Burning Fates - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Past Portents

Staring at her new self in the mirror, Liandra couldn't help the frown that found its way onto her lips. Because she was tall, stacked, and built enough like a bodybuilder that either the girl had been spending a good chunk of her free time exercising or there was some genetic engineering shenanigans going on.

Personally Liandra was leaning towards the second, because the natural crimson red hair was a bit of a giveaway that something odd had gone on in her body's genetic ancestry.

“I feel like I should be making a reference about finally being a ginger.” She chuckled at her own bad joke.

After her rather ravenous consumption of some unfortunately bland stew Marcus had deigned to escort her to her current body's room so she could clean up and get some rest in a proper bed. Neither of which she had been particularly against given she still felt like someone who had recently misplaced a significant portion of the blood in their body.

More importantly though, it gave her some time to be alone with her thoughts, or at least as alone as she could be given the small size of the room and the very large man named Vorn standing guard just outside her door.

Stepping away from the antique looking standing mirror, she moved over to the gothic vanity and reached towards a drawer only to hesitate. 

The thought of going through an unknown woman's personal things like she had been about to felt distinctly wrong on several levels. But a little voice in the back of her head was saying that choice to do so could very well be the difference between life and death.

And Liandra very much didn't want to die, so she pushed through the feeling and began opening the drawers.

As if to punish her for making that decision, the first drawer turned out to be full of bland grey panties and sports-bras folded so crisply that she could almost have believed they had come straight out of their packaging.

“I guess this means you weren't a member of the Order Famulous.”

When Liandra had been nothing more than a character on paper she had been Order Militant. However she had also been part of the Order of the Glowing Chalice,  not the Order of the Adamant Spear. So Liandra wasn't going to assume that the backstory she had put together for the character was particularly accurate.

Grabbing one of each for her own use she tossed the garments over her shoulder onto the spartan bed before shutting the drawer and moving on to the second of the vanity's four.

Twin stacks of robes similar in appearance to the one Liandra had woken up in were the only contents of this drawer, and she let out an annoyed sign before continuing down to the next.

“Well this is something at least.” She muttered.

The third drawer contained only a single item, a carefully folded black bodysuit that looked like it would be extraordinarily form fitting if she were to actually put it on. Given Liandra had been a Sister of Battle, there were only two things it could possibly be. Either an armored bodyglove, or the fiber-muscle undersuit needed for someone to utilize light power-armor. 

Carefully pulling it out of the drawer, Liandra held the almost wetsuit-like outfit up to her body for several seconds before flipping it around to try and figure out just how someone would actually put the thing on.

It took a bit of searching, but she eventually located a thin slit on the back that separated when she ran a finger over it. Looking over the interior of the suit, a full body cringe hit when her eyes reached several small tubules protruding from a plate-like structure at roughly crotch level.

“Allright…” She muttered as she carefully folded the bodysuit back up and returned it to the drawer. “That’s going firmly into the only if desperate pile…”

Continuing on to the final drawer, Liandra found herself blinking dumbly at the incongruity that presented itself. “Who keeps a chainsword in their vanity?”

The chainsword, because Liandra would never be able to mistake the thick rectangular weapon for anything else, was resting on a folded red cloth as if the owner had considered the weapon an object of religious significance. Which, given everything she knew about the Imperium's faith, might not have been that far from the truth. At least, if that weapon was what Liandra suspected it might be.

As a Sister of Battle, Liandra's starting equipment hadn't been particularly impressive. Outside of two items. Her suit of Best quality Sororitas power armor, and her Best quality chainsword.

If the weapon in front of Liandra now was, as she suspected, the real life equivalent of that best quality chainsword. That meant she was currently staring at something that was probably worth more than every guardsmen in the convent put together.

“Why couldn't you have been a best quality plasma pistol.” 

At least that she could have used, because she would probably cut off her own arm by accident if she actually tried to use that chainsword as a weapon.

Letting out a sigh she shut the drawer, straightening up, she glanced over the rest of the sparsely furnished room before flopping down onto the bed.

Her head hit the pillow, only to bounce off something hard just barely concealed by the underfluffed cushion. 

“What the hell!?”

She reached over her head, digging underneath the pillow for several seconds only to pull out a thick leather bound diary that looked like it had come straight out of a renaissance faire.

“I feel like I should be annoyed about this on principle… But on the other hand, there's a very real chance that her keeping a diary under her pillow just saved my life.”

