The battlefield didn't breathe.
It didn't mourn.
It didn't exhale victory or carry the scent of peace.
It simply stopped.
Where the dam had stood—where Cain had stood—there was now only a broken spine of steel and stone, cracked in half by its own heartbeat. The canyon below was a lake of ruin. Black water dragged broken bodies like debris caught in memory.
And above it all, high on the western ridge, Felicia Tayber stood with the vox cradled in both hands.
She didn't speak.
Not at first.
The channel whispered static, thin and broken. She held it like a lifeline to a voice she knew she would never hear again.
Her eyes were red, her cheeks streaked with soot and windburn. Her breath came slow and shallow, like someone afraid to let go of something too heavy to carry any longer.
"Commissar…" she whispered. "Do you read?"
Nothing.
Just the silence that comes after legends die.
Behind her, Jurgen knelt.
His coat was torn open at the side. One leg was bound in field mesh, his face half-wrapped in bandages. He hadn't moved in five minutes.
He stared at the ruins.
As if waiting.
Because that's what Cain did.
He got back up.
Felicia didn't look away.
Her fingers curled tighter around the vox until her knuckles turned white.
He had saved her.
Dragged her out of that Ork bunker with one arm bleeding and the other holding a laspistol that wasn't even loaded anymore. She'd been filthy, bruised, half-starved.
And he'd smiled.
"Sorry I'm late," he'd said, "but the Orks were hosting a rather disappointing dinner party."
She hadn't laughed.
She'd just cried.
And later that night, in the safety of a looted hab shelter, she had gone to him.
Not for strategy. Not for orders.
For comfort.
And Cain… had given it.
More than once.
She swallowed.
Her hand drifted to her stomach—subconscious, instinctive.
There wasn't much to feel yet.
Just a weight she hadn't dared name aloud.
But it was real.
And now, he was gone.
A single tear slipped down her cheek.
Not from the wind.
Not from pain.
But from the truth.
"I didn't even get to tell you," she whispered.
She lowered the vox. Pressed her palm against the faint curve below her coat.
"I was going to wait until after the battle. After the damn charges. I thought you'd laugh. Thought you'd make some smug remark about your 'genetic legacy.' Thought we'd fight over what to name it."
She breathed in.
Shook once.
"But now I know."
Her voice steadied.
Not strong.
But certain.
"I'll name it after you. Boy or girl."
She looked to the canyon.
The flood.
The silence.
"Your name will live on, Cain."
Her hand curled against her belly.
"I promise."
And behind her, the wind shifted.
The sky began to shimmer.
And something immense began to descend.
The wind paused.
Not stilled. Not silenced.
It paused—as if the world itself had taken a breath and was holding it, afraid of what might follow.
Jurgen stirred first.
He turned his head slowly, soot flaking from his bandages.
"Something's coming," he muttered.
Felicia didn't answer.
She was still staring down at the ruins—at the place where Cain had vanished. Her hand remained over her stomach, her eyes still wet. But her breath caught.
Because the sky—
—had changed.
It began as a shimmer.
A pulse.
Not like lightning, not like fire, but something older. Something vast. A brightness that pressed against the atmosphere, rippling the auroras like curtains caught in the breath of God.
Then—light.
It wasn't white.
It wasn't one thing.
It was all things: gold, red, molten silver, blinding but not painful. It cascaded downward in a single, impossible shaft of brilliance, wider than a fortress wall, slow and precise, like a blade being lowered through the heart of the world.
And it struck.
Right there.
Right where Cain had died.
The ground shook.
The broken remnants of the dam vibrated, stones rising into the air as if lifted by a breath too sacred for gravity to resist. Bits of shattered stubbers, spent las-packs, empty helmets—all hovered, suspended like thoughts between beats of time.
Even the water parted.
Just slightly.
Just enough to show something beneath.
A shape.
A glow.
A figure.
Jurgen rose to his feet.
Not quickly.
Not in disbelief.
