The Hollow Vessel
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---
The chamber was quiet, but not peaceful or serene kind. But the one nobody wanted to break.
At the center of the room lay Elithor's body. Bound in sigil wrapped cords of psychically inert material, the Eldar's frame was curled slightly, like something dead that had learned how to mimic sleep. Every rune drawn around him was still fresh some pulsing gently with psychic warmth, others inert, waiting for the ritual to begin.
The wards hummed in low frequencies, They whispered against the bones of the chamber, singing to the Immaterium, marking this place as one meant for the work of souls. Nothing about it was welcoming.
Then the doors opened with a hiss, and Cassian walked in.
He moved like himself. Same stride. Same posture. His cloak didn't drag. His boots made the expected sound across the alloy floor. He carried nothing but a single rune plated vambrace tucked beneath one arm. Standard psychic shielding gear.
But Faevelith tensed the moment she saw him.
She didn't know why.
He was clean. Sharp-eyed. His armor was dusted but polished. There was a faint scar over one brow he'd had that for a year. Nothing had changed.
Nothing should have changed.
Yet something had. She didn't know why but her intuition was warning her.
Cassian nodded once toward her, then at Farron. "He's ready," he said, gesturing toward Elithor . His voice was calm. Low. Tired, maybe. It was the kind of voice someone used when their thoughts were still somewhere else.
"Good," Farron replied, already moving toward the altar. "We're almost in phase alignment. We'll start the transference in five minutes."
Cassian gave another nod and stepped forward, setting the vambrace aside, then folding his arms.
Faevelith didn't speak. She watched.
There it was again.
That echo.
She didn't see it, not exactly but she felt it. Cassian's psychic presence had always been firm. Dense, like cold stone and iron edges. But now it felt… fogged. Like something dense was behind it. Not louder. Not stronger. Just wrong. Off-key.
Her mind gently brushed against his aura.
He didn't flinch. That was the problem.
Most people even trained psykers gave off subtle responses to being touched psychically. A ripple in the soul, an instinctive bristling. Like the way skin reacts to cold steel.
Cassian's aura didn't react.
It simply stood there. Unmoving. Like a mannequin dressed in a memory.
Faevelith's heart tightened in her chest.
She turned slightly, shielding her voice with one hand as she whispered to Farron. "Something's… off."
Farron glanced over, annoyed. "He's just tired. We're all tired."
"No." Her voice was clipped, quiet. "His aura—"
"It's fine," Farron cut her off, too sharp. "Focus Faevelith. I need you at full clarity. This ritual's too delicate for distractions."
She didn't answer.
Cassian was still standing still, now watching the bound Eldar body without blinking.
Faevelith observed him intentionally. Her fingers drifted toward one of her talismans, feeling its shape, its edges. She focused again on Cassian's aura. This time she tried something else resonance alignment, just for a second.
There was no response.
That wasn't possible.
Every living mind, even shielded, gave off resonance ripples, textures, reflections.
Cassian's aura was there, but… behind something. Like she was staring into a pool and seeing a stone face looking back, behind the water.
She blinked. Took a slow breath.
Then Cassian looked at her.
Just a glance. Half a second.
But his eyes didn't hold recognition. Not immediately. Not like they used to.
It passed, just as quick. He blinked once, then gave a faint smirk. "Something wrong?"
Her lips parted slightly. A dozen answers gathered in her throat.
"No," she said instead.
Cassian turned back to Elithor.
She knew then and there, something was wrong with Cassian. She started making her own preparations.
Just in case.
---
The chamber lights dimmed not by design, but by response.
Faevelith stood at the center of the etched circle, her hands raised above Elithor 's body. Her fingers twisted through practiced motions, psychic energy coiling around her like threads of luminous silk. The runes on the floor responded in kind pulsing, humming, glowing brighter with each beat of her heart.
Cassian stepped into position at the opposite end of the circle, a lone pillar between Elithor and the web of power gathering in the room. His role was crucial: anchor the energies, provide a soul weighted fulcrum around which the ritual would pivot. The process required stability. And the only psyker apart from Faevelith was Cassian here.
In theory.
Faevelith reached deeper. Her will became the crucible. Elithor's soul, dislodged and suspended in the psychic flux of death-but-not-death, began to melt gently at first, like silver over flame. His essence shimmered above his body in a pale stream of energy, nebulous, beautiful, and fragile.
