Entry VIII – Ash and Aftermath

Entry VIII – Ash and Aftermath

Safar Timura saw the opening moments clearly.

That, perhaps, was the first warning.

The strands aligned too cleanly as the Aeldari advanced — Aspect Warriors moving into position with ritual precision, runes settling into patterns Safar had walked a hundred times in vision. The skein did not resist his touch. It yielded. He mistook that compliance for favour.

The Drukhari were waiting.

Their strike came not as ambush, but as execution. Webway scars tore open the air itself, and death poured forth already knowing where to fall. Splinter fire and screaming energy cut through the advance in perfect arcs of cruelty. The Dark Reapers were hit first — not by chance, but by intent. Heavy weapons were silenced in seconds as return fire never came. Launchers shattered, armour split, bodies broken before their spirits could even recoil. Safar felt each loss like a thread snapped too close to the hand.

Aspect Warriors fell in disciplined silence — not routed, not panicked — but undone by preparation that mirrored their own. The Drukhari did not fight them; they harvested them.

Then the skein collapsed.

Safar remembered reaching — forcing power through resistance that had grown suddenly absolute — and then nothing.

He woke to the smell of burning wraithbone.

It clung to the air, bitter and wrong, its psychic echo scraping against his thoughts like a wound that refused to close. His vision swam as pain returned in measured waves, each one confirming survival rather than relief.

The battle was over.

Autarch Talmen Tengroth knelt beside him, helm discarded, his expression caught between restraint and something dangerously close to relief.

“Do not move,” Talmen said quietly. “You are still here.”

Safar drew breath with effort.

“So… the skein did not claim me.”

Talmen allowed himself a single, sharp exhale.

“No. The Guardians would not permit it.”

He helped Safar sit, his grip firm, grounding.

“They fought longer than any calculation predicted,” Talmen continued. “Long after the Aspect lines broke. Long after retreat should have been impossible. They held while others fell — and when you were struck down, they carried you from the field under fire that should have ended them.”

Safar closed his eyes.

He had seen their survival as necessary. He had not seen the price they would pay to ensure it.

“They fought not as militia,” Talmen said, voice low, “but as warriors who understood exactly what was at stake.”

Silence stretched between them, broken only by distant activity — the wounded, the counting of the dead, the careful recovery of what could still be saved.

“At least,” Talmen added, “this time the Drukhari did not take our fallen.”

A thin mercy.

Talmen rose, gesturing toward a cluster of rune-etched containers guarded nearby.

“There is more,” he said. “In the aftermath, our search teams uncovered additional blackstone deposits — fractured, irregular, but active. The material behaves inconsistently. Some dampens psychic resonance. Some sharpens it. Some does both, depending on proximity and intent.”

Safar felt it even now — a pressure beneath thought, shaping perception.

“We cannot continue as we are,” Talmen went on. “We have suffered too many setbacks in too short a span. We need time — to recover, to analyse what this world is doing to us, and to understand how blackstone here differs from what we thought we knew.”

Safar met his gaze.

“You are right,” he said at last. “To advance blindly now would be to offer Elune’s future to chance — and chance favours our enemies.”

Talmen inclined his head.

“Then we pause. We plan. And when we move again, it will not be as prey.”

Safar looked out across the scarred ground, where ash marked the places their warriors had fallen and shadows lingered where they should not.

The planet watched.

And now, so did they.