Kovex Verin knelt in a field of ferns and swore an oath to The Emperor of Mankind (who Kovex knew with absolute certainty could hear him regardless of where he was.) He was a Space Marine, An Astartes. His duty was to kill the Heretic beside his Battle Brothers. But The War was gone, stolen from him. The sky above held no smoke, no gunfire, only birds. His black armor steamed in the damp air. The skulls chained at his waist knocked together as he stood, alone. He did not know how he came here. One moment he had been charging toward the enemy line with Bolter roaring and the next, he awoke surrounded by silence and green trees. His bolt gun hung heavy at his hip, the small gold wings on its grip dull with grime. He had counted his Bolt Shells twice. He had cleaned the blade of his Power Sword until its edge gleamed with a mirrors shine, then powered it on watching the blade crackled with fresh blue light. Neither act gave him a target. A soldier without a war is only a weapon rusting. His battle had been stolen from him by a Warp Tainted Heretic. Kovex spat in disgust as an anger rose inside him. “But….”, he thought “There will always be another”. Kovex stood and held his Power Sword high and screamed with all of his love for his Emperor combined will his bottomless hate for his enemies and those of The Master of Mankind, “I will Dispense The Emperor’s Justice upon all of Humanity’s enemies, I will Purge The Xenos, The Mutant and The Heretic, I will dispatch all of them regardless of where I have been sent, they will all die! There is only War!!!!” "You point that sword at nothing," a voice said. Kovex spun. His blade swept up, lightning spitting across the fern tops. A small figure stood ten paces off. She was gaunt, her head shaved, her gray eyes flat and unafraid. Torn straps hung from a dirty jacket, the remains of a straightjacket. She tilted her head like a bird studying a worm. "You're not from here either," she said. "I can smell it. Ozone. Old blood. Purpose." She grinned, then let the grin die. "They put me in a room and studied me. I broke the room. Now they hunt me." Kovex lowered his Power Sword and leveled it to the strangest girl-child. "Name yourself." "They called me Patient Nine." She stepped closer, past the crackling edge, unafraid of it. "There is a woman coming for me. Tall. Scales like white glass. Claws. She serves a thing that wants this whole world dead." She reached up and pointed towards the skull pendant on the chain at his neck, the red gem winking. "You swear oaths to a dead god. She'd feed your god to hers and smile." Kovex didn’t lowered the blade an inch. He had no war. He had no Brothers. But her words gave him a shape he understood. An enemy. A servant of destruction. Something to be judged. "You lie to save yourself," he said. "Maybe." Patient 9 shrugged. "But she's real, and she's close, and you have nothing better to do." A thin whine cut the air. Far off, metal legs crushed brush. Something mechanical moved through the trees, fast and certain, tracking a scent. Patient 9's grin returned, wide and manic. Kovex turned toward the sound. His grip tightened on the black hilt. The blade roared to full power, he had crossed the whole galaxy and lost his war. Now the war had found him again, wearing new skin. "Stay behind me strange girl-child," he said. "I will meet whatever dares stand against me.” He walked toward the hunter in the trees, and for the first time since he arrived, his purpose burned clean. “There is only WAR”. Kovex said low and eventually, assuming a battle stance, his Power Sword held tight and ready to drink the blood of the enemy.

The thing burst from the trees and stopped in the open. Kovex faced it, ready for battle. It was no clean machine and no honest beast. Gray metal fused with pale, stitched flesh. Cables hung from its skull like torn veins. Its jaw split wide, lined with steel teeth. It moved on four limbs, low and patient, tracking a scent. "Abomination," Kovex said. Behind him, the strange girl-child spoke in a matter of fact tone that grew manic and unhinging as she seemed to grow excited about the looming violence. Patient Nine had warned him a scaled woman hunted her, a servant of a world-ending thing. This creature was her hound. "That's mine," she said, flat and calm. "They built it from a dead man. It never sleeps. It never stops." Then her voice tilted, sudden and bright, "You'll die pretty, big man. Try not to." She yelled the last words in a shriek while cackling madly. Kovex did not answer, “This child is not normal” He thought then he raised his bolt gun, and aimed faster than an unaugmented eye could perceive. He fired three rounds precisely into calculated points on the Abomination. The shells cracked into the creature's shoulders and the third in its chest and exploded. Metal peeled. Flesh smoked. The thing did not scream. It charged even in its damaged state. “Impressive, this may take slight effort”. He thought, anticipating the Abomination’s imminent actions. It crossed the ground faster than he expected. Kovex holstered the Boltgun and gripped his power sword with both hands. The blade roared, blue light spitting along its edge. The creature leapt. Its claws reaching out for his chest plate of his black Power Armor. He held his stance unmoved by the Abomination’s proximity. He drove the sword up into its unguarded underbelly in a way that he had done many times before, a killing blow. The blade bit through metal and meat. Sparks sprayed. The creature twisted, Kovex held the Power Sword firmly in his grip. The Abomination’s jaws snapped at his throat, somehow still holding onto whatever passed for life for this creature. Kovex