One-Shot

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| One-Shot |

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Carrack Class Transport Ship | The Purge

The void is endless.

A vast and pitiless expanse, older than the first star and colder than the last corpse. It was not silent, for the Imperium had long since defiled the stars with its churning war machines, yet it remained uncaring. The Imperium's might, its faith, its endless war... none of it mattered to the abyss beyond the immaterium. 

It had been there before the first prayers were uttered before the first world was burned in HIS name, and it would remain long after the Imperium's bones had turned to dust. 

And yet, despite the vastness of the void, it was never truly empty.

Drifting between the dead light of a thousand distant suns, a vessel clawed its way through the abyss. This was no grand battleship, no sainted relic of the Adeptus Astartes or the august might of the Imperial Navy. It was a transport, a mere cog in the vast, grinding machinery of the Imperium. But this cog carried the lifeblood of the Emperor's domain... his warriors, his weapons, his faith, and the fragile hope of mankind to let the war machine continue its unbroken march.

The Purge was a cage. It was not a home, nor a fortress, nor a ship of legend. It was a prison with its doors locked from the inside, a barrier against the horrors that lurked just beyond the veil of reality. Its hull was thick, but not thick enough. Its weapons were many, but not nearly enough. Its Gellar Field shuddered and flickered, an ember against the ever-hungering tide of the warp. Every second it held was a miracle, every moment it endured was a defiance of the natural order... because of a simple truth: mankind was not meant to travel the stars.

The bridge, such as it was, had no grandeur. The spire that loomed above it was the only true concession to luxury, a high gothic shrine built not for the crew but for their soul. Its stained glass mural, grand and terrible, loomed over all who entered... depicting the Holy Emperor in his eternal agony, golden and unbroken, his ruinous majesty stretching across the vault of the ceiling. The light from flickering lumen strips cast deep shadows across the bridge, twisting HIS image into something that seemed to shift and writhe when one wasn't looking.

The crew did not question it. 

To question would invite doubt, and doubt invited something far worse. 

The ship's defences were paltry at best. A mere fifty-two heavy-point-defense cannons, better suited for swatting down torpedoes than repelling warp horrors. Sixty-eight sanctified light-defence turrets, their barrels engraved with prayers that the crew muttered under their breath before every battle. Thirty-two torpedo tubes, each warhead bearing the mark of the Ecclesiarchy, their payloads of blessed destruction carrying a faint hope that they might strike true. It was armed transport, certainly, but against the horrors of the void, it was nothing more than a bloated animal bristling with broken fangs.

And yet, it pressed onward. Because it had no choice. Because the Imperium had no choice. 

There were tens of thousands of ships like the Purge. Freighters, supply hauliers, regimental transports... all carrying the weight of an empire that was perpetually on the brink of annihilation. They were the unseen arteries of the Imperium, bleeding men and material across the stars, feeding the never-ending wars that stretched from the Core Worlds to the forgotten fringes of the Segmentum Obscurus. Their crews were not warriors, not champions, not even true believers. They were just mere men and women who knew their duty and feared what lay beyond the hull more than they feared death.

To serve on a ship like the Purge was to understand despair. It was to know that, should the Gellar Field fail, your soul would be ripped from your body and devoured. That should the ship be boarded, you would be sacrificed upon an altar of brass or drowned in the plagues of a rotting god. That should the engines falter, you would drift into the abyss until your rations ran out, until your screams fell silent until nothing remained for you but another forgotten hulk in the graveyard of the void. 

Yet still, the Purge endured. Because endurance was all that was left. Because the Emperor's light, no matter how distant, no matter how dim, still burned. And because, in the end, there was no other option.

Not in this galaxy. Not in this lifetime. Not ever.

An aged man stood before the looming stained-glass depiction of the Emperor, his face lined with deep creases that told of years spent peering into the abyss in HIS name. He was not old... not truly, not in any way that mattered. It was not the burden of age that had stolen the vitality from his flesh, but the weight of duty, the unrelenting strain of gazing into the madness beyond realspace and emerging... scarred and unwhole. His drooping eyes gleamed with a strange, unsettling light, their milky depths carried the stain of sights no mere mortal was ever meant to witness. Yet it was those weary, war-torn eyes that marked him for what he was. 

Not, it was the slit upon his forehead... a mutation, the third eye, sealed for now but no less terrible for its dormancy.

A Navigator.

