Kratos5627
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Veins of the Old Empire
🕑 Added 2025-04-25 03:30:03 +0000 UTC---
The moment they stepped through the portal, the world fell away.
The light wasn’t blinding—it was disorienting, layered, bending, dancing with colors that didn’t make sense. Not just red, or green, or blue, but things his human eyes didn’t have names for. Cassian braced himself instinctively, one hand gripping the sling of his slightly-restored meltagun, the other twitching near the hilt of Faeveleth’s gift. He didn't stagger, didn’t stumble. Just straightened and took it all in, eyes narrowed, sharp, studying. Wariness before wonder.
They emerged into the Webway.
A corridor—no, a vast arterial system, branching like the insides of a god’s nervous system. It was endless and beautiful in the way deep sea things are beautiful: ancient, alien, and utterly indifferent to you.
Smooth walls of wraithbone shimmered with a faint bioluminescence. Some surfaces pulsed faintly, like the place breathed in its sleep. Others displayed incomprehensible runes that flickered, faded, and reappeared as you tried to focus on them. There was no wind, no sound, but a low thrum in his bones, as though the entire structure sang at a frequency too deep to hear.
Cassian exhaled slowly. "So this is it."
Beside him, Faeveleth stepped forward with something approaching reverence. She didn’t look back at them, just allowed her fingers to trail against the curved walls.
"This is not it," she said, her voice calm, almost distant. "This is merely the threshold. The Webway is vast. What you see now is but one strand, one blood vessel in a sleeping giant."
Magos Faron’s mechanical eyes spun and adjusted as he slowly took in the architecture. “Wraithbone latticework... neural-node webbing... This structure predates human civilization by millions of years. And yet, it persists.”
Faeveleth finally turned to look at him, a small smirk playing on her lips. “Marvelous, is it not? And to think... it was your species that decided to discard elegance for brute industry.”
The Magos stared at her. A long pause. “Your species failed to stop our rise.”
“You were never meant to rise,” she replied evenly. “But that is a philosophical pit we can revisit later.”
Cassian cut in, tone dry. “If we can find a place to actually stand for a few years without being caught in temporal backwash, then yeah. Let’s argue about evolution.”
That got a chuckle out of her. A real one. Light, but short-lived.
They walked. The corridors bent like tunnels inside a living mind. Sometimes they turned in impossible angles, Escher-like, but the Webway allowed them to pass. Cassian felt like brushing past a thing that acknowledged you, then dismissed you in the same moment.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“There is a node nearby,” she said. “An ancient outpost. Mostly forgotten. We can shelter there. Recharge.”
“And... the time thing?”
She hesitated. Not from fear. From habit, he realized. The kind of habit people have when they are used to withholding information until the right moment. “Ah, yes. That.”
Faron turned slightly. “Time dilation has been noted before, but its predictability remains—”
“No,” she cut him off, waving a hand. “Let me be clear. The Webway is damaged. Certain segments no longer connect. Some warp time. Others stretch it. The node we’re going to? Its timeflow is… decoupled.”
Cassian’s eyes narrowed. “Decoupled?”
“In simple terms? It flows slower inside. What might be twenty years for us could be two hundred... or more, outside.”
The silence that followed wasn’t stunned. Just... surprised.
Cassian processed it. Slowly. Thoughtfully. He didn’t panic. Didn’t raise his voice. “So if we spend twenty years training, upgrading, building...”
“The galaxy might burn and be reborn a dozen times in our absence,” Faeveleth finished, folding her arms.
Faron’s mechadendrites twitched. “That does not displease me.”
Cassian tilted his head, looking between the two. “And this place we’re going to… it’s safe?”
“As safe as anything left behind by my kind,” Faeveleth said. “There are no daemons. No warbands. No Imperium. Just dust, echoes of long past, and rest.”
Cassian breathed out. A bit rest from all back to back madness. The six months in the ship was the only holiday he got.
He looked down at his hands. The nanites buzzed faintly beneath his skin, still working. Reinforcing bone. Refining muscle fibers. Extending cellular lifespan.
