Then she would draw you back to your bed and direct you to sleep. For the Body you tried to be obedient, for once in your benighted life; it seemed beneath you not to. When the Body appeared time could be relied upon to work as it ought, rather than melting away like chips of ice only to reappear in unexpected places. But at these times your brain kept nagging itself to stay conscious. The fact that the Body had come to you now seemed tremendously important, if only you could stay awake long enough to figure out why.

And your face itched from the dried blood, and all around you the people whispered, Thousand kilos of osseo—old—keep that, that’s the first thing we run out of— No, Sergeant, ditch it; we’re behind schedule already.

Your world was a white and sterile box. This box was the hospital quarter on board the Erebos. The Erebos was the Behemoth-class flagship of the Emperor Undying. These facts you held on to like an asphyxiating man to a last lungful of air. You lived in a cool, colourless room of dismantled beds and cartons, and you had for your own a bed and a chair and a sword. They had tried to remove your sword, once—they had tried to take it away on some pretext you could not exactly remember—and you were perturbed in some distant way by that memory, which was red, and wet, and ill defined.

They no longer touched your two-hander. It appeared and reappeared around the room wherever you had dropped it, usually accompanied by the mysterious smell of upchuck. You now slept beside it, like it was your large steel infant. Truth be told you would have been happy hurling the thing straight into the hot heart of Dominicus, as it was loathsome to you and you were convinced it wanted to do you harm; but it was very important that it should not be placed in anyone else’s hand.

This didn’t stop you from dulling the blade, nicking the polish, and altogether fucking up the edge, as you vaguely knew you were. You knew so little about swords—you had never bothered to ask; you could barely differentiate between them. Some were narrow. Some were broad. Some were big, some were small. This two-handed soldier’s sword was huge and aberrant and frankly malicious, and utterly your responsibility—even if you could not touch it without power-heaving.