Cassian inhaled sharply and placed one hand against the stabilizer rune.
That was when it began.
The moment his palm made contact with the anchor point, everything shifted.
Light bent in the air not visibly, not at first, but subtly. Like reality inhaled and forgot how to exhale.
The runes on the floor didn't glow brighter they strained. Their illumination twisted, the colors bleeding into reds and sickly greens where there should have been violet and gold.
The temperature dropped.
Faevelith's eyes snapped toward Cassian.
He hadn't moved.
But the air around him writhed.
It was psychic pressure but wrong. Not the typical warping of power. This wasn't just exertion.
It was presence.
Like something had leaned too close to the veil of reality. Something watching with a smile it hadn't earned.
Cassian's head twitched. Just a fraction.
Then the shadows near his feet stretched, without a source.
Faevelith's breath caught.
Her suspicions were true. She started preparing.
"Cassian," she called, soft but urgent.
No response.
"Cassian."
He turned his head slowly. Too slowly. Like the joints remembered the motion but not the purpose.
"Yes?" he said.
Faevelith didn't answer.
She reached with her mind instead. Just a touch. Just enough to reaffirm what she felt earlier.
The thing inside him wasn't hiding anymore.
It pulsed. It bled hunger. Its psychic fingerprint wasn't Cassian's. It wasn't even human. It was layered. A personality behind a mask of familiarity.
And now that the link was active now that he was anchoring the ritual it was feeding.
The soul-thread of Elithor , halfway through its passage, began to shudder. His essence flickered, then pulsed like a heartbeat once, then again, harder, like a creature trying to escape a cage.
Cassian or the thing wearing him smiled faintly.
"Don't stop now," it said.
Its voice wasn't different, but it felt wrong. Like the idea of Cassian had been copied, filtered through a warped lens, and re-stitched with too clean threads.
Faevelith stepped back from the circle.
Farron noticed finally. "What's going on?"
"The anchor is compromised," she said, calmly
Farron blinked. "Compromised how?"
Then he looked at Cassian. Really looked at the changes taking place in Cassian's body.
Cassian's pupils were too wide. The irises ringed faintly in gold. He wasn't sweating. His breathing was steady. Too steady.
Farron reached for his weapon.
Cassian didn't move.
But the light dimmed again. And the pressure in the room spiked.
The wards began to fracture. Glyphs flickered. Sigils bent. The ritual circle didn't fail it began to warp. As if obeying something else.
Faevelith forced power through the web, stabilizing Elithor 's soul. She didn't care about protocol anymore. She pulled back hard, yanking the soul-thread back toward the source body before it could be swallowed.
"Hold him," she shouted to Farron.
Faevelith exhaled once, slowly. The physical world dimmed to black.
She closed her eyes and fell.
Not downward. Not into the Warp. But into him.
Into Cassian.
The soul space opened like a wound.
She landed in darkness not black, not void, but something wet. The air tasted of old blood and burned iron. Shadows pulsed along the ground, slithering away from her bare psychic form. There was no light source, but everything was dimly illuminated, as if memory itself served as the only torch.
This was not how Cassian's soul had felt before.
Faevelith had touched it once, long ago, by accident. It had been jagged then scarred from trauma, warped by his unique experiences but it had still been his. Now it was like walking into a cathedral that had been converted into a charnel house. The structure was there barely. But it was all wrong.
The psychic architecture was bloated and overgrown. Where once there had been the clean shapes of will, desire, memory, discipline there were now tumors of whispering ichor, oozing through the arches of thought.
Faevelith moved forward carefully, her psychic form clad in a silver shell of mind-armor, woven from the threads of her own identity. She resisted the place. It wanted her to stay. Wanted her to linger. The soul-space itself was heavy, thick with the stench of rot and invitation.
Somewhere deep within it, she felt Cassian's true self buried. Buried alive.
She pressed forward.
Time meant nothing here. She passed through monuments of memory twisted by the daemon's influence.
A memory an old man named Joren accusing Cassian of leaving him behind.
A battlefield stained with black sunflowers, where a arbites captain and Farron stood crucified and smiling.
Faevelith herself, weeping blood, whispering "You asked me to do this."
She pushed past them.
Each false memory tried to cling to her. Tried to rewrite itself with her as the centerpiece. A seduction. A trap. A test.
