Sota-Nul, Emissary of Kelbor-Hal

The Neverborn

Samus, The End and the Death

Imperial Army

Niora Su-Kassen, Solar Command Staff, former Admiral of the Jovian Fleets

Imperial Personae

Malcador, Regent of the Imperium

Armina Fel, Senior Astropath

Heliosa-78, Cult Matriarch of the Selenar

Andromeda-17, Personified-scion of the Selenar

Mersadie Oliton, Prisoner of the Unnamed Fortress, former Remembrancer

Euphrati Keeler, The Saint, former Remembrancer

Nilus Yeshar, Navigator

Cadmus Vek, Celestial Mining Magnate

Zadia Koln, Sub-mistress of the system freighter Antius

Aksinya, Lifeward to Cadmus Vek

‘That is my home of love: if I have ranged,

Like him that travels I return again,

Just to the time, not with the time exchanged.’

– attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire (fl. M2)

PART ONE

The Warp

∞

‘Father…’

He is waiting. He has always been waiting. In this place there is no time, not truly, not unless the forces within its tides dream it into being. Here, eternity is truth.

‘Father…’

Slowly, with weariness and reluctance, He forms the idea of eyes, of a mouth, of limbs, of the chair beneath Him. Far off, there is another chair, and a thread of thought and will that tether Him back to a place of metal, and stone, and time.

‘Father…’

He opens His eyes.

Darkness lies before Him, extending through every dimension. Darkness, and Him alone. In that moment He feels the echo of every man or woman who has ever woken beside a guttering fire to see the night creeping closer as the flame-light fades.

The darkness becomes a black mirror. He looks into His reflection: a man on a stone chair, old, dark skin clinging to the hollows of His cheeks. Iron and snow streak His beard. The shoulders and limbs beneath His plain, black robes are thin. Dust marks the bare soles of His feet. His eyes are clear, and there is neither kindness nor pity in them.

The chair and the man sit on a narrow stone platform. Behind Him burns a wall of fire that curves up and away, blazing and flaring like the surface of a star.

The reflection changes. For an instant, a figure of iron and blades with coal-furnace eyes is looking back at Him from a throne of chrome. Then it is gone, and the reflection is a blur of images falling one atop another: a golden warrior standing with drawn sword before the gates of a towering fortress, a figure before the mouth of a mountain cave, a boy with a stick and fear in his eyes, a queen with a spear atop a cliff, an eagle with ten wings beating against a thunder-threaded sky – on and on, images tumbling over each other like the faces of cards tossed through the air.

‘Is there any truth in you?’ asks the voice that comes from the dark.

The images vanish and the darkness hangs before Him. It falls into the abyss beneath like a cascade of obsidian sand.

‘At the root of your lies, is there any truth, father?’