WH 40k: Transcendence

Throw your power stones this way, doctor says I'm dangerously low on validation. In return I would throw a bonus chapter your way.

---

It had been one hundred and ninety eight years since they left Craftworld Kaelor. Since they stepped into the Warp. Since they boarded this rusted, chanting, half dead coffin of a ship.

Cassian doesn't feel that time in his bones, not the way humans do. The Warp twists that. To him, it hasn't felt like two centuries. Maybe a decade. Maybe less. The Warp doesn't pass time. It eats it.

The St. Heliosa's Lament is an old ship. Older than it has any right to be. When it launched, it was already creaking. Built back in the Age of Apostasy, some whispered. When blood ran in rivers across Terra and the Ecclesiarchy burned whole continents clean. Nobody knows how many times it's entered the Warp. No one counts anymore. It's just one more relic the Imperium refuses to let die.

It's a pilgrimage vessel. That's the polite term. In practice, it's a slow, drifting mass of metal, filled to bursting with the faithful. When they launched, there were millions aboard. Not soldiers. Not tech adepts. Pilgrims. Families. Penitents. Pariahs. Men and women trying to wash away generations of sin by crawling across the stars to kneel on a world they've never seen. A holy rock that might not even be there anymore.

But they believe.

That's the fuel that keeps the Lament moving. Not plasma. Not reactors. Just belief.

The ship is its own world. A world without sun or seasons, locked into the dark. There's no up or down just deck after deck of shrines and vox hymns that never stop. The air smells like burning oil and melted wax. Like old blood, too. Faint, but always there. If you breathe deep enough, you taste metal. Maybe rust. Maybe something else.

They call it a shrine-barge, but that's too clean a word. The Lament is part cathedral, part asylum, part graveyard. It groans when it moves, like it doesn't want to. Its walls sweat moisture, leak incense, and the lights flicker like they're about to give up. The corridors are narrow. The ceilings are low. You walk shoulder to shoulder, even when you're alone.

Most aboard were born here. The ones who boarded when it launched, they're gone. Long buried in the ossuary decks. Cremated and stored in glass bones beneath the altars. Their children grew up under flickering lumen strips, baptized in recycled water, taught to fear the dark outside the Gellar field. Their grandchildren are the ones tending the shrines now.

Nobody talks about there home planet. Or the stars. Nobody here has ever seen a sky.

That's the truth of Warp travel. You don't go from point A to B. You vanish into something that isn't space, and then you hope you come out again. It takes a year, maybe. Or two hundred. There's no map. No clocks. Only faith. You enter the Warp, and you pray that something bigger than you spits you out the other side before you go mad or worse.

Because the Warp watches. It Always does.

That's why the codes are strict. Not military strict. Religious strict. There are rules for everything when to sleep, how to bathe, what to eat, how long you're allowed to laugh. There's no touching without clerical permission. Warp entities especially the laughing ones they notice joy. They notice intimacy. And once they notice you, they don't forget.

The ship's psalms run on a loop. Always the same dozen. Chanted in High Gothic, echoed through vox casters with just enough static to make it sound like it's coming from underwater. Or somewhere deeper. There are processions daily priests in flak mesh and bone cloaks, swinging incense burners the size of helmets. Children walk behind them, holding relics wrapped in black cloth. The old weep. The young chant. Everyone watches their feet.

The Gellar field is barely holding. It rattles when the Warp pressure gets bad when the ship passes close to something with eyes. Sometimes the walls bleed. Sometimes people disappear and no one screams. They just bow their heads and assume the Emperor took them.

There's a room near the mid-spine of the ship. They don't call it a medicae ward. They call it The Listening Cell. People who dream too loudly get sent there. Not punished but isolated. Sedated. Kept cold so the things on the other side can't find them. They say the Warp listens for dreams. That's why most people here don't sleep too long.

Cassian himself hasn't slept more than three hours a day in this ship.

They don't belong here. They're not part of this faith, this system, this vessel. But they are trapped in it just like everyone else. When they took passage, they thought it would be a few years of slow transit. But the Warp decided otherwise.

And the Lament doesn't stop.

It drifts. Through unreality. Through pressure and wrongness. Toward the Gothic Sector.

Toward whatever comes next.

They are still alive.

But the Warp is watching.

And the laughter in the vents is starting to get louder.

---

There were rules aboard the St. Heliosa's Lament. Some made sense in that twisted, too old logic the Imperium swore by. Others were just plain threats dressed up as liturgy.

No singing outside of sanctioned hymnals. If the ship hears unsanctioned melodies, it sings back and it never uses your voice.

Never look through the portholes. Not unless you've already accepted you might need to gouge out your own eyes afterward. The stars don't stay in place. Sometimes they blink.

If someone calls your name using your mother's voice don't answer. No matter how much you want to. Your mother isn't here. And what's using her voice doesn't want to tuck you in.

Don't laugh in the lower decks. Something laughs back.

And the elevator? Never press the unmarked button that flickers in and out between Deck 3 and Deck 4. Some say it leads to the ossuary vaults. Others say it leads back. No one's agreed on where "back" is.