Flanking him were two Voidsmen, their grips tight upon their las-carbines, fingers poised just moments away from action. Their posture was rigid, their eyes locked forward, yet they stole fleeting glances at the Navigator, waiting and watching.

They were not there to protect him but to end him, should the abyss eventually take root in his soul. The instant he faltered... if he faltered... they would not hesitate. The void had a way of creeping into those who stared too long into its depths, and the Gellar Field was a fickle thing, strong but not infallible.

The Voidsmen had witnessed men of unwavering determination succumb in the past. They swore it as an oath... they would not hesitate.

Then, the stillness of the bridge was disturbed. The automatic blast doors at the far end of the bridge hissed open, releasing a cloud of pressurized steam as it split apart. A deep, resonating thud rang through the bridge, followed by the muffled rhythm of boots upon the cold, metal floor. The sound was distant at first, like the heartbeat of something vast and unseen, but it grew louder, the sharp clack of combat studs against ceramite plating reverberated through the gloom.

She emerged from the darkness.

She was no daemon of Khorne, no screeching avatar of mindless slaughter. Nor was she the putrid, plague-ridden spawn of Nurgle, sloughing flesh and spreading her foul contagion. She did not bear the sickly beauty of Slaanesh's chosen, whose very presence could unmake the minds of lesser men. No, this was something far more dangerous. For it she was a servant of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, no mortal would know until it was far, far too late. If her hands were already guiding the pieces on some unseen board, if her voice had already whispered the seeds of division into the hearts of the faithful, there would be no signs. No warnings. Only the slow, inevitable realization as the knife was driven home.

And yet, the Voidsmen did not waver.

For she was Inquisitor Sabrina Sevaisarn Van der Horth.

The woman strode forward, her presence of commanding authority, though she did not acknowledge the weight of the gazes upon her. She moved with the deliberate ease of one accustomed to authority, her posture betraying no fear or hesitation.

Beneath the shifting glow of the lumen-stips, she was clad in a coat of dark storm-grey and beneath it, a silver-chased breastplate that bore the sigil of the Inquisition, its burnished surface marred by the telltale scars of battle. It was no ornament, no ceremonial relic... it was armour, worn and bloodied, meant for the grim work of the Ordo Xenos. Across her chest, ornate medals and purity seals proclaimed her deeds, but to those who understood, they were merely trinkets of the past.

Victories counted for little when the war never ended.

At her hip rested an abomination of metal, a Gram-Pattern Service Bolt Pistol, its grip worn smooth from years of use. A weapon of finality, of judgment, of the Imperium's mercy... the kind given with a single bolt to the skull. A weapon of execution. An Inquisitor's weapon. Strapped to her waist, a power sword in a blackened scabbard, a tool of purgation waiting to be drawn. 

Her face was a testament. A testament to war, to duty, to the price of service in an Imperium that demanded everything and gave nothing in return. Pale, sharp, and ruined beyond all recognition, it was not the face of a woman but of a spectre... a thing carved by fire and blade, stripped of all doubts, all mercy. 

Her left eye was a cold, gunmetal grey, as unyielding as the iron walls of the ship, a gaze that could freeze water. But it was the rest of her face that truly marked her. Where flesh should have been, there was nothing. No skin beneath her nose, no lips to soften the stark contrast between raw, bloodless tissue and the exposed gleam of white teeth. Whether it had been burned away in some battle or flayed from her skull by cruel hands, none could say. What remained was a death mark, a frozen rictus of bare teeth, locked forever in a skeletal grin.

Her throat was no longer human either. A mechanical vox-caster had been grafted into the ruined meat of her neck, nestled in the torn remains of sinew and scar tissue. When she spoke, it was not the voice of a woman, but a voice cold, metallic, and stripped of all warmth. She did not hide it. She did not wear a mask to soften the horror. There was no shame in her wounds, no attempt to cover the ruin of what had once been a human face. This was what it meant to serve. To be broken, reshaped, and sent back into the fire. 

This was what it meant to be an Inquisitor.

If the presence of such a face disturbed the Voidsmen, they did not show it. They were disciplined, well-trained, and bore the practised, unreadable expressions of those who had long since learned to smother the flames of fear. But the way their fingers twitched against their rifles, the slight tightening of their shoulders as the Inquisitor passed, belied the truth.

She approached the Navigator, her voice cutting through the silence like a scalpel through flesh.

"Navigator Malachi."