But like a soldier standing at attention for a commanding officer who had just returned from the dead.
Felicia dropped the vox.
It clattered on the rock.
And both of them stared.
Cain.
Or what had once been Cain.
He rose slowly from the water, suspended in the beam, arms limp at his sides. His coat was torn. His skin was scorched. Blood and soot clung to every inch of him.
But he floated.
Upright.
Untouched by gravity.
Untouched by death.
And then—
He began to change.
Cain floated.
Weightless.
Lifeless.
And yet—becoming.
The light wrapped around him, not like fire, not like air, but like intention. It folded into him, thread by thread, unraveling what he had been and stitching together something new. His coat peeled away in golden flakes. His boots disintegrated midair. His chainsword dissolved into glittering motes that rose like sparks toward the sky.
His skin began to glow.
Not with heat.
But with presence.
Felicia took a step forward.
Jurgen did not.
His eyes stayed locked on the light, the way a Guardsman watches an execution—knowing something sacred is happening, and he's not meant to blink.
The air around them pulsed.
Stone fragments spun in slow orbit around the beam. Shell casings drifted upward like dust caught in a dream. The wind flattened into stillness.
And then Cain's body—
contracted.
It wasn't grotesque.
It wasn't painful.
It was graceful—a folding in, a re-forging of flesh and soul. His arms shortened. His chest pulled inward. The lines of his face softened, melted, became new. Age vanished. Scars rewound. Muscles collapsed and then reformed, tighter, smoother, impossible.
What descended within the beam was not a man.
It was an infant.
But not a normal one.
Not helpless. Not wailing.
This child glowed.
His skin was golden, flawless, glistening faintly with divine sweat. His body was compact and absurdly muscular—eight-pack abs carved beneath a chest no larger than a ration tin. Tiny fists clenched in purpose. His jawline was sharp enough to command regiments. His brow furrowed in tiny, celestial defiance.
And then—his hair erupted.
Strands of liquid gold unfurled from his head, framing his face in flowing curls that defied the wind. It didn't bounce. It cascaded. Styled by God, arrogant as a lion's mane.
Then his eyes opened.
Felicia gasped.
They weren't brown anymore.
They were blue—deep, calm, ancient. Eyes that had seen betrayal, war, comedy, and one too many unfortunate romances. Eyes that had stared down a Warlord and a falling bomber and chosen to smile anyway.
Eyes that remembered.
From his back, the light surged again.
Wings burst forth.
Not bone. Not feather.
But will made visible.
Golden, radiant, impossibly large—stretching wide across the shattered sky like banners made of forgiveness and flame. They shimmered with the echoes of every moment Cain had pretended to be a hero—now rewritten as truth.
The baby didn't cry.
He didn't move.
He simply hovered, naked and incandescent, held aloft by nothing but light and legend.
Jurgen knelt.
No hesitation.
Felicia took a trembling step forward, her hand still over her stomach.
She stared up at the child she had once known as a man.
At the Commissar who had saved her.
At the man she never told.
And now—never could.
A tear slid down her cheek.
But she was smiling.
The infant Cain raised one small, perfectly-sculpted arm.
He reached out—not to the sky, not to the earth—but to the people watching.
A farewell.
A thank you.
A promise.
And then—the light took him.
Brighter. Faster. Final.
He rose—wings folding, curls streaming behind him like a comet, his tiny fists still clenched with sacred determination.
He became a star.
Then a speck.
Then nothing.
And the world was quiet again.
Cain became a star.
Then a speck.
Then nothing.
And the sky fell quiet.
Felicia exhaled the breath she'd been holding, but it came out as a sound—not a sob, not a word. Just something stuck between disbelief and awe.
She lowered her hand from her stomach.
Her fingers trembled.
"...He actually did it," she whispered.
Jurgen remained kneeling. He hadn't looked away once. Smoke curled around his shoulders, blood seeping through his bandages, but his voice was steady.
"Of course he did."