Using an arm to push herself up into.a within g position, she opened the book to its first page and frowned.

In the lore the Imperium of Man had two primary languages. High Gothic, which was supposedly English with a few other languages thrown in for flavor. And Low Gothic, which was supposedly English with entirely different languages thrown in for flavor. 

Those ‘supposedlys’ were there because Games Workshop, while listing those specific about the languages in their lore, always portrayed High Gothic as Latin, and Low Gothic as pure English.

Which felt important because the first page of Liandra's diary looked to be written in a stylized but legible version of English that she could actually understand.

“Fuck it.” She mumbled as she let the diary drop back to the bed. “I'm too tired to existentially question my existence right now.”

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Standing in the small confessional Casa had pulled him into, Vesker stared at the medic trying to process everything she had just told him.

“Cursed?” He finally repeated just to be sure he had heard her right.

“That's what Marcus seems to think.” Cass confirmed with a nod.

Vesker frowned, because that was a loaded statement if he'd ever heard one. “And what do you think?”

Cass shrugged. “I think the woman had her heart run through and most of her blood leak out of her body. So while I suppose it could be a curse. It could also be that whatever miracle kept her alive wasn't able to fix all the aftereffects from the lack of oxygen reaching her brain.”

“Well, suppose it don't matter either way.” Vesker sighed. “Gone's gone, and the reasonin won't change that. But I do agree with the preacher on one thing, we can't be tellin the rest of the men the good sister can barely remember her own name.”

Moral had stabilized a bit in the past hour as word of the sister waking up had filtered its way through the rumor mill. But that could turn south just as easily if any of them got it into their heads that she was cursed.

“Guess the world really is coming to an end.” Cass laughed. 

“Don't you even joke about that.” Vesker scowled, making a quick Aquila in hopes of warding off whatever bad luck the medic had just summoned.

“Oh come on, nothing's going to–”

A fist knocked on the solid wooden door of the confessional before Cass could finish before the somewhat muffled sound of Quinn’s voice penetrated. “Vesk!? You two'er gonna wanna finish and get yer pants back on. Noel sighted what looks like refugees comin up the path.”

Vesker’s scowl depended, and he turned a glare on the now cringing Cass. “Got it! On our way!”

“Krak…” Cass groaned, dragging a hand through her short hair. “Now everyone’s gonna think we’re sleeping together.”

“If that's the least of our worries today I'd say the Emperor blessed us.” And Vesker heavily doubted it would be.

He pushed open the door. “Now come on, either yer gonna have a bunch of new patients soon or yer gonna need to put that run and hide plan to the test.”

Making their way up the stairs to the main parapet, a fancy rockcrete structure facing away from the small mountain the convent was built into, Vesker knelt down next to the sniper perch Noel had set up.

“So what we got?”

Noel Heldger was a small woman, barely topping five foot with short dark hair that only just touched the bottom of her ears and dark brown eyes that were currently staring down the scope of the long-las she usually carried around on her back.

“Thirty seven people on foot about three thousand meters out.” Noel reported in a clipped tone. “Sixteen men, eleven women, all armed with civie weapons. I'd say they were farming families from the outskirts, but something about the look of em’s making me suspicious.”

Grabbing the beat up pair of magnoculers from his belt, Vesker held the device up to his eyes and panned it in the general direction Noel's long-laz had been pointing.

It didn't take more than a few seconds to find the approaching group with the morning sun now peaking over the nearby cliffs. And he could immediately see what the sniper had meant, because something just felt odd about the approaching group.

Nonia Buenos IV was a small backwater of a world, prior to the attack it had barely held enough people to meet the fifteen million minimum needed for the Administratum to even consider it a civilized planet. The capital city of Kron, which the Order of the Adamant Spear’s convent was on the outskirts of, only had a population of a little under nine hundred thousand with a couple thousand more living in scattered locations around its outskirts.

The attack that had hit them had been an odd thing, their regiment had been split up across the planet to handle a series of protests against the Governor's crackdown on the Watchful Eye labor union when the cogheads at the orbital monitoring station had sent down an emergency vox signal about a frigate on approach to the planet.

They'd had less than seven hours to regroup, something that had been surprisingly difficult as the Watchful Eye had seized on the chance to try and take out as many of Nonia's guard regiment as they could. In the end less than half of the regiment had been able to make it back to the capital before landers had begun descending through the clouds. 

