Chapter 26: Emperor, Witness Me
Finn lay in the rubble and there was only darkness.
He tried to open his eyes. He could not. He understood: he was blind.
The pain arrived a moment after the understanding, from every part of him simultaneously, a full-body assault that had no single point he could focus on and manage. He heard himself making sounds he had not decided to make. His body was doing things without consulting him. He remembered, through the pain's noise, that he had been struck by a psyker's lightning bolt.
Every centimeter of his skin felt as though it was still burning. Every muscle was in spasm.
He tried to push himself up with his right hand.
There was no right hand.
From the shoulder down: nothing. The severed edge, had he been able to see it, was charred and blackened, the flesh curled back from the cut, the blood already congealed into dark scab. Cauterized by the same energy that had taken it.
He was ruined. The word arrived in his mind with complete clarity and he breathed through it, and the breathing was not good, and the despair that followed the word was considerably larger than the word itself.
He lay where he was. His lips moved. The prayers came out of him without a decision to start them, from some place beneath decision, the words worn smooth by fifteen years of daily use coming up through his damaged throat in a sound he could barely hear himself.
He was going to die here, he thought. That was fine. He was tired enough.
Something appeared at the edge of his vision.
He stopped.
He was blind. He knew he was blind. And yet — at the very edge of whatever darkness had replaced his sight — a point of light. Faint, moving, warm in the way that the orange glow of a lamp is warm when you are very cold.
Finn turned his head with considerable effort toward the light.
Two shapes. One large, one small, moving through the darkness toward him side by side, their hands joined. The light came from them rather than falling on them: it outlined their forms without resolving the details, the way a lamp seen through fog gives you presence without features.
Finn's breathing stopped.
A sound came out of his throat that had no words in it.
The pain, the darkness, the cold weight of dying that had been settling on him since he lost consciousness — all of it receded at once, pushed back by something he had no name for that was not physical and was not the Emperor's Gaze and was not anything he had words for after fifteen years of looking for them.
Are you... he began in the place behind language where prayer starts.
He tried to sit up. His spine had opinions about this that he could not immediately override.
Sophia. Anna. He said the names in his mind the way he had said them ten thousand times in the dark of camps and billets and the long hours between watches: one after the other, slowly, as if the repetition could make them more real.
You came, he thought. He tried to shape his damaged mouth into something that resembled a smile. The two shapes of light moved closer, becoming clearer in the darkness without becoming any more specific.
And then Finn went still.
He could not see their faces.
The light gave him outlines. Proportions. The size that a woman stood who had been exactly as tall as his shoulder, and the size that a child stood who had not yet reached his waist when he left. But no faces. Fifteen years, he realized suddenly. Fifteen years since Gryphonne IV. He had replayed certain memories so many times that he had worn through them, the way the edge of a much-used page loses its sharpness until the words at the margin become uncertain. The faces that had come to him in nightmares and in the hours of sleeplessness and in the quiet after prayer — he had been carrying versions of them for so long that he was no longer certain they were accurate.
Time had worn everything smooth.
He found he did not mind as much as he would have expected.
Today, he thought. Today it ends. That was all right. He was ready.
The larger shape crouched beside him and extended its hand. He felt it cover his remaining hand — his left, the only one still attached — and a warmth passed through the contact into him, something that was too specific to be imagination and too quiet to be the Warp and he did not know what else to call it except real.
His heart constricted.
"It is not over yet, Finn."
The voice came from inside his head rather than through his ears. Sophia's voice. Soft, level, exactly as he remembered it, which was more than he could say for her face. The small shape pressed close to him, and small arms found his neck and held.
"Help them, Father." Anna's voice. Still young, still clear, the way she had sounded when she was seven.
Finn made a sound. He wanted to say things. He had been composing the things he wanted to say for fifteen years, and none of them came out through his ruined throat. Only the sound.
Then he noticed the pain was gone.
He moved his left hand without thinking. His fingers touched cold metal, a familiar weight and shape. The notches and scratches on the rifle's stock that his thumb had found ten thousand times before. He had not known the rifle was there until his hand was already on it.
