specimen could fetch a good price from one of the many illicit dealers operating throughout the hive.

That possibility would make anyone cautious.

He lifted the magnifying lens.

The unease vanished again.

In its place came a profound stillness.

Beneath the lens, the stone appeared much as he remembered it. Its outer edges were a deep burgundy, flowing inwards through shades of red and orange before reaching a yellow-white brilliance at its centre.

He slowly rotated the stone in his palm, examining it from every possible angle.

It was not until his hand began to cramp that he realised he had been staring at it for forty minutes.

[The Neverborn]

The experience had been better than the worst possibilities Valdrien had imagined.

His circumstances had improved, at least in most respects.

The mon-keigh who found him could have crushed his spirit stone, but had not. One of their polluting machines might have shattered it, but had not. A root might have shifted the earth around him and driven some buried stone through its surface, but none had.

After so long alone—after all that time for which he had no adequate word—Hurl’s touch had stirred something within him.

When the mon-keigh first held him in his palm, Valdrien had felt the contact of another living being.

He pushed the thought aside.

This was a mon-keigh. One of the species that had killed him. One of those who had defiled the maiden world.

He remembered how deeply he had once despised them.

Pests.

An infestation of insects.

Then he caught himself.

He was being melodramatic, and melodrama was beneath his stature.

Mon-keigh were not literally insects. They were merely destructive.

Perhaps a different comparison would be more accurate.

Annoying colleagues.

A babe that mewled without pause.

A poorly trained household animal with a talent for breaking valuable things.

They were not inherently evil, not in the manner of Slaanesh. They were simply uncivilised and ignorant.

Perhaps that was not entirely their fault.

As he continued along this line of thought, Valdrien forced himself to confront what had been lingering at the edge of his awareness.

He was grateful.

In a fashion.

When Hurl had picked him up, Valdrien had felt something. Contact with a living mind after so many ages of isolation had been like a blinding light, even though mon-keigh souls, as he remembered them, did not burn especially brightly.

There it was.

He was beginning to remember.

When he had touched Hurl’s mind, some part of Valdrien that had faded in the darkness had begun to return.

He reminded himself of a principle he had once observed almost by habit: one should always be intellectually honest with oneself.

Internally, at least.

There was rarely any need to extend the same courtesy to others.

Valdrien remembered that this philosophy had served him well in life, though he could no longer summon any specific examples.

It was one of the many lessons he had learned while walking the Path of the Seer.

A seer’s mind must be sharp.

Sharp enough to deliver precise, rapier-like strikes rather than swing about like a two-handed chainsword.

When used correctly, the former was considerably more deadly.

Valdrien smiled at his own wicked conclusion—or recalled what smiling had once felt like.

Sometimes such things were required.

Very well.

He would accept his present circumstances.

For now.

There would be time to act later.

He remembered the mon-keigh turning him over in his short, thick fingers, examining the vessel that held Valdrien’s soul as though it were an infant’s bauble.

He had not feared being dropped. Spirit stones were normally worn upon the chest, often without armour covering them. They were not so fragile that a fall from head height would destroy them.

It was the indignity of the possibility that troubled him.

He had also sensed the mon-keigh attempting to clean or polish his surface with a mostly clean cloth, though Valdrien could not determine which.

Hurl had cut stones before. Valdrien had perceived that much when their minds touched.

More importantly, he had detected no intention to cut this one.

That knowledge gave him sufficient reassurance to conclude that the past few hours had been the best he had experienced in what must have been thousands of years.

The thought awakened something he had not felt in millennia.

Ironic amusement.

Valdrien permitted himself a moment to enjoy it.

Then, at the edge of his awareness, he felt Hurl’s mind begin to open in a way he had not encountered before.

The indistinct cloud of the mon-keigh’s thoughts softened and lost its structure.

Hurl was sleeping.

Or beginning to.

Valdrien considered the opportunity.

Then he chose restraint.

For this night, at least.

One could always commit an act left undone.

One could never undo it once committed.

[The Neverborn]

The night passed without incident, and Hurl slept.

Sadly, it was something he looked forward to.

There was very little in his life that someone else did not control.

His occupation had been assigned to him at the age of fourteen, as had been policy at the time. Under the more recent reforms introduced by Cassius von Krauzer, he might have been permitted to apply for an apprenticeship had he shown sufficient aptitude.