jammed his forearm into its mouth. Steel teeth ground on his armor. He roared and shoved the blade deeper, up toward the thing's spine. Something inside it burst. The cables jerked. Its four limbs kicked, then locked. Kovex ripped the sword free and swung once more, clean through the neck. The metal skull gripped around his arm, the body dropped and lay steaming. He stood over it, breathing calm and even. His chest plate was scored to the bone-white ceramite beneath, the result of the foul fluid that spilled from his enemies neck. The skulls at his waist knocked together as he gathered himself. "By the Emperor's Judgment," he said. "So dies His enemy." Korvex threw the Abominations metal skull from his forearm and into the dirt. Patient Nine walked to the ruined head. She crouched and studied the dead eyes without fear. "She'll know now," she said quietly. "The moment it stopped moving, she felt it. This thing was her eyes." She looked up at Kovex, gray gaze steady. "You didn't kill the hunter. You made her angry. Now she comes herself." Kovex lifted the severed skull and hung it from a fresh link on his chain. A trophy, and a promise. He had faced the servant and won. The master remained. He had not had to go in search of a new battle, battle had came to him. This new place was not so different than any other planet or any other War. He was prepared for the enemies that lay ahead, he was eager for the slaughter to come. "Then let her come," he said. "I will meet her too, whatever she is." Korvex look down at the small girl- child, “You will come with me, I have questions for you strange girl.” He turned and walked slowly towards the tree line in the darkness. Korvex shortened his stride allowing the small girl-child to more or less keep up him if she was going to follow of her own will and not him having to capture her. Far off, past the trees, something felt the silence where its hound had been. It turned toward them, and it began to move.

Kovex led the girl-child deep into the trees until the ground opened wide. A ring of white stones stood before them. Purple grass glowed under a scarred altar. He stopped in the clearing's center. Here he could see any enemy coming. The severed metal skull swung from the chain at his waist, still leaking green fluid. He turned and faced Patient Nine. "Sit," he said. "You will answer me." She did not sit. She circled the altar, dragging one thin finger along the cracked stone. The torn straitjacket hung loose from her shoulders. She hummed a broken tune. Kovex had learned little of her since she warned him of the hunter. She talked in riddles. She flinched at nothing and smiled at horrors. He suspected her mind was broken, but nevertheless he needed the knowledge she kept in her head. Preferably before this scaled woman arrived. "The one who hunts you," Kovex said. "Tell me what she is. Tell me of this world and its people." He drew the power sword and drove its tip into the soil between them, its power core deactivated. The skull on its guard grinned up at her. "I have no patience left, girl." Patient Nine stopped humming. Her gray eyes locked on his helmet. "You want it all at once," she said, flat now, cold. "Fine." She crouched by the massive blade, it’s length twice her height. "She serves a thing that eats worlds. A woman with white scales, in a black coat. She sends the crawlers to drag me back." Her voice climbed, sudden and manic. "Back to the table. Back to the needles!" She laughed, then went still again. "I ran with shadow. It leaves a smell. She follows the smell." Kovex had no experience with children let alone one as strange and unstable as this one. He turned to the altar and examined it, gauging its support capacity and sat down, something no Astartes would normally do while in their Power Armor. He was now somewhat closer to her level, His massive form casting a shadow over her small frail body. He could extract the information from her with force but, he wanted to learn about her as well, and so he decided on a different approach. "Why do they want you?" He asked without infection, his helmet’s Vox making it difficult to speak with anything remotely close to tenderness, or his concept of tenderness, this was the best approximation he could do. "Because I saw the plan," she whispered. She leaned close, too close, breath on his cheek. "She offers this whole world to her master. Every tree. Every hidden nest. Every stone city under the dirt." She pressed one finger to his chest plate, over the scored ceramite. "You landed in a slaughter, big man. You just don't see the size of it." “And how did you manage that?” Kovex asked. “You say this scaled woman possesses the power to preform such a dark ritual, yet is so inept she put her entire plan down?” Korvex continued “And then left those plans unsecured for all to see…” He wasn’t simply asking questions any longer, he was testing the girl. “And then, you a captive test subject somehow managed to escape from your confinement, and find these plans unsecured….?” He noted a shift in her facial expressions, they had stopped, she was wearing a mask of focus, not a shifting face of an unhinged mind, she was beginning to see the line of thought he was leading her to. “This is good, she can manage herself at least for a short time” He thought, then continued. “And then after that series of unlikely events you somehow managed to then escape a secure facility with the means to undo the plans of this scaled woman?” Kovex realized that he had just spoken more in five minutes than he had in the last five years. “Given all of that, how do you explain such a scenario?” A glimmer flashed near the treeline. A