Utrechz picked his steps with precision, each placement deliberate among the shattered bones of the mon-keigh settlement. Plasteel and ceramite lay peeled open like carrion. The air still tasted of ionised dust and burnt flesh.

He felt it.

Closer now.

The settlement he walked through had been purged to merciful silence, reduced to blackened earth and drifting ash before it could metastasise into one of the mon-keigh’s choking hives. A necessary excision. A clean cut.

He remembered this place.

A thousand years ago, before this infestation, it had been a garden of alien symmetries and fractal growth. Mosses like crystalline flame spread across frozen stone. Life here had been delicate, intricate, worthy of study. Worthy of preservation.

Now it stank. 

He nudged aside a slab of collapsed hab-wall with the tip of his lance. Beneath it, impossibly, a bloom of the indigenous red moss clung to existence, burning like a candle against the grey like a wound that refused to close.

Something had endured.

Something always did.

He rose, senses sharpening. The psychic pressure thickened, a gravity well pulling at the edges of his thoughts. Not the howling madness of the warp. Not quite.

Something… focused.

He sent a command without a word.

His wraithguard turned in perfect unison, their dead minds receptive to his will alone. They moved off into the ruins, deliberate and silent, to draw the remnants of the mon-keigh counterattack away. A misdirection. A final cruelty.

He would face this alone.

The presence swelled.

It had found him seemingly by chance when he should have been safe in the webway, slipping into his dreams, threading through even the anesthetised dark of a healing coma. It had no language, no proper form, only pressure. Need. Demand.

It had bent him.

Not through threat.

Through inevitability.

He stepped into one of the alien habitations of the monkey. The ceiling had collapsed inward, crushed by orbital fire. Light filtered through jagged gaps, illuminating a hollow of broken stone.

And there—

He stopped.

For a moment, his mind rejected what his eyes presented.

It was mon-keigh. Yes.

But wrong.

The child was bound with nothing but a crude fibre cord, looped tight around one ankle and anchored to a heavy piece of their alien furniture. The flesh beneath the cord was raw, the skin stripped away where it had struggled, if it had ever truly struggled.

Its body was… malformed. The eyes were vacant. The face twisted and moist with drool and tears. 

Limbs twisted at unnatural angles, muscles wasted to threads. One arm jerked intermittently, fingers clawing inward at nothing with useless spasms. Its spine curved grotesquely, forcing it into a permanent, collapsed posture.

It could not stand.

It sat in its own filth. Layers of it, dried, fresh, smeared. The stench hit even Utrechz’s refined senses, thick and animal. Urine soaked the ragged remains of its clothing. Its skin was ulcered where it had lain too long without movement.

It had been left. Abandoned in the attack.

But, he could see, it had lain for a long time in the dark, bound and neglected long before his ship had sprang from the warp just three days ago. 

Its head lolled, neck too weak to hold it upright for long. One eye attempted to track him, bloodshot and sunken. The other wandered, unfocused.

Its mouth—

Twisted. Lips pulled unevenly, jaw misaligned. It tried to form words, but only a wet, choking gargle emerged.

A failure.

A discarded thing.

These defects had been erased from the Aeldari before memory. Culled. Perfected. Forgotten.

And yet—

The pressure.

Utrechz’s mind tightened instinctively, ancient disciplines snapping into place. Barriers. Mazes. Stillness.

It did not matter.

The child was already inside.

Not forcefully. Not like a daemon’s assault.

It simply… was there.

Leafing through him.

Memories flickered, not stolen, but examined. His long life, his battles, the quiet halls of his craftworld, the distant ache of a dying race.

It understood nothing.

But it touched everything.

Utrechz’s gaze shifted.

The rubble.

Only then did he truly see it.

The collapsed mass of plasteel and ceramite above the child, half the fractured building suspended. Not fallen. Not resting.

Held.

The pressure was not emanating from the warp.

It was emanating from this… child.

This broken, starving, abandoned creature.

It had wrapped itself in a cocoon of force, instinctive and absolute. The ruin that should have crushed it instead hovered, trembling faintly, as if reality itself hesitated to obey.

This was no trained psyker.

No sanctioned witch.

This was raw and inchoate.

Unfiltered.

Catastrophic.

A daemon, he had thought.

No.

Worse.

Untouched by discipline. Unshaped by will. A mind that had never learned the boundaries between thought and matter.

And it had reached him. Across the void. Across the warp. To destroy this place it was trapped in.

Utrechz felt something unfamiliar coil in his chest.

Not fear.

Not quite.

It was awe. Wonder at the terrible things nature wrought.

He stepped closer. Compelled.

The smell worsened. The child’s body shuddered, a reflexive spasm. Its eyes widened, not in fear, but in a kind of desperate fixation.

It knew him.

Not as he was.

As something… else.

‘I followed your call,’ Utrechz said, his voice low, controlled. ‘Now what?’

The child’s thoughts surged again, closer, clumsier. Not words. Impressions. Hunger. Pain. Isolation so profound it had no structure, only endless depth.

Its mouth worked.

Gurgled.

Failed.

Then—

A sound.

Cracked. Wet. Forced through a throat that could not shape it.

‘W… wa…’

Its mind reached for his, dragging meaning with it like broken glass. The word formed inside him before it escaped the child’s lips.

‘Water.’