Hurl regretted that no such opportunity had existed during Ivan’s governorship.

His personal life was scarcely more within his control.

For as long as anyone could remember, citizens had been required to attend mandatory social and religious gatherings, usually at least once every two weeks.

There was no attempt to conceal the purpose of the religious events.

Praise was offered to the God-Emperor, He Who Sits Upon the Holy Throne on Holy Terra.

The epithet was repeated so frequently that even the overseers’ eyes sometimes glazed over when they heard it.

The purpose of the social gatherings was equally transparent.

Unmarried men and women were required to attend them together. This obligation generally ended once a citizen was registered as a parent, at which point they received minor improvements to their standard of living and the compulsory social events were replaced by parental groups.

The structure was well known and only thinly veiled.

The entire system was designed to encourage large families.

Hurl saw it for what it was.

The tithe had to be paid in minerals and manpower.

Manpower required children.

Children came from women’s wombs.

It was self-serving and simple, at least as Hurl understood it.

That was why he enjoyed sleeping.

No one could take sleep away from him.

Emperor willing, at least.

Not the foreman.

Not the overseer.

Not the priest.

Not the social coordinator.

Not the family planner.

For six hours each night, he could simply rest.

Those hours were his.

Hurl woke, as he usually did, with regret.

His favourite part of the day had ended, and he was required to return to his assigned place of labour.

He completed his two morning rituals: sanitation and the consumption of nutrient paste.

Then came the verbal checklist.

“Helmet. Overalls. Boots. Shovel. Gloves. Keys.”

As he prepared to leave, his eyes settled on the strange stone he had found the previous day.

He still had not named it.

Hurl took one step towards the door.

Then the compulsion returned.

Hide the stone.

He grimaced.

For several seconds, he stood in indecision before exhaustion finally won out over irritation.

Perhaps it was sensible.

He trusted the three men with whom he shared the habitation, but there was always the possibility that someone else might enter while he was away. An overseer. A maintenance worker. Someone he did not know.

Someone who might steal the stone.

Or confiscate it.

Hurl returned to the bedside table, picked it up and placed it carefully inside the lockable storage compartment near the entrance.

He secured the lock.

Yes.

That was sensible.

When he returned from work, he would have it appraised.

[The Neverborn]

Hurl’s day was unremarkable.

He was assigned to the same location where he had found the red stone the previous day. Habit told him to keep an eye out for a second one, but something deeper told him that would not happen.

This had been a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

As he worked, Hurl allowed himself to fantasise about what the stone might be.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be valuable enough for him to retire.

Hurl knew of ancient technologies for which the right buyer would pay obscene sums. But that presented a problem. If the stone truly was worth a Chairman’s ransom, he could not simply show it to anyone.

He needed the right person.

Someone who would not steal it.

Someone who would not confiscate it as “contraband.”

Someone who would not lie to him.

Or, failing that, someone who could not physically take it from him.

Most importantly, someone who knew stones.

Hurl knew the lapidary hobby well. Its practitioners were mostly men, many of whom possessed collections filled with pieces they had never quite got around to cutting or polishing.

Among cutters, there was a familiar joke, usually delivered with affectionate embarrassment:

“Piles of uncut shame.”

Hurl avoided the problem altogether by rarely cutting anything and keeping his collection small. He limited himself to perhaps two dozen pieces. Whenever the collection grew much beyond that, he sold or traded away anything he no longer cared for or could not easily store.

That knowledge also told him who to approach.

Campbell.

Campbell would be the best choice.

He was too old to make a serious attempt at stealing the stone, and Hurl suspected that even if he tried to deceive him, Campbell lacked the social skill to conceal it.

When Hurl returned from his shift, he moved with unusual purpose.

Excitement had followed him home.

He retrieved the stone from where he had left it, slipped it into his pocket, and left the hab-block without changing out of his work clothes.

Campbell’s habitation block was around thirty minutes away on foot.

Hurl walked with both hands in his pockets, holding the stone carefully between two fingers as he navigated the sprawling mass of humanity.

Not every hab-block was like his own.

Some had become social hubs, home to groups of friends, families, or colleagues who gathered in the same communal spaces day after day.

Hurl himself was affiliated with fewer than a handful.

He often found conversations difficult to follow or contribute to unless they concerned mining or rocks.