Air defenses had been almost non-existent in the city, with only the single emplacements protecting the Guard’s regimental headquarters and the Governor's fort. Unfortunately the former had quickly been silenced by an orbital strike, while the latter had only really been focused on keeping the airspace around the fort clear.

Once the landers had hit ground things had devolved pretty quickly as the monstrous forces onboard had spread out and began to take the city. The regiment had done their best, but even at full strength they would have been hard pressed to fight off the enemy forces. 

Except in hindsight a lot of things weren't making sense. The squiggles that made things go funny had first started showing up behind their lines. And none of the landers had set down anywhere near the sisters convent. Yet everything they had found while searching the convent suggested it had likely been the first place to be attacked.

“Why are they walkin?” He mused as the thought struck him.

It didn't make sense, the path up here was more than wide enough for the standard groundcar to make it. And while he could see a Guard squad being worried about spooking whoever might be hold up in the convent, that wasn't the type of thing civilians usually worried about.

“Maybe something knocked out their vehicles?” Cass theorized.

Vesker cocked his head in acknowledgement. “Maybe. But I got a little voice in the back of my head whispering that something about this ain't right. And given the circumstances, I'm of a mind to trust it.”

He secured the magnoculers back on this belt before straightening up. “Keep a bead on em, Noel. I'll send Bilker up to keep ya company while we prep, so you see anything of note as they get closer have him run down a message.”

It still made him cringe to waste a man on running messages like that given how few hands they had left. But they'd had to ditch their vox-casters early in the fight when the devices had started picking up things that made people claw their own ears off. Which left them with the choice between using runners or nothing.

“Got it, Vesk.” Noel confirmed. “If they start growing horns or something you'll be the third to know.”

“Kark that.” Vesker growled, glaring down at the woman with indignation clear on his face. “They start growing horns, you shoot em.”

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Vesker felt like an idiot standing out in front of the convent's solidly reinforced doors like he was, even with the number of not so hidden weapons currently covering him from the gunslits in the convent's outer walls. However it was either this or telling his men to open fire on the approaching group without so much as a howdoyoudo. And as much as that little voice of caution in the back of his head was saying that was exactly what he should do, the thought of potentially gunning down scared innocents just didn't sit right with him.

“Gonna need to ask you to stop right there!” He yelled out as the approaching group reached the point where the stone road up the hill began to widen into the small square that led up to the convents doors.

Almost amazingly the group did stop, the handful of people in the lead exchanging cautious glances before a burly man with a rifle slung over his shoulders took a half step forward and raised a hand to his face. “We're just here for the sisters, guardsmen! Tell em to hand themselves over and we won't trouble the rest of you none.”

Pretending to consider the man's request, Vesker's mind raced as he tried to work out just what it was that might have led to what was looking very much like an angry mob showing up at the convent's door.

“Sorry to say the sisters aren't exactly among the livin at the moment!” He yelled back, deciding to err on the side of caution. “There some reason you want em!?”

Two thirds of the angry looks morphed into ones of general confusion, and several of the men and women began whispering amongst themselves.

“You could say that.” The big man gave a slow nod. “But iffen the sisters are dead, half of that reasons gone. But that just leaves you to tell us where the kids are?”

“Kids?” Vesker repeated, the honest confusion he was feeling at what the man's statement suggested all but dripping off his voice.

“Yeah.” The man nodded firmly. “The kids the sisters took yesterday. And iffen you don't return them, Guardsmen or not, we're gonna have problems.”

Vesker blinked several times as his confusion deepened. “Now that don’t make no sense, cause the sisters have been dead for at least a couple days.”

And the one that wasn't hadn't been in any condition to do much of anything let alone go around grabbing kids.

The large man scowled and moved to stop forward only to catch himself. “We know what we seen, Guardsmen. Couple of the same acolytes as when they did their preaching rounds last year. And it's real hard to mistake that armor they stomp around in for anything else.”

That made Vesker frown again, their investigation of the convent had confirmed that there had only been twelve full sisters stationed there. On top of their survivor, they'd found the remains of all eleven. What they hadn't found was any of the bodies of the support staff that followed the sisters around on their more normal duties.

Add that information to what the man had just told him, and it painted a rather dangerous picture that Vesker really hoped wasn't right.

“I'm gonna take a bit of a guess here and say you didn't see any of the sisters without their helmets?”

“No.” The man confirmed. “But how's that any different from normal?”