She shattered them with surgical force, threading through gaps in the lie webs, deeper into Cassian's core.
And then she found him.
---
He was crouched at the bottom of a psychic oubliette.
Bound not by chains, but by grief. His soul flickered weakly, wrapped in tendrils of translucent warp flesh that pulsed with daemonic light.
He didn't look up when she arrived.
"Cassian," she called, stepping closer. "Cassian, look at me."
No response.
His mouth moved, slowly. "Not real. Another lie."
"I'm not a lie."
"Yes, you are. They all are. It keeps changing your face."
Faevelith knelt. Her voice softened. "It's me. You know it's me. Think. When we first met, that daemon world. We were on a verge of killing each other."
A flicker. A twitch. His head jerked slightly.
Faevelith leaned closer. "I told you about the corrupted Exarch."
His lips trembled his brows furrowed. "It was corrupted Pheonix Lord from my memory." he murmered.
The bindings hissed. The daemon's web stirred.
"That's it," she whispered. "Come back to me, Cassian. Take control. Now."
---
The cocoon pulsed and exploded.
Not outward.
But Inward.
A scream tore through the soul space. A voice layered with baritone oil and crushed glass, like something drowning in its own ego.
The daemon emerged.
Not as a beast, but as a man-shaped distortion mirroring Cassian's form, but taller, stretched, with eyes like black holes and a grin too wide. It hovered, cloaked in robes of writhing shadow, its limbs too fluid, its outline jittering like bad footage.
"Little witch," it purred. "You should not be here."
Faevelith rose.
"Get out of him."
"You'll have to make me."
Her psychic blades sliced through the daemon's bindings, severing the cords of control wound into Cassian's soul. Each thread resisted like steel wire soaked in fire. The daemon retaliated with illusions memories turned to weapons.
Faevelith as a child, burned alive.
Farron's corpse whispering, "You should've let him go."
She shredded them. Painfully. Each one cut a little deeper into her own mind. She was a Exarch herself so she was capable herself.
The daemon lunged grabbing her by the throat of her soul self, trying to rip her identity apart. She resisted, burning power from her own lifeforce, her psychic defenses flaring like stars going nova.
—-
Deep within, Cassian began to wake.
The real him. Scarred. Wounded. But alive.
He didn't fight the daemon he resistedit. Dug his soul deeper into himself. Reclaimed pieces.
He began remembering this life, the laborer that helped him when he first transmigrated to that hive world. His combat trainer and arbites Verrus. The events that started spiralling from then on.
He remembered her.
Faevelith.
He began to stand.
—-
The physical body of Cassian twitched. Then jerked violently.
Wards exploded in a burst of red fire.
Cassian's hands reached out grabbing psychic cables and pulling trying to break the link.
Farron moved fast, faster than instinct. He didn't stab he pressed his blade against the wards using technology to anchor it.
Blood streamed from his nose.
He didn't stop.
---
Faevelith drew the last blade of memory.
It wasn't a sword. It was a kiss.
There pure emotions for each other. The most potent weapon in warp.
She drove it into the daemon's chest into its stolen identity.
Cassian's voice roared not aloud, but through the soul-space itself.
"GET OUT OF ME."
The daemon split.
Ejected.
A black egg of corruption cracked and bled ichor into the soul-space as it was forced out. Screaming, it scattered like smoke caught in reverse wind.
---
Faevelith collapsed in the soul-space.
Cassian stood above her, bloodied, pale, soul-self trembling.
"You saved me," he said.
He cradled her broken spirit body gently. He stopped restraining his feelings.
"I am sorry, Fae"
---
Cassian convulsed. Then went still.
His eyes snapped open. His body trembled, his mind echoing with the memory of too many voices but he felt it. The shift.
"The daemon's out," he rasped.
Farron moved to the vat-grown form lying in the second cradle. The air shimmered faintly above it, wards pulsing a soft blue as something ancient settled into new flesh.
He turned, just enough to nod.
"It's done," he said. "The daemon's in the new body. Transfer succeeded."
Faevelith lay unconscious, breathing shallow but stable.
Cassian too was exhausted beyond words. He just sat using the support of the walls and stared at his Faevelith.
One disaster averted. One success pulled from the Warp's teeth.
By Fucking luck. With no clue how much damage it caused to Faevelith herself.
—
Word Count: 2282
Side Note: The system protected his past life memories.
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