Other hab-blocks, like Campbell’s, had gradually transformed into clusters of small, semi-legal businesses.

One could have hair cut, clothes repaired, boots resoled.

Less legal services were available as well, but even the criminals tended to keep to themselves.

Campbell was not officially a stone seller.

Collecting stones was illegal, after all.

The pretence was extremely thin.

As Hurl entered the corridor leading towards Campbell’s unit, he slowed.

Something felt wrong.

He could not say why.

For a moment, he felt confused and distracted, as though he had just experienced some important revelation only to forget it instantly.

He stopped.

The sensation passed.

Then returned.

Something was missing.

Hurl halted so abruptly that the man walking behind him nearly collided with his back.

The taller man stepped around him and gave Hurl a look of mild offence.

Hurl lost the thought again.

“Right,” he muttered. “Campbell’s appraisal, then home.”

He continued.

When he reached Campbell’s door, Hurl pressed the guest button and waited.

A young woman’s head appeared around the corner.

She smiled.

Her face carried the kind of easy joy that some people on Stanley XI seemed to wear around themselves like a raincoat.

She looked at him.

“Here for Campbell?”

Hurl blinked.

Was he really one of those people who could be read that easily?

He nodded.

She stepped away from the threshold and allowed him through.

As Hurl crossed it, a sudden wave of anxiety passed through him.

The woman was pretty, certainly, but that was far too strong a reaction.

He continued towards Campbell’s shared living space and knocked.

Movement came from within.

A moment later, Campbell opened the door.

He was elderly and somehow both overweight and skinny at the same time: pot-bellied, noodle-armed, and wearing the fez he seemed to possess for no reason other than to make himself immediately recognisable.

“Hurl,” Campbell said matter-of-factly.

Hurl entered the shared hab-space.

For reasons he could not explain, he felt as though he should hold his breath.

 

End of Act II

Edited August 7 by The Neverborn

[The Neverborn]

Act III

 

Hurl put his hand into his pocket.

He had expected to feel... something.

This time, there was nothing.

He paused.

Campbell noticed the confused expression on his face.

Hurl drew the stone from his pocket and held it between his thumb and middle finger, squinting at it one last time.

A faint expression of surprise had already appeared on Campbell’s face.

“Tell me about this,” Hurl said.

“Interesting,” Campbell murmured. “Very interesting.”

He opened his palm.

Hurl placed the stone flat against it.

Campbell held it up towards the light and examined it.

There was something unnatural about the way it responded. The yellow-white centre appeared almost like a source of illumination that somehow emitted no light at all.

Campbell tested the impression by covering the stone with his other hand.

Exactly as he had expected.

It gave off no light.

Yet it looked as though it should.

“That’s odd,” Campbell said.

“What?”

Campbell did not answer.

He placed the stone carefully upon a cloth spread across the table behind him. Hurl followed as Campbell moved towards a large leather case containing his equipment.

Valdrien felt himself being passed to another mon-keigh.

He resented it.

If he had to belong to one of these creatures for the moment, that was indignity enough. Being passed between them like some decorative possession was considerably worse.

For a moment, he considered lashing out.

He was not entirely certain that he could.

Nor was he certain what effect it might have.

Perhaps he could influence Hurl into striking the mon-keigh who had placed him on the table like an ornament.

Before he could seriously consider the possibility, he was lifted again.

This mon-keigh felt older.

Weaker.

Campbell examined Valdrien through a loupe.

Valdrien could not determine precisely what was happening, but he felt the older human’s attention narrow upon him.

This one was more formidable.

Not physically.

There was simply a greater sense of danger surrounding him.

Valdrien sensed knowledge within the old man, though not knowledge of an academic kind. It had been accumulated through years of reading descriptions of objects and concepts he could rarely examine directly, then comparing those descriptions against practical experience.

A knowledge built from fragments.

From interpretation.

From repetition.

Campbell’s examination felt almost like an extraordinarily primitive form of scrying.

Slow.

Painfully slow.

After three seconds, Valdrien had concluded that the mon-keigh was getting nowhere.

Campbell nevertheless continued for another two minutes.

“Where did you find it?” he eventually asked.

“On the site where I’ve been working for the past two months. Outside the old K-103 side road. You know the one that takes you towards Perry’s Hive? Or used to, anyway.”

Campbell gave no response.