Vesker opened his mouth to explain only to pause as the realization hit that the man had a point. “Allright, fair. But consider, you all saw the sisters yesterday, while we all know the sisters were dead yesterday, so that suggests it probably weren't the sisters you saw stomping around in that armor.”

“Or…” The man drew out the word. “Maybe yer covering for the sisters.”

“Coverin for what!?” Vesker yelled in exasperation. “Assumin they weren't already dead, you'd all be about as threatening to the sisters as an angry Molbbit.”

And the small fluffy burrowing creatures were pretty much the least threatening animals on Nonia.

For a moment it looked liked his words were getting through to the group, then someone in the back of the group yelled out. “Bet he's just scared cause he's all alone!”

That line of thinking was the exact opposite of what Vesker needed right now. “I ain't alone ya dunbass! Got a dozen las’s trained on you from the walls. But if ya ain't noticed, we're in the middle of a karking invasion. So I ain't gonna risk some of the few men I got left on the chance one of you boneheads gets an itchy trigger finger and decides to start firing off shots.”

He watched various eyes zero in on the rifle barrels sticking out through the firing slits in the walls before letting out an annoyed huff and continuing. “Now, I get that yer right upset about yer missin kids. And if things were normal I'd be more than happy to send a couple squads to help you hunt down whatever bastards took em. But things ain't normal, so I'm gonna have to ask you all to–”

“Vesk!” Noel suddenly yelled down in alarm. “Got two Taurus and an Overlander five minutes out! Invader colors!”

“Emperor's balls.” Vesker cursed, making a split second decision that he really hoped he wouldn't regret.

“Open the doors!” He yelled out before focusing on the confused group of armed civilians in front of him.

“Ya got four minutes to get inside before I order em shut!” 

With those words he turned and bolted through the far too slowly opening doors.

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“She comes.”

The sound of an explosion cut through the dream Liandra was having, and she was out of bed and dashing towards the door with something heavy clutched in her right hand before her conscious mind could even finish waking up.

Her thoughts finally caught up to her and she stopped dead just as her left hand was about to pull open the door handle.

She blinked, and then blinked again before looking down at the spear, that had absolutely not been anywhere in the room before she'd fallen asleep, which was now clutched in her right hand.

“Oh fuck no.” 

She practically threw the weapon across the room to clatter against the far wall, knowing with absolute certainty that no good came of randomly appearing melee weapons.

“Get thee back daemon weapon!”

Several seconds passed as Liandra waited for something to happen, but the silvery metal spear seemed content to not respond to her rebuke and continued to lay where it had been thrown.

A sudden series of loud cracks reminded her that she was facing other more immediate problems than an evil weapon plotting her corruption. So she yanked open the door to ask the large guard just what was going on only for a feeling of impending doom to settle in the pit of her stomach at the complete lack of anyone standing outside.

“I need a weapon…” She muttered, turning back to her room only for her eyes to flick from the spear to the bottom drawer of her vanity where she knew a chainsword was resting. “One that won’t corrupt me or end with me accidentally cutting off one of my own limbs.”

It took only a moment of looking to confirm that the only things weaponable in the room, other than the two actual weapons, would involve tearing fixtures off walls or ripping apart furniture. 

More sharp cracks echoed out through the stone halls followed seconds later by a deep thump that rattled the walls.

Indecision wracked her mind as two immediate options stood out, try and run away from what was obviously a battle of some kind. Most likely between the Guard and whatever Chaos cultists were running around the planet. Or run towards the battle and pray to the Emperor that there was something she could do to help.

“Fuck it,” She muttered as she began running towards the sound of fighting. “At least this way I'll die quick.”

Allowing the sounds of fighting to guide her, she sprinted down the stone halls and quickly found her way to a crowded chapel full of armed oddly dressed men and women nervously milling about.

“It's another priest!” A stout dark haired woman exclaimed, making Liandra blink and look around for who she might have been talking about before the realization hit that she hadn't bothered changing out of the robes from earlier.

“Looks more like one of the sisters.” A large man growled, only for a somewhat similar looking woman to smack him lightly on the back of the head.

“Look at her hair, Jarn. Everyone knows the Sister's is all white.”

If this had been an anime instead of real life, Liandra was pretty sure she would have sweatdropped. 

“What's going on?” She asked instead.

“We're hoping you could tell us.” The large man asked, shooting an annoyed look at the similar looking woman in a way that just screamed some sort of relation. “The Guardsmen told us to huddle down in here and shoot anyone that came through that big door that wasn't one of them.”