“Faron,” he said, without turning. “How long do I have?”
The Magos responded without hesitation. “With the current configuration of the nanoswarm? Three centuries of physiological function, minimum. Possibly four, assuming a low-stress environment. With future upgrades, it could be extended indefinitely.”
Faeveleth glanced sideways at Cassian. “Your kind aren’t meant to live that long.”
“I’m not normal human anymore,” Cassian murmured.
They kept walking. The node came into view like a memory—gray towers bent in strange shapes, half-covered in vines that weren’t plants. Some pulsed. Others twitched when they approached. Alien design clashed with ghostly beauty.
They crossed the threshold of the outpost. Lights flickered on, recognizing an Eldar presence. Not welcoming but Not hostile either.
Cassian looked around the chamber they entered—a massive dome, open on the top to a ceiling of constantly swirling light. Stars didn’t shine here. But it was still very beautiful.
He turned to her. “And you’re sure this place is stable?”
Faeveleth tilted her head. “Nothing is certain in the Webway. But I would not have come here if it were truly lost.”
Faron was already scanning the walls, interacting with dormant systems. “I can interface. Begin modifications. Establish a working base. Cassian—nutrient intakes will need to be doubled. Possibly tripled. The nanoswarm will require extensive fuel for continued enhancement.”
“I’ll eat,” Cassian muttered. “Plenty.”
He looked up again, letting the silence stretch. The vast chamber swallowed the sound.
A faint scream echoed, so distant it could’ve been imagined. From the warp that surrounded the webway Cassian didn’t look at it.
“Time to begin,” he said.
–
Cassian didn't sleep that night. Or whatever passed for night in the Webway.
There was no sky here. No sun. No moon. Just an infinite swirl above the outpost’s open ceiling, an aurora of emotion and memory, twisting like a wound in reality that never healed but never bled out either. A place built by a dying empire to escape the terror they’d unleashed—and yet, it still endured.
He sat at the edge of the platform, legs crossed, eyes up. The air wasn’t cold or warm, just… still. Like nothing had moved here in a thousand years.
Behind him, the faint whirr of Magos Faron’s servo-skull echoed from deeper within the structure, the tech-priest muttering to himself, half-machine, half-man, all task-focused as he cannibalized ancient panels and tried to interface with a civilization that thought in spirals and harmony, not straight lines and binary logic.
Cassian didn’t interrupt.
There was something in the quiet. You only cherish peace after suffering from conflicts several time. And Cassian just wanted to relax.
And they were alive. Which was another plus.
“You’re not what I expected,” came Faeveleth’s voice from behind him.
Cassian didn’t jump. He didn’t even turn. Just replied, “You’re not the first person to say that to me.”
She stepped forward, light and quiet, cloak dragging just enough to suggest she wanted to be heard this time. Not a threat. Not a challenge. Just… curiosity.
“I saw your memories when I touched your mind. Fragments, not much. But enough.”
He finally looked at her. Her angular face was unreadable, but not cold. Her eyes, ageless and sharp, bore into his like they were searching for something that might not be there.
“You saw that hive.”
“I saw a dying world,” she said. “But full of defiance. Full of... noise.”
He smirked faintly. “Sounds like desoleum, yeah.”
She lowered herself beside him, keeping a gap. Not wariness. Not quite. Just... distance. The way someone might sit beside a campfire they weren't sure would burn or explode.
“You've endured a great deal,” she said.
“Most people would’ve broken,” Cassian said. “I didn’t. Mostly because I didn’t have the luxury.”
“And now you have time.”
Cassian exhaled. “That’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever been given.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The air pulsed faintly around them, like the Webway itself was listening.
Then Faeveleth said, without looking at him, “We will remain here for some time.”
He nodded. “You mentioned twenty years.”
“Give or take. Repairs must be made. Pathways recalibrated. And the node’s stabilizers are... less than optimal. It will take time.”
“And outside?”