He returned to the leather case and retrieved a head-mounted magnifier.

He placed it over his eyes without removing his fez.

Valdrien understood this much.

The mon-keigh was escalating his investigation.

Valdrien was becoming annoyed.

Beneath that irritation, however, something colder was beginning to form.

Dread.

It was unlikely, but there remained some small possibility that this human might identify him almost by accident.

He probably would not speak the words Aeldari spirit stone aloud.

But he might understand enough to involve the mon-keigh priests.

If that happened, Valdrien expected his stone would eventually be destroyed.

His soul would once again be exposed to Slaanesh.

The thought reminded him what nausea had once felt like.

Five minutes passed.

Campbell finally leaned back.

“She’s a very special thing, isn’t she?”

Hurl waited.

“Well, I’ll tell you something for free. She isn’t a natural stone. At least, not one from this world.”

Valdrien did not fully understand the final part of the sentence.

He understood enough to panic.

“How do you know?” Hurl asked.

Campbell pushed the magnifying visor upwards.

His grey eyes were slightly bloodshot, heavy bags beneath them, his expression caught somewhere between warmth and irritation.

“See this?”

He pointed towards the edge of the stone.

“Far too smooth to be natural.”

He rotated it carefully.

“Not only that. You said you dug her out of the ground. How long have you had her?”

“Around a day.”

“She doesn’t look like something that spent a million years underground and was dug up yesterday, Hurl. She’s too glossy.”

Hurl winced.

Was Campbell suggesting he had brought him a fake?

He shifted his weight.

“And,” Campbell continued, “the cuts are perfect. Completely perfect. Someone shaped this. Probably off-world.”

“Ooh, off-world?” Hurl said. “Does that mean she’s worth something?”

“Not automatically.”

Campbell reached back into the leather case and retrieved a refracting light.

He shone it directly onto the stone.

Valdrien felt violated.

He considered lashing out again.

Again, he restrained himself.

Every second beneath the light felt like being forced to walk naked through a public square.

He closed his eyes—or remembered what closing his eyes had once felt like.

There was nothing painful about the radiation itself.

It was the scrutiny.

Campbell seemed to be approaching some conclusion.

He reached into the case once more and withdrew three hardness-testing pens, each fitted with a reinforced point.

Valdrien felt the same terror he had experienced when his soul first left his body.

No.

He reached into the old mon-keigh’s mind.

One word.

No.

Campbell stopped.

The testing pen hovered above the stone.

“Is there a problem?” Hurl asked.

Campbell found himself caught between two pressures: an inexplicable desire to stop and the social expectation created by Hurl standing beside him.

He grimaced.

Then pressed the testing point against the stone.

Valdrien remembered what it felt like to take a deep breath.

“Huh.”

Campbell frowned.

“She’s hard as... I don’t know what.”

He briefly considered using the next testing tool.

Then decided against it.

Apparently, he had reached a conclusion.

“Well?” Hurl asked.

“She’s worthless.”

“What?”

“She might be from another planet, but she isn’t valuable. Best guess? Some cheap, highly decorative gem taken from a piece of jewellery.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I suspected it the moment I first held her.”

“How come?”

“Hold out your hand.”

Hurl did.

Campbell dropped the stone into his palm.

“Feel that, Hurl. She weighs maybe a sixth of what a stone that size ought to weigh.”

Hurl sighed.

“I can give you two copper coins for her. That’s all. Too much risk, not enough reward.”

Hurl sighed again.

“I’ll keep it. It's pretty, at least. Maybe if I get bored of it, I’ll make a trade.”

Campbell turned his back on him and began putting away his equipment.

“If you decide to, you’re welcome to try me again.”

[The Neverborn]

Valdrien did not speak Imperial Gothic.

He did not need to.

He felt the words through Hurl.

Worthless?

Worthless?

His spirit stone was worthless to these mon-keigh.

Valdrien felt the insult like a blow. Had he still possessed a body, he might have killed both of them where they stood.

One did not describe a spirit stone as worthless.

One simply did not.

Even between sworn enemies, the idea was unthinkable. It was a social grace that crossed craftworlds, rivalries and cultural divisions: a shared understanding among the Aeldari that some things were beyond insult.

Valdrien could feel himself brooding.

He would do something in response to the offence.

He simply had not decided what.