Following the man's gaze to the far side of the chapel where a pair of large metal doors that looked like they'd recently been on the wrong end of a space marines boot, were barely hanging on to their hinges. Liandra sent a mental curse towards whichever Chaos god was responsible for the bullshit circumstances she was currently stuck in.

“You should be setting up to actually do that then” She snapped at the crowd in her best authoritative voice.

“What?” Jarn asked, eyeing her in confusion.

Liandra rolled her eyes, settling into the part of domineering battle priest with surprising ease. “You're standing around in the middle of the room gawking like you have no idea that enemies of the Imperium are literally at our doors.”

She pointed at the heavy pews. “Flip those over for use as defensive barricades, those of you with rifles should be!!”

The grinding sound of stone on stone interrupted Liandra before she could finish, the noise drawing the eyes of everyone in the room to the altar as the entire structure receded backwards before sliding into a depression in the wall and revealing a woman in Sororitas power armor standing in the now unveiled secret passage.

“I told you, there was no way those idiot guardsmen found the secret pass…”

The woman's smug sounding voice trailed off as she seemed to notice the room was anything but empty, which was when they large man yelled out.

“It's her!”

Liandra hit the ground as everyone began firing, bullets from the chapel groups projectile weapons ricocheted wildly off the armored woman as intermittent red beams of light fired out from behind the armored woman to cut down any they hit.

“Try and leave some of them alive!” The armored woman laughed a she stopped forward and pulled a twisted looking sword from her back. “The dark gods will appreciate the extra suffering!”

Liandra crawled towards the doorway she’d come in through, desperately ignoring the screams of the dying and desperately thanking the Emperor for every second that passed with a stay shot punching through her barely protected body.

She had nearly made it when an armored boot slammed into her side hard enough to flip her body over entirely.

“You!” The armored woman growled out as her helmeted form stated down at Liandra all but radiating a feeling of absolute hatred. “I impaled you myself! Saw you bleed out during the ritual! How did you survive!?”

A choking laugh found its way past Liandra's lips as the sheer absurdity of everything seemed to hit her all at once. That didn't seem to be what the armored woman wanted to hear however as another kick hit her ribs, the force sending her flopping into the hall she had moments ago been crawling towards.

“How do you think I survived?” Liandra wheezed out as she struggled to catch her breath. “The Emperor gave you the middle finger.”

Even though it felt good that was apparently the wrong thing to say as the woman ripped off her helmet before stalking forward with murder in her black veined eyes.

“For years I watched you strut around, the world bending over backwards for you just because you were an Emperor blessed child. But where was that blessing when I led my master in to wipe out every sister here? Where was it when we used the relic spear you spent your lives trying to protect as one of the keystones that will soon plunge this world into the realm of the dark gods?”

Her lips stretched into a rictus grin as she raised the twisted sword. “And where is your false Emperor now?”

The weapon descended towards Liandra, and her hands scrambled on the floor for anything she could use to try and block the blade.

Her right hand fell on a mental pole of some kind, and she grabbed it desperately trying to interpose the object between herself and her attacker.

Something flashed gold, and she stared dumbly at the field of golden energy holding  the twisted blade mere millimeters away from her face. A small whimper escaped her lips, her hand still clutching the unknown metal object in death grip.

“Retribution.”

“Ho–” The armored woman let out a wet cough that sent droplets of blood spattering across Liandra's face, and the faux sister's head tilted down in the same moment as the redhead's own stare at the silvery spear that was somehow impaling the armored woman through her chestplate.

“But he promised me…” She collapsed forward onto Liandra before she could finish, the awkward angle of it ripping the silver spear out of the redhead's grip.

Desperately scrambling to get out from under the body, Liandra finally managed to escape, pushing herself up against the wall and clutching her knees to her chest as a series of shakes ran through her body that slowly morphed into an almost manic giggle as the reality of what just happened finally caught up with her.

She stayed like that for several minutes, the sound of gun and las fire from the chapel slowly petering out before a mirror on a stick poked around the corner of the doorway.

“Clear!” A man in the recognizable uniform of a guardsman announced as he made his way around the corner. “Looks like the sister got her.”

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Author's Notes: Chaos cults and traitors abound, but that's usually how these sorts of things go. On the up side, Spear-Chan apparently likes her enough to break physics, so that's something.

I honestly didn't expect to get another chapter of this done so soon. Not the least because the general chapter length I decided on for this story was 3-4k+ before I would consider it “done”.