Of Fire and Glass

--

The stasis fields hissed. Lights blinked in quiet rotations. Beneath the vaulted chambers of the Craftworld’s foreign machine-temples, two silhouettes stood surrounded by the hovering of servo-skulls and glinting cogitators.

Cassian exhaled slowly, knuckles brushing the edge of a bright console. His reflection flickered across a curved starmap. Cold eyes. Still face.

Magos Faran hadn’t looked up. He was dissecting a wraithbone schematic he was very interested in Eldar tech which played with metaphysics.

“You’ve noticed it too, haven’t you?” Cassian said.

“Specificity, Cassian,” came the dry rattle from behind the mechadendrites. “You must learn to specify your anxieties. There are many things to notice aboard a vessel full of alien mystics.”

Cassian didn’t smile. “Faevelith. Her… behavior.”

“Ah,” Faran replied. The schematic folded into a hololith. “Yes. The glances. The prolonged psychic contact. The territorial gestures.” He paused. “Fascinating to observe in a live specimen.”

Cassian looked away. “It’s not just observation anymore.”

“She has feelings for you,” Faran said simply.

There was silence.

Cassian’s voice turned flat. “She’s Eldar.”

“As are all the people around us. A keen deduction.”

“I’m not talking about their species. I’m talking about what that means. You’re the brains here. You know better than anyone.”

“Yes. And so do you.” Faran turned then, the blue glow of his optics dimming slightly. “You find her beautiful.”

Cassian didn’t answer.

“You admire her intellect,” Faran continued. “You respect her mind. You trust her judgment. She did save our life in that chaos world.”

“She’s alien,” Cassian snapped.

A pause. Then: “Yes.”

He exhaled through his nose, frustrated. “Their biology is different. Everything is different. Her customs. Her culture. Her ethics. Her soul.”

“You’re afraid you’ll get an Eldari STD.”

Cassian blinked. “That’s not funny.”

“It wasn’t intended as humor,” Faran replied. “Merely a clinical observation of your irrational mating anxieties.”

“I’m not mating—!”

“Not yet.”

“Faron.”

The Magos waved a mechadendrite. “I understand your concern. You were born in a world of binary thinking. Human or not-human. Flesh or steel. Safe or unsafe. But the Eldar don’t think in binaries. They feel in spectrums. And they feel more. Their souls are psionic constructs. Passion, emotion, memory—they are not contained in them. They are them.”

Cassian looked up slowly.

“Are you saying she’s—?”

“Have a potential to be possessive?” Faran said, voice amused. “Yes. Or something like it. You’ve seen the signs. Mood swings. Fixation. Psychic mirroring.”

Cassian’s jaw tightened. “So what happens if I say nothing?”

Faran’s eyes gleamed.

“She will not wait. You know how Eldar can get when left unresolved. Their culture suppresses obsession. Their instincts do not.”

Cassian stared at him.

“That’s not comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” Faran stepped closer, his voice quiet, clinical. “You either resolve this, or it resolves you. Emotional repression doesn’t work on a race that sees your every flicker of doubt like a flare across the void.”

Cassian said nothing for a long time.

“…She could be listening right now, couldn’t she?”

“No she is not,” Faran said. “I checked.”

“....You are a bro Faron.”

---

Cassian started keeping his distance from Faevelith after that awkward conversation.

He kept to the archives. Faevelith occupied the upper halls. Faran roamed between them like a diplomatic courier in a cold war.

The work continued. Psychic echoes mapped. Ritual logs decrypted. Spirit-constructs interrogated until their recorded voices began to degrade. But the silence between the three of them was worse than the ghosts they hunted.

Cassian didn’t look at her. Not if he could help it. When he did, it was sideways. Like checking if the door was locked. Like gauging the range of a landmine.

Faevelith hadn’t spoken more than twenty words in the last week. Likely guessing the conversation that he had with magos through some psychic bullshit. But her presence lingered behind him at all hours. Not physically. Psychically. Like pressure on the back of his neck.