She turned to him. “You’ll walk out of here looking twenty, and the galaxy will have shifted by two centuries. The stars will have changed.”
Cassian leaned back, hands behind his head, eyes back on the swirling not-sky. “Good. Maybe the bastards chasing us will be dead by then.”
A faint smile touched her lips. Not approval. Just... understanding.
“Your augmentations,” she said, “they will keep you young. At least, long enough to make the difference irrelevant.”
“Faron told me,” Cassian replied. “Three to four centuries with upgrades. More, if we find anything useful down here.”
“Eldar live long lives,” she said. “But not forever.”
Cassian turned to her, eyes meeting hers.
“I never planned to live forever,” he said. “Just long enough to matter.”
Silence again. Not awkward. Just... heavy.
From deeper in the structure, a bang, a curse—Faron’s voice, distant, half-organic. “Void-damned lattice inversion! This entire substructure is built by blind architects with art degrees!”
Cassian chuckled.
Faeveleth tilted her head. “He amuses you.”
“He’s what passes for stability in my life right now,” Cassian said. “That should terrify both of us.”
She stood then.
“Rest,” she said. “Tomorrow, we begin rebuilding.”
And then, almost as an afterthought—
“Cassian. You have earned this break. Do not waste it chasing after ghosts.”
He nodded once. But his eyes didn’t leave the scenery.
---
The following days blurred, not from inactivity, but from rhythm.
They found quarters—half-rooms really, grown from the wraithbone like coral. Faeveleth led them to a series of interconnected chambers that hummed with latent energy, activating only under her touch. The lights flickered on, revealing storage caches—depleted, but still functional. Old weapons. Medical alcoves. Autodocs grown from the walls themselves.
Cassian claimed a room closest to the armory. Faron, naturally, turned half his quarters into a laboratory within hours.
There was no natural sleep cycle in the Webway, but they adapted. Made their own. Built habits.
Cassian trained.
Every day.
He ran the corridors—winding, disorienting, forcing him to memorize shifting paths. He lifted old weights. Shadowboxed in zero-grav alcoves. Practiced with his blade until sweat ran down his face and the nanites kicked in to reknit torn fibers.
Sometimes Faeveleth watched. Sometimes she joined. And those duels were lessons.
“You're thinking too linearly,” she would say, spinning past his strike with inhuman grace. “Your species loves straight lines. Force. Impact. Think like a current, not a hammer.”
Cassian improved. Day by day. Cut by cut.
Faron, for his part, began talking more. Less binary. More human. His voice modulators smoothed over the weeks, his tone picking up hints of inflection.
“Cassian,” he muttered one day while connecting a psychocrystal to a power converter, “I have decided to name the nutrient paste machine.”
Cassian looked up from his workout bench. “You're what now?”
“It is called Clara.”
“Why Clara?”
“Because unlike you, she feeds me without complaint.”
Cassian had laughed so hard he nearly dropped a barbell on his foot.
The outpost breathed again. Lights glowed warmer. The Webway's thrum felt less like a warning, more like a hum. A pulse.
There were still dangers. Tunnels that shifted without cause. Shadows that didn’t belong. Once, Cassian swore he saw a figure in the distance, tall and crowned, watching from a ridge.
Faeveleth said nothing. Only that “The Webway has long memory.”
But they stayed. Trained. Built.
And slowly, slowly, the days became weeks.
The weeks began to stack into months.
Cassian changed. Not in body alone. But in presence. There was steel in his spine now, the kind you didn’t see unless you knew.
---
And somewhere, far beyond the silence of the Webway, the galaxy burned.
Planets rose and fell. Empires cracked. Names were lost to history.
But in the heart of a dead corridor, forgotten by time itself, three people just lived for once.
---
Comments
Jonnylawz0
Wow... thats actually so heartwarming and satisfying. Like just a group of buddies just chilling in a calm pocket of space while the galaxy outside is moving on just forgetting about em... and the beautiful thing about that is thats 40ks entire setting things are forgotten while time moves on... shiii this cooked lowkey...
Rowan
More pleasssseeeee
