The waiting was terrible. Month by month the rumours grew steadily worse and the Cadians, stranded on the other side of the galaxy, had greeted the reports with gathering concern.

Their impatience grew. All every Cadian wanted was to be home, facing whatever dangers that brought.

‘If Cadia falls, then I fall with it. If the spirit of Cadia dies, then I die too,’ was the phrase that summed up the spirit of those Cadians stranded far from home. But they never really believed that Cadia could fall.

Ultimately their recall had come too late. By the time they left Formund’s system and set a course for the Cadian system, Cadia was about to fall.

The loss came whilst they were still in warp transit. Their void-craft was buffeted like a cork in the storm, the passage the worst that anyone could remember. Yedrin himself had spent the whole journey tormented with nightmares and visions, vomiting with warp-sickness. It turned out that they were one of the last regiments to escape out of what was to become Nihilus, squeezing through a narrow gap in the roiling warp storms that would make up the Cicatrix Maledictum.

They had exited the warp in the Agripinaa System and met forces that had escaped from Cadia. They were greeted with the awful news that Cadia had fallen just weeks before. It was almost an impossibility. But each survivor told similar tales. Cadia was gone.

‘But,’ as General Bendikt had assured them all, ‘Cadia still stands.’

For Yedrin, the loss of Cadia sparked a maelstrom of emotions. Furious denial, grief, recrimination and then a gnawing sense of guilt.

With Cadia lost, Yedrin’s chance of becoming a real shock trooper was gone. In the lower hab decks of the ageing troop transport, Sanctus Invincible, he found an old janitor’s storeroom and locked himself away, and wept.

When he came out, he apologised to his mother. It was clear from the look on her face that she had been weeping as well. He had never seen his mother show weakness before. It was like watching water welling up from a crack in a stone.

‘You will find another way to serve,’ she said, and swallowed back her pain.

In the following months, as they were thrown about by the tumults of war, Yedrin sensed a growing distance between him and his mother. The future she had envisioned for him had been ripped away. He felt as though he was a constant disappointment to her. Whenever she looked at him he saw the well of sadness in her eyes.

So when, years later, word came of a new cadet programme, Yedrin enlisted immediately. His mother had been too overcome to speak, but she had gripped his hands and embraced him, and managed to whisper, ‘The training will be ruthless. But have faith. You might so easily have been Cadian. Do not fail in this. Understand?’