She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen sunlight. 

Chaedi had too much time for such thoughts. Stifled as she was in the deep cold vaults of the Librarius, her constant prayers, learned in the Scholastica, melded with the skincrawl whispers from the darker tomes or chittering of some eldritch artefacts—a malign white-noise surrounding her. She worked for focus, but sometimes, a thought crept through.

She saw a servitor, occasionally, who pushed nutrients at her; she saw the bone-colored giant of the Apothecary less frequently, to treat the signs of warp-sickness on her, to amputate the limbs too lost to her ‘gift’. 

She wasn’t entirely sure how much of her was left: her feet she had lost long ago to blackened frostbite. Her left arm had atrophied, her right replaced by an augmentic; she needed to be able to write to be useful.

But now, she heard the hypnotic chant of the litany servitor, the swing of a thurible, and then the heavy drop of the warding chains around her casket, and then…

…light, and air. It was almost too much, even the dim light of the Librarius, even the air was redolent with incense. And then, him. The Librarian.

She did not know his name and doubted he knew hers. He probably didn’t even consider that she had a name, that she was anything more than another relic, artefact or tool in this place.

He had already donned the sigil-wrapped gloves, lifting her out of the casket to place her in the inscribed circle laid for her work. She had heard, in the Black Ships, that Space Marines treated their weapons and armour with reverence, honouring and appeasing the machine spirits.

She was no machine. She got no reverence.

‘A ward,’ his voice rattled her breastbone, ‘An unmaking.’ His eyes were as brown as the loam on the edges of the agri-world wheatfields she remembered, faintly.

Chaedi opened her mouth for the sample he put in: a fragment, torn cloth. When she had had hands, she had used them. She did not want to think about what would happen when the warp-burn took her mouth as well.

She let her eyes unfocus, her gift welling like a black tide around the scrap of fabric in her mouth, tasting its threads, sour and malign.

It was always the same: the sensation of falling backwards, blind tension of fearing hitting ground, falling without control. She could smell the rank reek of the Warp, the taste in her mouth resolving into lines that tried to be even, symmetrical patterns, but were pulled askew from Euclidean geometries, pulling her down into diseased, obscene vortices, impossible angles.

She had learned, at a high price, not to fight it, but to be like a mote of dust in the Immaterium: a flicker of light at best; to pass unnoticed by the unholy predators of the Warpspace; to see, unseen.

She saw it form around her, and the stylus in her augmetic hand began to draw, blindly but accurately, as she descended through the sigil of the daemon, its geometric astral signature. Travelling down through its essence, she saw the way the shapes formed, then twisted as they contacted each other, like serpents fighting and then melding. A true daemon’s sign was through all dimensions, revolving and shifting to the eye, runes layered atop other runes.

It threatened madness, if looked at for too long: a poison seeping in through the eyes. It broke sanity if one tried to make sense of it. Chaedi had learned not to try, just record.

But Chaedi had to look, to study the order of the elements, the shapes and angles for the unmaking, feeling them sear into her, the corrosion bridging the gap between the astral and the real. Her mouth and jaw she felt melting, bone turning to ash, the scrap of fabric like a clot occluding her airway.

She vomited, or something like, blood and black drooling from what had once been her mouth, scorching the fabric of her shift, her eyes turning up to the Librarian’s with some silent plea.

‘Is it done?” he demanded. “Is it accurate?’ 

She couldn’t speak, her mouth bubbling bone and ichor, but she nodded, her eyes seeking his, trying to make him see her for once, see beyond her cursed gift, her ruined body, succumbing in front of him: see the girl who had run the long fields as a winnower, whose hands had braided stars out of grass stems, who had once been picked to sing a solo at the Scholastica Psykana for the sweetness of her voice.

She was no longer any of that. No voice to sing. No hands to braid anything, no feet to walk the winnowing rows.

But she once had been burning pure in her devotion to the Emperor, as though it would keep her safe. And now she felt herself dissolving, both here and there, body succumbing as her soul began unspooling in the Warp. Chaedi wanted to tell him her name, at least, to become known as something other than a tool, but her mouth was gone, unable to make any sound but a thick ‘blup’. It was overtaking her, and she felt herself swelling and getting crushed aside, as the warp found her, a hiding mote no longer, and she was a threat, now, a vessel of contamination, darkness blazing in the chill of the Librarius.

The Librarian stepped back, the parchment in one hand, retreating out of the working circle, his free hand tracing a sigil in the air, one that she knew was not of warding, but of war.

The last thing she saw before her eyes were clawed into the Immaterium was the glimmer of witchsight around the Librarian’s eyes, and the last thing Chaedi thought was that the golden burning glow was the closest thing to sunlight she had seen since the Black Ships came.