He squinted up at the sky, blinking ash from his one good eye. Then he muttered, mostly to himself:
"Just like that time on Gravalax. Thought you were dead, you crazy infant bastard. Came back riding a Salamander tank and quoting poetry."
He spat onto the rock.
"Back then you were just almost naked."
Felicia blinked at him. "Wait—what?"
Jurgen didn't answer. He just adjusted his melted coat and stood, slowly, like a tree trunk deciding it was done pretending to be part of the scenery.
"I knew he wasn't gone," he said, louder now. "You don't get rid of Cain with explosions. Or daemons. Or logic."
He sniffed once. "Tried all three."
Around them, others stirred.
A Valhallan trooper knelt beside a broken stubber mount, jaw slack.
A factory worker fell to his knees, weeping quietly.
A priestess from the local shrine whispered a prayer she didn't know the name of—only that it felt like the right shape in her mouth.
They had all seen it.
The light.
The wings.
The absurd, sacred child.
The truth of it didn't matter anymore.
They believed.
Felicia stepped up beside Jurgen.
Her voice was small.
"I didn't even tell him…"
Jurgen looked at her.
She shook her head.
"He never knew. About me. About this." She gestured vaguely toward her stomach.
Jurgen didn't respond immediately.
Then he said, "He'd have made a terrible father."
Felicia smiled—sharp and sad.
"But the best story."
They stood there together, staring into a sky that had no business being that clear.
Cain was gone.
And somehow, more present than ever.
Amberley Vail's Notes
Addendum to Ordo Xenos Case File #98620-P: Perlia Engagements, Subsection 7 – Subject: Ciaphas Cain
"In the aftermath of the Perlia campaign, the Adeptus Administratum issued no less than nineteen separate, conflicting reports regarding the fate of Commissar Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium.
Of these, twelve concluded he perished heroically in the detonation of the dam.
Five claimed he was seen crawling from the floodwaters, only to disappear hours later into the ruins.
One… suggested he commandeered a submerged Ork submarine and vanished westward.
And one—the absurd one—was mine."
"I saw what the others saw."
"A light that split the sky.
A body lifted.
A transformation no cogitator, no scry-engine, no priest could explain.
An impossible rebirth.
And then… silence."
"Officially, the Ecclesiarchy declared it a localized divine manifestation, likely sanctioned by the Emperor Himself. They were already carving shrines into the cliffside before the bodies were cleared.
The Adeptus Mechanicus, predictably, filed for the retrieval of any surviving xeno-tech artifacts—as if Cain's sudden apotheosis was due to Necron nanoglyphs or a teleportation mishap.
The Officio Prefectus tried to suppress the event entirely.
That went about as well as one would expect."
"Unofficially?
He died like he lived:
At the center of a catastrophe, covered in other people's blood, surrounded by fire—
and somehow…
the last thing anyone could look away from."
"The statue they built on Perlia stands over a hundred meters tall. It depicts him in full dress uniform, one hand on his chainsword, the other cradling a child.
I'm told the sculptor took liberties.
The jawline is far too noble.
The eyes—the same unnatural blue he opened during his apotheosis—glow at night.
Naturally, the good people of Perlia have declared him a saint.
They hold festivals now.
Light candles.
Offer lasgun cartridges to shrines.
A minor cult has even emerged—worshipping a golden-winged infant with an eight-pack.
I filed for censure.
And then… I didn't enforce it."
"Because if Cain taught me anything—and Throne help me, he did—it's that sometimes the truth doesn't matter.
Sometimes a lie is holy enough to be true.
And sometimes, when the galaxy is bleeding from every orifice and begging for one moment of light—
That light doesn't come from angels.
It comes from a sarcastic bastard with a chainsword, a death wish, and just enough decency to make the story worth telling."
Ave Imperator.
And Ave Cain, you magnificent idiot.
— Inquisitor Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.
Cain drifted.
No—not quite.
He hovered.