Her voice was distorted, cold, mechanical rasp that somehow carried the weight of authority sharpened by decades of unyielding service. She turned her gaze to the Voidsmen standing beside the ancient psyker, her words as much an order as they were a dismissal.

"Voidsmen, you are relieved. Make yourselves ready for what's to come."

They did not hesitate. A sharp salute, crisp and precise motion, and then they were gone... vanished through the arching blast doors without a word.

Navigator Malachi turned, his milky, light-riddled eyes narrowing as he regarded the Inquisitor before him. There was no fear in his gaze... perhaps because he had seen far worse beyond the veil of reality, or perhaps because fear had long since ceased to be something he was capable of feeling.

"Inquisitor Van der Horth."

His voice was as worn as the rest of him, cracked and heavy, yet it carried no reverence, no deference. He was not a soldier, nor a subordinate, merely another tool of the Imperium, as necessary... and as expendable... as any other.

The Inquisitor inclined her head slightly, an acknowledgement between old acquaintances, nothing more. Her expression did not shift, could not shift... not with the ruin it was. She stepped closer, her storm-grey coat shifting with the motion, the sigil of the Inquisition catching the dim, flickering lumen glow. The stained-glass image of the Emperor now loomed behind her, HIS golden radiance fractured and shifting in the unsteady light, casting twisted, jagged shows across the bridge floor. 

"Psyker Thetys has confirmed your purity,"

She said, her mechanical vox-caster turning the words into something hollow, something utterly stripped of humanity.

Malachi let out a quiet, breathless laugh... an ugly, rasping sound,

"As I said it would be."

His lips twitched, the ghost of a smile, brittle and thin.

"You think I'd let the abyss take me so easily."

"Perhaps not easily."

The Inquisitor replied, tilting her head just slightly, the movement sharp and measured.

"But nothing in this galaxy is immune to corruption. Not even us."

Malachi exhaled slowly, his breath rattling from a chest that had long since forgotten the simple pleasure of warmth and comfortable breathing. The great, black seals of his robes shivered with his movements, their fabric steeped in old incense and the sanctified oils of the Navis Nobilite. He was a relic as much as he was a man, and though his kind was vital, they were also feared.

Yet none doubted his purity. Not now. Not when he had passed Thetys' scrutiny.

Silence settled between them, thick as oil, the weight of unspoken words pressing down upon the bridge like the hull of a sinking ship. The Purge groaned around them, steel bones flexing beneath the strain of a strange pull. Disant, somewhere beyond the reinforced walls of the command deck, the engines burned with the fury of a caged beast, driving the ship forward, deeper into the darkness that lay ahead.

The Navigator's hands trembled at his sides, the fingers of one curling, reflexively, as though grasping for something unseen. His third eye remained closed, bound by layers of psychic wards and sanctified augments, but even with it sealed, the sensation gnawed at him. The faintest taste of ozone, of something vast and hungry, brushed against the edges of his perception.

He had felt this before. 

Inquisitor Van der Horth had felt it as well.

She did not need to be a psyker to know when the veil was thinning. The atmosphere itself had turned sickly. The lights flickered, lumen-strips dimming for mere fractions of a second, as though something unseen had passed between them and the ship's power supply. The machine spirits murmured their discontent in the rattling of cogitators and the distant, intermittent stutter of servitor voices looping broken litanies. 

Sabrina shifted, the motion barely perceptible beneath the heavy folds of her coat, her skeletal grin parted a fraction. The smell of incense burned in the air, thicker now, thick enough to choke, mining with the staleness of recycled oxygen and the ever-present tang of oil and ceramite

She exhaled slowly, 

"We... are dead."

There was no despair in her voice. 

"Yes..."

Malachi let out a slow, rattling sigh, his tongue darting out briefly to wet dry lips.

"It waits."

The Inquisitor did not acknowledge his words, nor did she need to. Her bionic eye flickered, adjusting its internal mechanisms, enhancing her vision as she turned toward the forward viewport. The abyss stretched before them, vast and empty, but there was something else now... a sensation of crawling beneath the skin, burrowing into the very marrows of the ship itself. 

She turned to the command throne, where Captain Varro stood, hands clasped behind his back, his posture stiff in her presence. He was a soldier of the Imperial Navy, a veteran of void warfare, and yet even he felt it... felt the unease clawing at the edge of his mind. The bridge crew had not spoken since her arrival, they worked in silence, their gazes on their instruments and the dim glow of purity seals fastened to their workstations. 

