The battlefield lay silent.
The air, once a chorus of screams, gunfire, and roaring engines, had gone still — as if the world itself had been muted by the sheer finality of what had just occurred.
Smoke curled from the shattered remnants of the dam, no longer a structure, but a scar carved into the land by wrath and sacrifice. It jutted from the landscape like a snapped bone, its jagged remains half-sunken in churning floodwater that foamed with blood, oil, and ash.
The valley was quiet.
But it was not peaceful.
Corpses floated like leaves — Orks and humans, indistinguishable in death. Chunks of twisted armor drifted beside shattered war machines. Flames guttered on the wreckage of a ruined Chimera, flickering weakly in the breeze, as if reluctant to admit the war was truly over.
And the flood kept moving — slow, vast, indifferent — dragging away the last of the Waaagh! like filth from a wound.
High above it all, Felicia Tayber stood frozen on the cliffs.
Her eyes were rimmed red, throat raw from shouting orders and names that would never be answered. She clutched the vox unit in both hands, knuckles pale, holding it like a rosary. The channel was open, hissing static.
"Commissar… do you read…?"
Nothing.
Not even a broken signal. Not even the click of a dying unit.
Only silence.
Beside her, Jurgen knelt on one knee. His coat was in tatters, one leg wrapped in emergency field mesh, and his face was half-bandaged from burns. He stared down into the broken valley, unmoving, as if his presence alone could force Cain to rise from the water.
But there was no sign of him.
No coat.
No chainsword.
No body.
Only the wind.
And then—
The sky opened.
It began with a shimmer.
A pulse of brightness, just barely visible above the clouds, as if the veil between the mortal and the divine had thinned for one unbearable moment.
Then came the light.
Not lightning. Not fire. Not the cold, clinical glow of a searchlight or the blue crackle of plasma.
This was something older. Something deeper.
A beam of radiance, wide as a fortress tower, stabbed down from the heavens and struck the valley like a divine spear. It was not merely white — it was gold, red, molten silver — a prism of sacred power too complex for any eye to truly understand.
It did not simply fall.
It descended with purpose.
A shaft of celestial judgment and impossible grace, reaching down from beyond the stars, through the Warp and realspace alike, piercing all the filth of the battlefield to land on one spot:
The ruin where Ciaphas Cain had vanished.
The ground beneath the beam shuddered.
A low rumble rolled across the cliffs, and dust rose in swirling eddies. Chunks of debris began to rise into the air, lifted by unseen forces. Stones floated. Shell casings hovered. Ash spiraled upward, caught in a silent cyclone of reverence.
The water at the base of the valley parted — just enough to reveal something glowing beneath.
A figure.
A shape.
Rising.
It was him.
Ciaphas Cain — or what remained.
His body floated upright in the heart of the beam, arms slack at his sides, legs gently trailing behind. His greatcoat was scorched, bloodstained, barely clinging to him. His flesh was torn, marked by the battle, his face pale beneath layers of soot and ash.
But then, before the stunned eyes of everyone watching…
He began to change.
His coat disintegrated, flaking away into motes of gold. His boots, his weapons, his armor — all dissolved into the light, leaving only naked flesh, suspended in radiance.
Then his body contracted.
His limbs folded inward, muscle reshaping, bone shortening. Time itself reversed its hold on him. Scars faded. Wounds sealed. The lines of age and wear melted away like wax.
And where a war-hardened Commissar had once floated...
...there now hovered a baby.
But not a helpless child. No wailing, no squirming.
This was an impossibly ripped, musclebound infant — no larger than a standard ration pack, but gleaming with divine definition. Eight-pack abs flexed beneath perfect golden skin. His tiny fists were clenched with purpose. His tiny jaw was sharp with destiny.
He was absurd.
And he was sacred.
Light flared again as his hair erupted, flowing in golden strands like molten solar flare. It curled around his face, radiant and impossibly soft, framing features that were at once innocent and eternal.
Then he opened his eyes.
No longer brown.
Ocean blue — deep and calm, endless and ancient, the color of things lost to time and myth.
They did not blink.
They saw everything.
From his back, light exploded once more.
Not flames.
Not fire.
But wings.
Golden, angelic, carved from divine will itself — layered like the blades of heaven's armies, shimmering with echoes of holy wars long forgotten. They spread wide, vast enough to span the cliff walls, and they pulsed not with heat, but with purpose.
He hovered there, motionless and magnificent, arms outstretched.
The infant Cain.
Reborn.
Ascended.
And he was beautiful.
Jurgen fell to his knees.
Felicia's breath caught in her throat. Around them, the surviving soldiers stared upward in awe, weapons forgotten, mouths agape. Some wept. Others sank to their knees. A few reached out in reverence.
And Cain — little Cain — looked down at them.
At the friends who had survived.
At the world he had saved.
He reached out with one small, muscular hand — a gesture of farewell, of apology, of gratitude.