Suspended in nothing, like a thought no one wanted to finish.
No up. No down. No pain. No voice.
Only memory.
And light.
He blinked, or thought he did.
Vision meant very little in a place that had no walls.
But something stirred around him—something inside him.
Not warmth.
Not sound.
But weight.
Remembrance.
He remembered:
Jurgen, standing quietly over his shoulder, reeking like sacred mildew and holding off an entire Tyranid swarm with a half-melted melta.A crowd of civilians waiting to board evac transports… and the child he pretended not to see so he could board one himself.The grin of a wounded Ork warboss, just before Cain buried his chainsword in its lungs.Amberley Vail's voice, teasing and tired.Felicia Tayber—one hand on her stomach, one hand on a vox unit, too late to say what she needed to say.
That one hurt.
More than the blade.
More than the bomb.
More than the knowing silence that came after.
Cain stared into the void of light and whispered:
"...She didn't even get to tell me."
And then—his chest ignited.
Not burning.
Beating.
A second heartbeat roared to life beneath his own.
It wasn't just thump and pulse—it was music. A cadence of things larger than language. It surged up through his ribs like a war hymn sung by angels who'd been wounded too many times to care if they bled again.
And with that pulse came color.
🔴 RED
It struck first.
A shockwave of primal heat. Not rage—but the willingness to do whatever was necessary. It rolled through his body like a second bloodstream, dragging fire behind it.
It didn't settle in his heart.
It bled into his muscles.
Every ligament. Every tendon. Every fiber of his body tightened—not in fear, but in readiness. The Red Core didn't ask what he wanted.
It simply asked:
"Do you wish to survive?"
And Cain, being Cain, gave the only answer he ever knew:
"Yes. But sarcastically."
The Red accepted it anyway.
His arms thickened.
His legs coiled like springs.
His chest rose with impossible tension.
The Core grinned inside him, feral and satisfied.
⚪ WHITE
Next came stillness.
It didn't rush. It arrived—like calm after shock, like breath after panic.
It whispered down his spine and curled gently into his nerves, threading itself through every line of thought, every reflex, every trembling gut instinct he had ever ignored or obeyed.
The White Core wasn't mercy.
It was discipline.
It kissed his brainstem, smoothing the chaos. Slid into his eyes, sharpening them. Sank into his gut, aligning organ with intuition.
Even his intestines—long ignored by most magic systems—twitched with divine calibration. He could feel the world more clearly now. Hear every heartbeat from his own soul.
And then it nested in his brain.
Not to control.
But to clarify.
Cain didn't grow smarter.
He grew aware.
And for the first time in years—decades—he wasn't tired.
✨ GOLD
It didn't hit him.
It entered him like a decision made long ago and finally remembered.
It moved not through blood or nerve, but through bone. Through posture. Through presence.
It wrapped around his skeleton, coating it in something heavier than steel and lighter than light. The Gold Core didn't tell him he was a leader.
It simply made others know it.
His back straightened. His stance settled. His very breath began to carry weight.
Even in this place of silence and light—
He commanded attention.
At the center of it all:
His heart.
It had always beaten in panic.
In fear.
In anticipation of the next bad order, the next cowardly compromise.
But now?
It beat in harmony.
Two pulses. One of blood. One of light.
They alternated—syncopated like a march rhythm written by divine hands.
He saw it now.
The Core didn't inhabit him.
It grew from him.
A second heart, wrapped like a crown around the first—veins of color spilling outward like a star blooming in his chest.
Red through the fleshWhite through the mindGold through the bones
He wasn't wearing power.
He was made of it.
Not chosen.
Forged.
And just as he understood that—
The world lurched.
The Core flared—blinding, holy.
Cain opened his mouth to curse.
And then—
The light moved.
He felt his wings flare open—not by choice.
His body lifted.
Forward.
Not because he willed it.
Because the light did.
The Core was no longer passive.
It was a conduit.
And Cain had just become a passenger.
The Core moved.