As Hurl left the older mon-keigh’s dwelling, Valdrien sensed activity within his keeper’s mind.

Hurl was replaying the appraisal.

Considering it.

Questioning it.

He was thinking about seeking a second opinion.

A dozen thoughts entered Valdrien’s mind at once, most of them fearful enough to displace his indignation.

What if Hurl took his spirit stone to more mon-keigh?

Each new examination created another opportunity for someone to recognise what he was. Eventually, Hurl might place him before one of the mon-keigh priests capable of identifying him.

That could not be permitted.

Yet there was another possibility.

If his keeper accepted that the stone was worthless, then at least one danger disappeared. There would be little reason to sell it, less reason to involve anyone important, and almost no reason for the authorities to take an interest.

Valdrien’s mind raced through chains of cause and effect at a pace alien to the human carrying him.

Slowly, a coherent plan formed.

Valdrien smiled inwardly.

Very well.

Let his keeper believe the stone worthless.

But let him value possessing it.

That distinction would be useful.

When the mon-keigh slept, Valdrien would enter his mind.

He had already sensed what happened during Hurl’s descent into sleep. His thoughts seemed to open like a cloud dispersing, their boundaries becoming less distinct.

There, Valdrien believed, he could search more deeply.

Conduct reconnaissance of a sort.

Find something upon which he might gain purchase later.

As Hurl left Campbell’s hab-block, he passed the young woman who had admitted him earlier.

She was standing in her doorway, speaking with a man perhaps four years her senior. Their conversation possessed the carefully effortless quality of two people pretending they were not yet flirting.

Anyone who watched them for more than a moment could see the beginnings of a romantic journey.

Such scenes were common on Stanley XI.

The governorship encouraged the formation of family units with considerable enthusiasm.

As Hurl passed, he nodded towards the woman in thanks.

She did not notice.

She was too absorbed in the man standing at her door.

Hurl wondered briefly whether she had actually been waiting for him when she answered Campbell’s door earlier.

Then his thoughts returned to the stone.

He began mentally listing others who might appraise it.

But Campbell had said it was worthless.

And, when Hurl considered the explanation, it seemed not merely plausible but likely.

The stone possessed no identifying markings. It had simply been lying loose in the ground, already cut with unnatural precision.

Perhaps Campbell was right.

Maybe some off-world trader had once worn it purely for its beauty, set into a pendant, necklace or earring. It might have fallen from a piece of jewellery only a week before Hurl discovered it.

That would explain everything.

Hurl felt the stone between his fingers inside his pocket.

“I’ll keep it,” he said quietly to himself.

It was unusual, if nothing else.

Perhaps that was enough.

It would make his collection unique.

[The Neverborn]

That night, Hurl felt the urge to place the stone on the table beside where he slept, near the head of his bed. He paid the thought little mind. He was already tired from the seventy-five-minute round trip to Campbell’s hab-block. After removing his clothes and visiting the shared sanitation room, he returned to his cell.

As he slept, an ancient being watched.

The barriers that held Hurl’s mind together softened, and something alien entered. An intelligence that had once scried the skein and directed thousands across centuries now saw the opportunity it had been waiting for.

Valdrien considered his next move.

Mon-keigh minds were simple.

It would be easy to trick one. He would present himself, and the world the mon-keigh’s mind entered while at rest, as something beautiful. Then it would yield up its secrets with little resistance.

Hurl’s mind entered an unusually sharp lucid dream, the kind in which he could tell he was dreaming, but this felt far more vivid than any dream he had ever known. Details usually absent were now present. He had senses in full. He had never been able to touch or smell in a dream before. The world around him felt more real. He could not only hear the gentle breeze that filled the air, but feel it too.

He found himself lying in his usual sleeping position beneath a night sky. The sky was a perfect navy blue, yet he could still see clearly. He had no protection from the elements, yet his skin felt as though it were resting at the perfect temperature.

He stood and looked around.

He was in a clearing surrounded by a forest. The branches of the trees were hung with luminous violet leaves that cast soft light upon the ground. Beneath his feet lay perfectly cut grass. He was barefoot, and its softness felt almost meditative against his soles.

He surveyed the area.

His mind, practical even in sleep, wondered where the water source was, as if trying to reverse-engineer the natural impossibility surrounding him.

Turning, he found it.