He almost touched them.
But the light took him.
The beam surged, brighter than ever, and with a final pulse, it carried him skyward, his wings folding into the light, his golden hair streaming behind him like a comet's tail.
He rose.
Faster and faster.
Until he was nothing more than a star.
Then gone.
---
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 in the destruction of the dam. Five claimed he was seen crawling from the floodwaters before succumbing to wounds. One absurdly insisted he commandeered a submerged Ork submarine and vanished westward. And one… was mine."
"I saw what the others saw."
"A light that split the sky. A body lifted. A transformation no cogitator, no logis engine, no priest could explain. An impossible rebirth. And then… nothing. Only awe. Only silence."
"Officially, the Ecclesiarchy has declared the event a 'localized divine manifestation,' possibly sanctioned by the Emperor Himself. The Mechanicus, in their ever-charming way, have filed for the recovery of any 'unusual xeno-tech' in the area — as if Cain was strapped to a Necron teleportation beam instead of being pulled into the heavens by sheer narrative inevitability."
"Unofficially?"
"Ciaphas Cain died like he lived: at the center of a catastrophe, covered in other people's blood, surrounded by fire, and somehow — somehow — the last thing anyone could look away from."
"The statue they built on Perlia stands over one hundred meters tall. It depicts him in full dress uniform, one hand resting 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 blue as the ones 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 small cult has sprung up around the event, worshipping a golden-winged baby with abs. I've filed for censure, of course."
"But I haven't enforced it."
"Because if there's one thing I learned from Cain — a lesson he never intended to teach, but lived nonetheless — it's this:"
Sometimes the truth doesn't matter.
Sometimes, a lie is just true enough to be holy.
And sometimes, the Imperium needs a miracle — even if it comes in the form of a sarcastic, terrified, coward-turned-angel baby with an eight-pack.
"Ave Imperator."
– Inquisitor Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos
---
For Cain there was no pain at first.
Just the memory of it, echoing like the last note of a scream in a cathedral that no longer stood.
One second, Ciaphas Cain had been standing on a crumbling dam, his chainsword lodged in the chest of Warlord Gargash Korbul, victory clenched in blood-soaked fists. The next, a burning Ork bomber slammed into the deck and the world turned to light.
Not white light.
Everything light.
Cain did not black out.
He tore free.
Something deeper than flesh had been peeled away. His body—bone, blood, brain—was gone, cast into vapor. But something endured. Something hard to kill.
Consciousness.
Awareness.
That stubborn sliver of self that refused to be extinguished, even when wrapped in fire and reduced to myth.
He drifted.
No.
He plummeted—not down, not through space, but through time, through memory, through a kind of vast spiritual afterbirth that had no form, only feeling.
The Warp.
Not the swirling madness he had known as a Commissar—screaming daemons, impossible architecture, horror smeared across eternity—but something older. Something cleaner. Not gentle, but not yet monstrous.
It welcomed him like fire welcomes dry paper.
Flashes surged around him—each faster than thought, each more intimate than breath.
He saw:
A sea of green bodies falling beneath lasfire.
Jurgen firing his melta into a Tyranid's open mouth.
A civilian woman crushed under rubble.
An officer's eyes as Cain gave the retreat order a moment too late.
The face of a child he had pretended not to see when the transports left.
Amberley Vail, smiling, her expression too wise, too sad.
Each memory burned into him.
Each sin, each triumph.
Each cowardice that had somehow been rebranded as courage.
He screamed.
Not with lungs. With soul. With the essence of what he had always hidden: fear, guilt, defiance, and the bitter, endless surprise that he had somehow lived this long.
But the Warp was not finished.
From the swirling void, light began to take shape.
Three lights.
Not colors—forces. They had color only because his human mind demanded it.
🔴 Red.
Hot. Violent. The pulse of war. Strength without hesitation. It smelled like blood and tasted like iron. It knew his fear—and roared through it.
⚪ White.
Cool. Still. The ache of healing, the sting of forgiveness. It wrapped around him like gauze dipped in starlight, not soothing but steadying.
✨ Gold.
Warm. Vast. The weight of destiny. The silent hand on the shoulder. It didn't ask permission. It already owned him.
They did not speak.
They did not need to.
They entered him—not piercing, not merging. Becoming. As if they had always been there, waiting for the meat and myth to finally burn away.
Cain tried to cry out, to deny, to demand explanation.
None came.
Only fire.
The three lights fused. Not into a harmony, but a pressure, a gravitational singularity of identity.
And at the center of it, he was reborn.
The Warp screamed. The galaxy shuddered.
Somewhere far, far below—on a tiny planet he had never heard of, in a year that meant nothing to the Imperium—the sky split.
A single point of golden-white fire erupted across the northern night like a second sun, trailing heat, light, and unknowable force.
Cain fell.
Not like a man.
Like a judgment.