They were right. It was not over.
He got his left arm under him and pushed. The movement was badly wrong without the right arm's counterweight, balance becoming a problem that required solving each time he shifted his position. He worked through it. His hand found the rifle's grip. He tried to raise it.
His arm shook badly enough to be a problem.
A hand made of light reached from beside him and came under the barrel. He felt the support, not as pressure exactly, but as a presence in that space that made the rifle's weight manageable.
Finn turned his head.
Sophia's smile. Clear and sudden and entirely real in a way nothing else in his vision had been since he lost his sight. She had her arm around his shoulder, taking the weight he could not support on his own.
"I am still here," her voice said inside him.
He could see nothing, he reminded himself. Nothing in the physical world had changed.
"There, Father." Anna seemed to hear the thought. Her hand closed on his sleeve and tugged, and he felt her small arm rise to point in a direction he could not see.
He turned the rifle's barrel to follow the line of her pointing.
He could see nothing. He trusted his daughter.
"All right."
He pulled the trigger.
The rifle kicked against his shoulder. A dull impact reached him from somewhere below and to the right, distorted by distance and the strange acoustics of the space below.
"Shoot the psykers!" The commissar's voice came up from the square beneath him, rough and carrying. "All of you, now!"
"Anna." He adjusted his grip. "Where are the psykers?"
"Here, Father."
The small hand moved his sleeve again.
Finn followed the direction and pulled the trigger.
[Emperor, bear witness to me.]
The old words came up without effort, familiar as breathing.
A shape fell somewhere in the darkness below him.
[Silence: 18 seconds remaining.]
"The next one."
"Left a little, Father."
[Pain is but an illusion of the senses.]
He fired.
A second shape fell.
[Silence: 15 seconds remaining.]
"Two more."
Sophia's arm remained steady around his shoulder. Her presence beside him was the realest thing in the darkness.
[Despair is but a phantom of the mind.]
The rifle spoke again.
A third fell.
[Silence: 12 seconds remaining.]
The last one.
Finn's left hand was shaking. He was aware of it the way you are aware of something happening at a distance. The weight of fifteen years — the hatred that had kept him moving when nothing else would, the grief that had no floor, the exhaustion of carrying both of them through a hundred campaigns and a thousand sleepless nights — he could feel it beginning to release its grip. Like a tide going out, leaving the shore behind it empty and quiet and clean.
"Straight ahead, Father."
[Only in death does duty end.]
He squeezed the trigger one final time.
The shot left the rifle and crossed whatever distance it needed to cross and the sound of its arrival came back to him a moment later from below, a heavy and settled impact.
[Silence: 9 seconds remaining.]
Finn let out a long breath and leaned against the warmth beside him.
"Is it over?"
"Not entirely." Sophia's voice, unhurried. "But the most important part is done."
Anna's shape pressed against his cheek. No texture, no physical weight, only that subtle warmth, brief and precise.
"Father did well."
He wanted to laugh. What came out was different from a laugh but had the same intention behind it. He wanted to ask where they were going. He wanted to ask if he was going with them. He had so many questions. He could not make any of them into sound.
"We should go." Sophia's voice, gently.
"Wait." In the place behind language where he had always spoken to them. "Don't go."
The two shapes of light began to fade. Not suddenly, the way a fire dies down rather than the way a lamp is extinguished. Gradually, the outline of them softening and then becoming uncertain and then becoming the memory of an outline.
"We have always been here." The voice was distant now, reaching him from somewhere that was not quite any direction. "Sleep, Finn. You have earned your rest."
The light was gone.
The darkness came back.
But this time the darkness was not cold.
Finn lay back against the rubble. The exhaustion that had been held at bay came for him all at once, patient and thorough, and he let it take him. His eyes — already blind, already closed — needed no instruction. His mouth found the smile he had been trying to make since the two lights first appeared in the dark.
From somewhere far below: the sounds of the Ash Watchers still advancing, the clash and crack and shout of a battle that was not finished. A world of metal and fire and the voices of men who were still fighting.
It reached him the way sounds reach you through water.
Finn Valentine slept.
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