The water made a sound unlike any he had known before. It had the character of water, but there was something composed about it. Then he heard the wind passing his ears. The breeze, the leaves and the branches of the forest combined into something like a tune.

Hurl wondered what it sounded like.

It was music, certainly, but he could not match it to anything he knew.

Then came a thought that did not feel like his own.

What would this sound like?

Hurl remembered a peaceful tune he had once heard played at one of the state-mandated social events. Something hauntingly beautiful.

He focused on the memory.

Then realised that this was the tune he was hearing now.

His senses felt almost assaulted, though not unpleasantly. Even so, it became too much to bear while walking, too much to endure while standing. He did the only thing that felt natural.

He sat.

Then even that became overwhelming, and he lay back down upon the grass.

He let his mind melt into the sensory flood.

Giving in at last, he allowed himself to enjoy the peace.

Edited Sunday at 06:12 PM by The Neverborn

[The Neverborn]

Hurl’s eyes opened.

Usually, he did not remember his dreams.

Last night’s, however, remained vivid.

He remembered how the world around him had responded to his thoughts. The water had changed its tune. A water source had appeared where moments before there had been none.

In all his twenty-four years on Stanley XI, he had never experienced anything like it.

More strangely, he felt unusually refreshed.

Hurl glanced at the time.

05:45.

Exactly when he needed to wake.

Yet he felt as though he had somehow slept two hours longer than he actually had.

He rose and dressed.

Today was the Sabbath.

By Imperial mandate, as had been the case for as long as anyone on Stanley XI could remember, the population worked only a half-day. Labour ended at noon. After that, all Imperial citizens were required to attend prayers, followed later by their assigned social groups.

Both were mandatory.

No exceptions.

When Hurl entered the common room, his co-habmates—Victor, Jon and Perry—were already awake.

The four men moved around one another with the unspoken coordination that came from months of shared routine, or, in Perry and Jon’s case, years.

The Sabbath morning always changed the atmosphere of the hab slightly.

Hurl had thought about why.

He had even tried to rationalise it.

Eventually, he had concluded that because they would travel to church together after work, the morning itself acted as a kind of social lubricant.

The social expectations of Stanley XI also required everyone to attend in clean clothes and having used a sanitation station. Boots had to be polished. Presentable clothes had to be found.

Across the hab-block, that produced a coordinated effort every Sabbath morning.

Hurl had sometimes wondered whether that, too, was deliberate.

He looked towards Victor, who was licking the last of the ration paste from a tube.

Victor had a habit of launching into long, repetitive rants on almost any subject, usually in far more detail than seemed reasonable.

Hurl decided to keep the thought to himself.

“Morning,” he said.

Victor responded with a thumbs-up, his mouth still occupied.

“Are you coming to church today?” Victor asked once he had swallowed.

He always asked that.

It was mandatory.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got polish. Happy to do yours when I do mine,” Victor continued.

It was a kind offer.

Hurl knew Victor expected nothing in return. Sometimes he simply did things for people for no reason Hurl could understand beyond the fact that he wanted to.

"Sure."

Jon and Perry ignored the conversation as they prepared to leave together.

Perry paused in the doorway.

“Two o’clock, yeah?”

Victor and Hurl answered at the same time.

“Yeah. Two.”

Before Hurl gave the matter another thought, he was at work.

At some point during the morning, he found himself wondering why he had not told the other three about his dream.

Well.

It had only been a dream.

Did men talk to one another about dreams?

It felt a little feminine.

None of the four of them had ever discussed one before.

Perhaps someone from Hurl’s previous hab-block had mentioned a dream once, but only in the context of an illness.

Hurl decided he would mention his own only if one of the others brought up dreams first.

When he returned from his half-shift, Victor was midway through polishing his second boot.

Hurl looked at him as he began removing his own.

“You’re sure you’re all right doing mine?”

Victor looked up.

“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”

Jon and Perry both glanced towards Hurl.

Something about the look suggested that asking for confirmation had crossed a social boundary, though Hurl was not entirely sure which one.

He decided it was better not to question it.

Hurl removed his boots carefully and placed them respectfully beside Victor’s feet.

He was the last of the four to get ready.

A quick calculation told him he had perhaps ten or fifteen minutes before his lateness risked delaying everyone else.

If that happened, they would either have to leave without him or risk facing an overseer themselves.

Hurl hurried.