Cain didn't control it.
He wasn't flying.
He was being flown—wings flared wide, trailing sparks of radiant color, dragged through the Immaterium like a spear hurled by something that had finally lost patience.
His body pulsed with rhythm—two heartbeats now, in harmony. One of blood. One of fire.
He couldn't slow.
Couldn't turn.
Couldn't scream.
He wasn't falling.
He was ascending sideways through unreality, and the Warp noticed.
At first it was quiet.
Awe-struck.
The light radiating from Cain—gold, red, white—was wrong here.
Too pure.
Too structured.
Too alive.
It burned in contrast to everything the Immaterium was: chaos, entropy, contradiction. The very fabric of this place recoiled around him like oil pushed back by flame.
And that's when the daemons came.
They didn't scream.
Not yet.
They reached.
Clawed arms emerged from the walls of unreality—arms made of teeth, ink, veils of regret. Some had fingers. Others had mouths. They weren't chasing Cain.
They were chasing the light.
Because light like this couldn't be allowed here. It was a threat. An infection.
A contradiction.
It had to be erased.
Claws slashed through warp-winds, grasping for the tiny angel-child that should not be.
Cain slapped one away with a glowing, tiny fist.
Another lunged from beneath him, jaws gaping open with fire and prophecy.
He headbutted it mid-flight, leaving a trail of blood and echoing confusion.
"Back off!" he snarled. "I've survived Catachan jungle worms with less screaming!"
The White Core flared in his skull, feeding reflexes into his nerves like an overclocked machine spirit. He ducked under a tendril of hate. Kicked off a face made of war crimes. Wove through claws that howled with every failure to connect.
They couldn't touch him for long.
The light around him scorched them.
Every time a daemon lingered too close, it burst into flame—not fire, but clarity. A burning truth that made lies unravel and hatred wither.
They screamed then.
Not in pain.
In offense.
But the Core didn't slow.
Cain couldn't stop it.
The wings on his back weren't his anymore. They beat with purpose not his own. They shimmered and burned, threading warp-space like a golden needle carving a path through impossible dark.
Planets flickered by.
Real ones. Broken ones.
A world of mirrors that screamed its own name. A gas giant bound in chains. A moon orbiting a thought. Cain passed them all in seconds, light trailing behind him like a contrail of blasphemy in reverse.
Ahead—
The Eye of Terror.
He recognized it.
He had never seen it in person, but he knew it the way nightmares know teeth.
A wound in reality. A swirling storm of red and black, vast enough to swallow thousands of star systems and make them worse. It churned with Warp tides, shrieking wind, and uncountable daemons clawing for something to do.
And Cain flew straight into it.
He didn't want to.
He tried to scream, to resist, to pull away.
The Core didn't listen.
The wings burned brighter.
And he dove into the eye of the storm.
Inside was madness.
Space bent sideways.
Stars sobbed in languages they hadn't earned.
Planets fell upward.
Cain passed through it all—his light burning a path across the inner wall of the Eye like a scalpel across an infection.
Daemons fled.
Some tried to hold him.
He tore through them like a baby-shaped meteor made of flame and heresy.
One larger daemon—massive, horned, cloaked in screaming skins—managed to grab hold of his ankle.
Cain looked down, glowing with fury.
"You really want to test me today?"
He cocked his tiny, golden fist.
Then punched the daemon so hard its skull turned into a flower of light.
He exited the Eye of Terror not like a soul leaving the Warp—
But like a god ejected from it for misbehavior.
The galaxy spread before him.
Terra in the distance.
Cadia—broken, still glowing faintly.
Fleet wrecks. Throne-worlds. Worlds he'd never set foot on but had died to protect anyway.
He passed them all.
And somehow, they felt him pass.
A ripple moved through the Immaterium.
A pulse of defiance.
A whisper of light.
A child who would not yield.
Cain blinked.
Not out of pain.
But wonder.
He saw it now.
All of it.
The Imperium—burning and praying.