small winged figure darted between the monoliths, no taller than a hand. Leaf-shaped wings caught the purple light. The forest messenger. It hovered, then flashed images into Kovex's mind, sharp and cold. He saw the scaled woman moving through the dark. He saw more crawlers waking, dozens of them. Patient Nine hissed at the tiny thing. It shot backward, afraid of her. Then it vanished into the trees. Kovex rose. He gripped the parchment seal at his chest and read its oath in silence. He now understood his war. Not one hunter, but a swarm. Not one girl, but a whole world marked for the pyre. "Then I know my enemy," he said. He pulled the sword from the earth. "We move. She comes, and she does not come alone." Kovex pushed through the trees with the girl-child trailing him. The dead machine's skull swung from his chain. He stopped where the woods opened. A wide ring of purple grass spread before him. White stone pillars stood at its edge. At its center stood a pale altar shaped like a rose, wrapped in living vines. He walked to the altar and waited for the girl. “Do not move”, he reached down and with great precision to avoid crushing her, took the frail girl in one massive armored gauntlet and sat her down on the stone rim and drew his power sword. “Now to test her” Kovex thought. The blade woke with a low hum, blue light spitting along its edge. "Now," he said. "You will answer me." Patient Nine sat on the cold stone. She was gaunt, her head shaved, her gray eyes flat as coins. Torn straps from an old straitjacket hung off her jumpsuit. She had warned him of the scaled woman. She had told him almost nothing else. "You want to point that at me," she said. Then her voice climbed, bright and cracked, close to manic. "Point it. It won't make me talk faster, big man." She stood up on the altar craning her head to look up at Kovex and grinned wide, then went blank again. Kovex did not move the blade. "The scaled woman. What is she. What does she serve. Why does she hunt a child." He leaned closer. The skulls at his waist knocked together. "I have killed liars before. I know their silence." The girl studied him. Something in his stillness reached her. The manic light drained from her face. She spoke plainly. "Her name doesn't matter. Her master does. They want this world unmade. Every stone. Every living thing. She keeps me because I carry a piece of how it's done. In my head." She tapped her temple. "I ran. She wants me back before I give it to anyone else." "Then you are a weapon," Kovex said. "Or a key." "Both." She started darkly Kovex turned off the power flowing through his sword and struck it in the ground, letting go of the massive weapon and spoke. “Place your hands on the handle.” Given the additional height from her standing upon the alter the weapon’s handle was level with the girls hands. “Why…” she asked, suspicion in her voice. “Do as you are instructed” Korvex said flatly. “Fine..” she said, and did as Kovex had told her. She placed her small hands on the pommel of the enormous sword, which made her look even smaller. “Do you know how many lives that sword has taken?” Kovex asked, “Thousands upon thousands, every type of horror you could imagine”. She looked down at the sword as he spoke to her. “I am an Astartes, a chosen of The Emperor of Mankind and I kill in his name, it’s what I was created for.” She looked up at Kovex’s helm. “I slaughter any that threaten The Imperium, and to do that I use a weapon, a real weapon.” He looked down at her as he spoke to her as he would to a newly pledged Aspirant. “You referred to yourself as a weapon, do you believe yourself be capable enough to rival a true weapon?” Sheila looked back down at the massive sword her small hands lay on and then looked up at Kovex. “I don’t think I’ll need to take as many lives as your sword so,no I don’t think I can compare.” She said with a calm determination. “But I will be my own type of weapon”. Kovex and the girl said nothing for a long moment, then he said “We shall see” She looked at the vine-wrapped altar and the rainbow stone glowing at its heart. "This place is old, older than her. I felt its power, so I followed that feeling here.” She explained “The power in these stones feels the opposite of her kind of magic.” "You gave us away when you had to kill her monster, But here, she can't see. For a little while." Kovex pulled his Power Sword from the ground, he understood now the path he must take. The girl wasn’t a mad child, but something else. She seemed to possess a natural psychic ability, but she had been altered in some way through experimentation of some kind, she had told him that much. Kovex expected that there was more than that the girl had been subjected to, But there was time for more questions later. His purpose sharpened. This was his new War, "Then I will keep you," he said. "Not as prisoner. As the thing she must not reclaim." A faint sound crossed the clearing. Metal on grass, past the pillars. Patient Nine's head snapped up. Her grin returned, terrible and glad. "She's close," she whispered. "The stones slow her. They don't stop her." Kovex turned toward the sound. The girl had given him his truth but, the scaled woman wasn’t what had caused the noise, it was something else. The head of the Abomination at his hip began to twitch. The girl looked at the head twitching on the chain at Kovex’s. “Thats probably not a good thing.” She said in a low voice, then looked up at Kovex,s helm and began to cackle. He scanned his surroundings attempting to locate the threat, one he had already put down. He looked around to the girl, “Get down from there and find cover, I’ll make sure it stays dead this time.”