He slept with one eye open. No reason. Just instinct.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her.

It was that he wasn’t sure if she knew the difference between obsession and possession.

And Cassian had no damn clue whether what she felt was affection or some kind of psychic boundary-marking. Yandere energy in alien skin. That kind of intensity didn’t calm him or excite him. It made him count exits.

Faran, for his part, said nothing directly. But his tone had changed. Calmer. Warier. Like soothing an errant machine spirit.

The Craftworld itself had begun to turn against them. Not overtly. But patrol paths changed. Requests for access were “pending.” Faevelith’s voice on the interlinks was getting more clipped. More strained. Her rank held the Eldar at bay. Barely. But the leash was fraying.

Ten days gone. Eighteen left before they’d be executed. Maybe sooner, depending on which way the wind blew.

Break came not with a bang, but with a hiss of static.

Cassian was bent over a crystalline map, reviewing soul-echo trails when Faran entered fast, mechanical legs almost tripping over themselves. He slammed a scroll of data-thread onto the slab.

“Decoded,” he said.

Cassian didn’t look up. “What is it?”

Faran rotated the projection. A fractal spiral bloomed—ritual code, alive, twitching.

“Wraithbone doesn’t get corrupted,” the Magos said. “You know that. It’s soul-attuned. One of the only incorruptible mediums in the galaxy.”

“So?”

“So this one’s corrupted.”

Cassian stared.

“No,” Faran corrected himself. “Not corrupted. Possessed.”

The silence cracked.

“You’re serious.”

“I’ve triple-checked. There’s a hidden ritual, embedded beneath standard Eldar rites. And someone knew exactly what they were doing.”

“Someone Eldar?”

“Yes. High-level. Old blood. The override patterns match...”

He tapped the name.

Farseer Elithior.

Faevelith’s knuckles went white against the edge of the slab.

Cassian frowned. “Where is he now?”

“Missing,” Faran said. “Went into seclusion seventeen days ago. Claimed it was soul-meditation. Locked off his quarters. Refused scans. Then the psychic anomalies started.”

Cassian’s voice dropped. “You think he’s possessed?”

“I think we’re already late.”

Faevelith finally spoke.

“Elithior would never.”

Cassian looked at her. Just long enough. “He already did.”

She didn’t respond.

Faran kept going. “There’s more. I pulled auxiliary logs from the Spirit Core. Sealed data. Elithior used a restricted transport node. Directed to the outer ridges.”

Cassian leaned in.

“Why?”

Faran brought up the last slice of data. Redacted, scorched, but still legible under spectral filters.

Execution order. One target. Craftworld Seer Initiate. Velae Thirean.

Cassian exhaled. “The one I am getting accused for?”

Faran nodded. “A psychic. Young. Gifted. Unaffiliated. Probably saw something she shouldn’t have.”

“Who did he hire?”

Faran didn’t look up. “Saim-Hann Corsair. Wild-blood. Asuryani blade.”

No trial. No official strike. Just a ghost with a knife.

“Craftworld justice,” Cassian muttered. “Elegant as always.”

“Not justice,” Faran said. “Cover-up.”

Cassian rubbed his jaw. “Let me guess. This happened right before the ritual showed signs of corruption.”

“Three days before.”

“Of course.”

Cassian straightened.

“Someone tried to silence a witness. Someone powerful. Someone old. And now they’re hiding inside a soul-prism the size of a city.”

He looked up.

“We’ll need clearance to access the inner sanctum.”

Faran clicked his fingers. “Already denied.”

Cassian looked at her. Directly this time.

“Can you get us in?”

She nodded.

Cassian turned to Faran. “Gear up.”

The Magos began to cycle through weapon modules without argument.

Cassian pulled on his coat. Looked at the crystalline map again. And got ready.

—

It took another five days to get an audience. The Council stalled, redirected, "considered." Faevelith called it protocol. Farran called it politics. Cassian called it bullshit.