The Chaos Gods—raging and laughing.
The Warp—twisting and shuddering.
And through it all, one absurd, angry voice muttering:
"Please don't let this end with me crashing into a cathedral naked again."
And the light laughed with him.
Not cruelly.
But fondly.
Because it was taking him somewhere.
Somewhere he needed to be.
It began with a shimmer.
Not on Meighen Island. Not even in the sky above it.
It began far away—on the edge of the galaxy, beyond Terra, beyond the warp-ripped bones of Cadia, where stars flicker like old lanterns and the Warp holds its breath.
There, in the void between, a light was born.
Not a star.
Not fire.
Not war.
A verdict.
And it came.
Faster than anything that had ever crossed the veil between dimensions.
Through the Immaterium.
Through the Eye of Terror.
Through the breathless quiet of orbit.
Through the curtain of night.
And it did not fall.
It stabbed.
At 23:59, December 25th, 1900, the northern hemisphere blinked.
Every sky from Greenland to Russia lit up in silent detonation. The auroras died. The stars vanished. The very air paused, as if ashamed to breathe.
Above Ellesmere.
Above the Arctic Circle.
Above the black sea ice surrounding Meighen Island—
The heavens tore open.
And the beam arrived.
A single, colossal column of light descended from the sky like the sword of a long-forgotten god. Not gold. Not white. Not red.
All three.
Spiraling together in an impossible shaft of heat and judgment—wide as a mountain, impossibly straight, terrifying in its precision.
It hit the island with no sound.
Not at first.
Because sound couldn't keep up.
On Meighen Island, the altar was already soaked. The stone circle ran red with blood and viscera. The snow had melted into a slick of ruin.
And the dogs were feasting.
Flesh hung from their jaws. Bones cracked beneath eager teeth. They gnawed on thighs, on necks, on dreams long since surrendered.
They didn't look up.
Not at first.
Not until the wind stopped.
Not until the shadows bent the wrong way.
Not until the light arrived like a scalpel of creation, clean and silent and absolute.
The first to react was Vomit.
The only dog left that still remembered what it meant to be more than flesh. The one who had been touched—barely, faintly—by daemonic madness.
He looked up.
And saw it.
The light.
The shape behind the light.
The truth behind the shape.
And he ran.
Tried to.
He made it three paces.
And then—
He was gone.
Not vaporized.
Unwritten.
The other dogs never moved.
The beam hit.
And the world stopped.
The stones didn't shatter.
They ceased.
Every rune. Every blood smear. Every crude symbol carved by Unarjuk's hand—erased in an instant. Not blasted. Corrected. The circle itself folded inward, like a wound suturing itself shut with light.
Unarjuk didn't scream.
He didn't have time.
He raised his arms, eyes wide with joy, grin split to the jaw—
And then he was a silhouette.
Then a memory.
Then nothing.
The beam held.
For sixty full seconds.
And the world watched.
From mountaintops.
From naval ships.
From Inuit camps, from Danish outposts, from German survey decks and American steamships. The skies of the North lit like a funeral pyre so divine it had no precedent.
This was not aurora.
This was not war.
This was a correction.
And in that blinding center—
After sixty seconds—
Something moved.
It wasn't fire.
It wasn't debris.
It wasn't divine thunder.
It was a figure.
Small. Radiant. Cloaked in fire and resolve.
Cain.
He emerged from the beam like a bullet wrapped in purpose. His wings flared once, his body trailing smoke and heat, his hair streaming like a comet's tail. His Core pulsed like a second sun inside his chest.
And he landed.
Not lightly.
Not softly.
He struck the center of the crater on one knee, his fist driving into the glassed earth, a shockwave bursting outward as steam hissed and stone cracked.
The light winked out.
Gone.
As if it had never been.
The crater hissed in silence.
The snow vaporized.
The island trembled.
And at the center—
Cain knelt.
Alone.
Alive.
Awake.
And the world would never be the same.