EMPEROR PROTECTS.

Sabrina's vox-caster rasped.

"Captain?"

Varro did not hesitate. 

"Engines burning at full output. Defensive batteries primed. Gellar Field... stable."

A pause. A hesitation. Normally, she would have killed him for it.

"But we're registering interference. The readings are wrong."

A ripple passed through the ship, a sift so subtle that none but those attuned to the unnatural would have noticed. Malachi stiffened, his breath catching for a fraction of a second, before his lips began moving again, whispering in High Gothic the old, familiar prayers.

The bridge crew worked faster. Servitors twitched, their mechanical voices slipping into fragmented binary before correcting themselves. Static bled through the vox links. Not enough to disrupt communication, not yet, but it was there.

The void beyond the ship had darkened. Not a natural darkness... not the simple absence of light... but something deeper, something hungry. The distant stars, once cold pinpricks of light, had begun to blur at the edges, distorting like oil smearing across a surface.

Warp-born.

A breath of static hissed through the bridge's vox-net. A voice. Faint. Tainted.

"...sssseeek... yoouuu..."

Sabrina's skeletal grin remained unchanged, her ruined throat voicing the command before hesitation could set amongst the crew.

"Full battle stations."

The bridge erupted into movement. Sirens wailed, klaxons screamed through the decks as red warning lights flared to life. Officers barked orders, their voices struggling to be heard over the sudden chaos. The Purge was no warship, but it would fight like one.

Varro's voice was sharp.

"Heavy batteries manned. Torpedo tubes primed..."

Sabrina felt it then. The first tear in real space.

The void ruptured.

A great and terrible wound tore itself into existence, its edges writhing with the unholy light of the immaterium. It was not a portal, not a gateway... it was a gaping maw, a violation of reality, a raw and bleeding wound in the flesh of existence itself. It quivered, convulsing, a thing of absolute hunger, and within its depths, things moved. 

Shadows that should not have been cast twisted in the bridge, stretching like grasping fingers, their edges bleeding into the metal and glass, their hunger reaching for the soul that now stood paralyzed in horror. The hum of the void engines failing, the ancient machine spirits shrieking in distress, their binary litanies turning to static and broken, gasping wails. The Gellar Field buckled, its blessed barrier against the tide screaming as it cracked, as something on the other side pressed against it, tasting its surface, preparing to rip it apart.

And then... Malachi's third eye opened.

The seals burst, the wards burned away in an instant, and the LIGHT OF THE EMPEROR FILLED THE BRIDGE.

For a single, agonizing moment, there was nothing but radiance.

It was not gentle, not warm, not merciful.

It was fire, purging, all-consuming, absolute in its wrath.

The bridge crew collapsed, screaming... those weak of faith ruptured where they stood, blood running from their eyes and ears, their flesh scorched with holy ruin. The purity seals across the walls ignited, their sacred script burning in the divine interno, flickering in golden flames gnawed at the wild, erratic shadows. 

And yet... the Inquisitor did not fall. 

She did not scream out in pain.

She laughed. 

A ragged, tearing sound, not human, not sane, something raw and unnatural that rasped from the ruin of her throat. Her jaw cracked open, far wider than any mortal should have been capable of, the ruined flesh around her skeletal grin splitting apart, the tissue tearing as fresh blood wept from the gashes. 

The warp howled.

The bridge of the Purge disintegrated around her, torn apart in the cyclone of unreal physics and screaming ruination. The ship was not dying... it was being unmade, its structure unravelling one molecule at a time, its machine spirits wailing in binary agony as the blessed steel of its hull rotted into rust and dust in an instant.

The void was not black anymore.

It was searing white, pulsing red, drowning purple, every colour and no colour at all, a wound in the universe that should not be... a cosmic pit where the laws of reality had been gutted and left to bleed out. It was a mouth with no lips, a howling vortex of unreality, a hungry, endless throat, and she... she leapt into it willingly.

Sabrina Van der Horth, Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, laughed as the warp consumed her. 

Her augmetic eye burst first, the sacred machinery crumpling inward like crushed parchment, liquid metal and coolant boiling away as the heatless fire of the warp licked at her skull. Her throat followed after, her vox-caster detonating in a wet explosion of flesh, metal, and blackened sinew, her spine arching as the sudden loss sent a flood of raw, burning air into her lungs... corrupted air that did not exist, air that was not air at all but something suffocating and filled with whispers that tried to crawl down her throat and nest inside her ribs.