Each day went by slowly. The Eldar had begun to watch them like they were the disease. Passing glances sharpening, greetings became silences, and patrols hovered just a little too long near their quarters.

The Council's permission came begrudgingly—conditional access to Farseer Elithior’s personal quarters, no unnecessary personnel. One hour.

Cassian didn’t care. And neither did others.

He entered the high seer's sanctum with Farran at his side, Faevelith a few steps behind, silent. She hadn’t spoken to him in two days. But he felt her all the time now. Her thoughts pressed at the edge of his own like soft fingers against a sealed door. She hadn’t pushed through yet. But again she was not trying either.

They passed through a corridor seeing some Eldar servants hurrying by. Moving in silence, as they checked out the room of high seer.

The chamber opened to them. A vaulted dome, empty save for a single low dais. Upon it sat Elithior.

Gaunt.

Hollow-eyed.

Draped in ceremonial bone-white robes that no longer fit. His body sagged within them like dead cloth. His face was a ruin of age and rot. Yet something beneath the skin pulsed faintly. Like a larval heart.

He opened his mouth.

The voice that came out didn’t match the lungs that made it.

"Ahh... the fate breaker. It is my pleasure to meet you."

Cassian stopped mid-stride.

Farran's mechadendrites stiffened. Faevelith froze behind him.

"You’re not him," Cassian said.

“No,” the thing said. “He is not me. But we are beginning to understand each other.”

The warp flared. Not outward, but inward—around Cassian, like a spiral folding in reverse. No colors. No shapes. Just presence.

Cassian couldn’t breathe.

Elithior’s body had not moved, but the chamber bent. It was in Cassian’s mind, his veins, behind his eyes.

Then—contact.

Soul to soul.

Cassian’s psyche was dragged from its seat in meat. It happened without warning. Like drowning in slow motion. His awareness ruptured outward, stripped of language, memory, identity—only the I, the spark of Cassian, remained.

And it was seen.

The Daemon Prince did not look. It understood.

Its name was a thunder that broke across a billion dead planets. Its essence was a cathedral of hungers.

Pharaa’gueotla.

It had worn names before. Names whispered into the ears of sorcerers and madmen. It did not speak—it imposed it's will on reality. The daemon freely showed his form to Cassian.

Cassian’s soul twisted beneath it, reflexive and small. For a breathless instant, he knew exactly how humanity looked to the warp—fragile, delicious, infinitely corruptible.

But something in him held.

Not purity. Not courage. Something else. Something stubborn.

The daemon paused.

A ripple in the immaterium—curious.

“Why do you resist, human? You have touched the Warp already. You have eaten its fruit. Why pretend?”

Cassian didn’t reply. He couldn’t speak—there was no mouth here, only thought. Only will.

But in the cold black corner of his mind, he formed one word.

No.

The daemon recoiled in interest.

“You would make a fine shell,” it mused. “But not yet. You are not ripe.” As it left something in Cassian’s body.

Reality buckled. Cassian was snapped back into his body like a wire yanked tight. The chamber spun. He dropped to one knee, bile rising in his throat.

Elithior sat still. The daemon did not push further.

Behind him, Faevelith reached out, then stopped herself. Farran knelt beside him, mech-claws adjusting his collar.

Cassian wiped his mouth. Stared up at the possessed seer.

“What... are you doing on this craftworld?”

The daemon tilted Elithior’s head with a cracked smile.

“Not your problem.”

Faevelith whispered something in Eldarith. A ward glyph flared blue against the air. The pressure dropped.

Cassian stood, slowly.

“You’ll be purged,” he said, voice hoarse. “By the Eldar. By the Imperium. By me.”

The daemon chuckled.

“One of those is true. I look forward to seeing which.”

It slumped suddenly. The seer’s body went limp, as if a great weight had been lifted—or vacated.

Cassian turned.

“We need to move. Now.”

Farran didn’t ask. He helped Cassian walk.

Faevelith followed without a word.

---