Faevelith once joked about pressing it. Cassian just looked at her for a long, long moment. Farron made a note in binaric, which Cassian swears translated to "DO NOT ENCOURAGE THE ELF."

---

Cassian was 233 years old now. Which, all things considered, made him the teenager of their trio.

He wasn't bored, exactly. Boredom was a word used by people who hadn't spent six years arguing theology with Ecclesiarchy data-scrolls just to prove the Litany of Restoration contained a misinterpreted double negative. He'd been laughed out of a shrine for that one then quietly handed a backup copy by a curious confessor who wanted to know more.

He read. He practiced blade-forms in the private cargo spaces those areas conveniently "under maintenance." He taught himself multiple dialects of High Gothic just to prove the preachers wrong in more languages. He'd given up sleep cycles for a month to master a reconstructed eldar puzzle-box. Even Faevelith was annoyed at how smug he'd been about it.

He and Faevelith were still together. In that understated, matter-of-fact way shared by people who've been lovers so long the idea of separation is more absurd than staying. They didn't speak about it often. They didn't need to. She'd once said, "You have the soul of a Farseer, but the self control of a Mon Keigh." He still wasn't sure if it was a compliment.

---

Faevelith, for her part, didn't fall into the same decay of tedium as the younger humans around her. She'd lived through craftworld exiles, dead siblings, and wars that never made it to human record. She wasn't dulled by repetition, she was stabilized by it.

Her routine was meditative. Slow and deliberate. She painted. She studied the warp through her own esoteric disciplines. Some days she sat in silence for hours, tuning wraithbone with a touch and a hum too high for human ears. She had made her own chambers into a cloister of soft glow crystals and impossible angles. It calmed her. It unsettled visiting pilgrims. She considered that balance ideal.

Sometimes, though, she laughed. Real, sharp laughter often at Cassian's expense. He once tripped over a servo-skull mid-lecture and landed in a relic box. The sigh she let out had been centuries old.

---

 Farron, was closer to 900 years old, now. Didn't experience boredom as humans do. 

He spent most of his time with the ship's forgotten systems. The things the tech priests had long ago learned to ignore because they prayed instead. Farron didn't pray. He calibrated. The incense bothered him. The chanting got into his gears. He'd rerouted entire vox grids to mute certain hymnals in his chambers. No one had figured out how yet.

He communicated mostly in binaric. Not because he couldn't speak Low Gothic he just didn't want to. He once told Cassian that using the local dialect was like "installing a Noosphere uplink with meat paste."

Still, the three of them made the situation work. Somehow.

Farron managed their access. Faevelith kept the pilgrims from prying. Cassian handled the red tape with the kind of calm, world-weary tone that made bureaucrats sweat. When the ship ran short on prayer oil or incense, they had their own stores filtered, hoarded, rationed.

They weren't rebels.

They were simply not stupid.

---

Then there was the demon.

Still with them. Still bound. Still sedated. The vat-body floated in the reinforced, multi-warded chamber beneath their quarters. A homunculus of false flesh and anchor-sigils, pierced with psi-dampeners and bound in scriptwork too ancient for easy translation.

It didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't even twitch.

It did hum. Softly. Sometimes, at night. A tune that didn't match any human scale. Faevelith once compared it to the mourning songs of the Alaitoc dead. Farron said it resembled scrapcode converted into music. Cassian just said it gave him migraines.

But it was stable.

It had to be. Too much effort had gone into binding it. Too many calculations. Too many quiet sacrifices, sealed doors. To let it slip now would be... catastrophic.

So they checked the runes daily. Adjusted the stasis feeds. Farron ran diagnostics on the psychic bleed. Faevelith tuned the wards when they grew misaligned. Cassian handled the failsafes.

None of them spoke of what it really was. Not anymore. That subject had too many teeth.

---

And so they drifted. Two centuries now aboard St. Heliosa's Lament. Lightyears away from Craftworld Kaelor.

Still heading toward the Gothic Sector. Still waiting. Still pretending that the ship's bones didn't whisper old names when the lights flickered.

It was a good life. By Imperium standards.

No one had died that week. That counted for something.

—-

Cassian Vail — Status Page

Age: 233

Race: Human (Imperium)

Occupation: Survivor of Hive Desoleum

Stats:

Physique: C (54/80)

Dexterity: C (38/80)

Intelligence: C (49/80)

Wisdom: C (25/80)

Affinity: C (22/80)

Perks:

Bodily- Kinesthetic Awareness

Advanced interpersonal discernment

 Machine spirit obedience

 Controlled Assimilation and Adaptation 

Chaos Resistance (from being possessed by daemon)

Skills:

Lexicon Proficiency — Level Max

 Astartes weapon training – Level 89

Physical Conditioning — Level Max

 Doctrine of flesh engine – Level 94

 Marksman Creed – Level 78

Basic Mental Discipline — Level Max

Basic Telepathy — Level Max

 Arch Enginuity – Level 75

Warp Empowerment – Level Max

Electrokenisis – Level 58

Pryokinesis – Level 54

Technopathy- Level 63

Biokinesis- Level 42

Precognition- Level 3

—-

Word Count: 1900

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