Her skin peeled away.

Not burned. Not flayed.

Simply gone, evaporated into ribbons of raw energy, boiling off her bones like steam. Her muscles unravelled, tendon and fibre snapping like puppet stings cut loose, her arms splitting at the seams, her fingers curling into claws as the nerves inside them twisted into barbed wire and fire.

And she laughed.

She laughed as the warp ate her.

Her bones cracked.

Then shattered.

Then turned to dust, scattering like ash into the madness of the rift.

Her ribcage splintered open, her spine wrenched itself into unnatural shapes, her skull split down the middle like a discarded relic... but she did not stop. She did not fall. She did not break.

She lunged forward.

She was not an Inquisitor anymore. Not a human. Not even a corpse.

She was a thing of hate and disgust, a thing that did not care that she no longer had a body, did not care that she was nothing more than a shattered soul wrapped in the dying echoes of its fury.

She had no throat, but she still screamed.

She had no hands, but she still held a blade. 

She had no flesh, but she still bled.

And the warp welcomed her with open arms.

She was nothing.

Flesh was gone. Bone was dust. Thought was ruin.

And yet... she remained.

The warp screamed around her, its shifting tides clawing at what little was left of her, trying to reshape her, twist her into something lesser, something obedient. Shadows coiled, hungry and waiting, whispering names that had never belonged to her, beckoning her to surrender.

She never would.

She did not.

Finally, a presence emerged from the swirling madness, a thing of endless malice and smug amusement. Wreathed in coiling black fire, its form shifted between monstrous and beautiful, flesh and chitin, god and corpse. It had no single face—it wore thousands, all screaming in silent laughter, mocking the defiance that would not survive.

"Ahh... still yourself, little thing?"

Its voice was silk wrapped around a poisoned blade, the whisper of a scalpel sitting at her throat.

"No flesh... no soul... why resist?

Sabrina's teeth bared... for she still had teeth.

The daemon circled her, the warp fabric bending to its will, and the air thick with the scent of old blood and rotting meat.

"No god watches over you, Inquisitor. You are unmade, abandoned. Where is your Corpse Emperor now?"

She could not.

She did not answer.

She did not need to.

The daemon smiled, its shifting, sinuous form pressing closer. It bore a weight not of flesh, but of certainty—the arrogance of something that had witnessed thousands of souls broken before it and would see thousands more.

The thousand faces it had worn before collapsed into one, sculpted from mockery and filth, a twisted imitation of divinity.

It had given itself the Emperor's visage.

But not as HE has been, not as the golden beacon of mankind's salvation, but as the rotting husk upon HIS throne, a corpse barely clinging to existence, a god of falsehood and dust, of failing machinery and burning prayers.

Its lips peeled back into something too wide, too cruel, too knowing.

"This is what you hold on to?"

It purred, its warpflesh writing, its voice dripping with slow, deliberate contempt.

"A withered corpse, slumped in the dark, fed by the blood of a billion screaming innocents? A dead god propped up by superstition and the gnashing of broken fools?"

It leaned in, close enough that the stench of its breath... a stench of corpses and incense, bile and sacred oils... crawled down what little remained of her throat.

"Tell me, little human..."

The daemon whispered, its words like rusted iron driven between ribs that no longer existed.

"Where is your god?"

It let the question hang, let it seep into the marrow of reality, let the mockery stretch into the bones of the abyss, waiting for the final crack, the moment where she would break, where the ruin that had once been an Inquisitor would understand that there was nothing left for her.

That she had fought for nothing.

That she had died for nothing.

That the Emperor did not watch.

Had never watched.

Had never cared.

And in that perfect silence, that moment of certainty, Sabrina moved.

Her hands had no flesh, no sinew, no form... only hate, only rage, only the will of something that refused to keel over and die. 

She reached for its throat.

The daemon shrieked, confusion rippling through its form, warpflesh boiling where she touched it, its form shattering under her fingers.

Sabrina's skeletal grin split wider.

Her jaws unhinged, her ruined throat vibrating with something raw, something potent, beyond word, beyond thought... beyond the creature's understanding.

A whisper of burning sinew and boiling blood.

"Right here."

The daemon's eyes widened.

And she ripped its head clean from its shoulders.