Like a spear hurled by a dead god who never meant for him to die at all.
And back on earth, on the 25th of December, 1900, the sky had no stars—not above Meighen Island, not anymore.
Smoke still lingered over the stone circle, thick with iron and rendered fat. Where snow should have been, there was only a dark slurry of ash, blood, and pulverized bone. Once silent and brooding, the stones now stood drenched and slick, coated in ruin. They did not whisper. They did not speak.
They watched.
And at the center of it all, barefoot and half-naked, stood Unarjuk.
His eyes glowed with fever. His arms were painted with drying blood. He had crowned himself with a ribcage.
He was humming something tuneless and slow—half prayer, half lullaby—as he arranged a final hand onto his altar of corpses. A finger popped free. He replaced it with a toe.
"Precision," he murmured, nodding to no one. "Artistry. Chaos with symmetry."
He turned to face the sky.
The heavens were silent.
Unarjuk raised his arms.
"Now," he whispered, "I am ready."
And the sky replied.
It began with a single point of gold—Tiny.Almost playful.A flicker above the horizon, no larger than a candle's flame, hovering in the frozen dark like the ember of a forgotten star.
Then it grew.
Faster than thought.Faster than anything that should move through atmosphere.
It didn't fall.It descended.
Like a verdict.Like a blade.Like judgment had found coordinates.
The sky rippled.
Clouds didn't part—they split, cleaved as if struck by an unseen sword. The auroras vanished like frightened spirits. Wind died mid-motion. The world held its breath.
Then came the heat.
Snow evaporated not in steam but silence—gone before it had a chance to hiss. Trees—those few that still clung to the black soil like old ghosts—wilted, dried, then disintegrated into fine gray powder. Moss curled in on itself, crisped, and vanished.
The pressure dropped.
The air screamed.
Not through sound, but through the collapse of everything familiar. Every molecule seemed to tremble at the edge of annihilation. Shadows grew long, then shrank, then fled. Color bled from the ice. For one impossible moment, the night sky above Meighen Island became day—
Not gentle.
Not warm.
But blinding.Indifferent.Divine.
Unarjuk's grin stretched wider. His eyes gleamed, unblinking, caught in the ecstasy of prophecy fulfilled.
He didn't run.
He didn't kneel.
He laughed.
"YES! YES, YOU SEE! THE GATE IS OPEN! THE—"
He raised his hands toward the descending beam like a priest welcoming god's fire.
The beam hit.
There was no sound.
No thunder. No explosion. No screech.
Only obliteration.
The light struck the circle with the force of a collapsing star—gold, white, and red, fused in a spiral of raw metaphysical force.
It didn't detonate.It didn't shatter.It unwrote.
Reality folded in on itself, pressed flat, then erased.
The altar of corpses? Gone.
The stones? Vaporized at impact, their ancient carvings and unknowable symbols reduced to quantum fog, flung screaming into the stratosphere like the forgotten memories of dead gods.
Unarjuk?
There was no scream.No final curse.No defiance.Just a silhouette—brief, defiant, arms stretched wide, mouth open in laughter—
Then nothing.
No blood. No bones. No ash.Just a hole in the world where a man had stood.
Absence.
The ground liquefied.
The crater wasn't dug—it was burned into existence, fused and carved in one act. Layers of permafrost melted in an instant, then boiled, then ceased to be. Rock turned glass. Moss incinerated. Every living thing in a kilometer's radius was erased—tree, insect, microbe.
Pools of water nearby didn't ripple.They screamed into vapor.
The ice shelf shattered, driven back by a wind not of this Earth—a wall of displaced atmosphere and holy force. Massive floes broke like plates of sugar and were flung into the sea.
Snowfields hundreds of meters away didn't melt gradually—they collapsed, sluicing into muddy runoff under a sun that should not exist.
On a distant ridge, half-frozen Inuit survivors fell to their knees, clutching their faces, their throats, their chests—not from awe, but raw, animal terror.
Some wept.Some convulsed.One screamed so loud his voice tore and blood sprayed from his mouth.
Birds died mid-flight—feathers scorched, wings seized, hearts stopped by pressure alone.
The air turned sharp with ozone and the sweet, sick scent of vaporized bone.
And then—
At the center of the storm—
The light softened.
Where once had been judgment, now remained aftermath.
A crater. A basin of cooling glass and steaming stone, blackened at the edges, glowing at the center.
And from that center—
Something moved.
A shimmer.
A stir.
Then a shape.
Small.
Golden.
Steam curled from his shoulders like torn silk. His skin glowed faintly, slick with the breath of heaven. Around him, frost hissed and retreated, as though in deference.
The wind circled. But it did not touch.
Then—
Wings.
Radiant. Massive. Composed of fire and light. They unfurled from his back with no flesh or bone, only power. Each feather shimmered, blades of heat and truth, flickering in golden-red arcs like burning parchment.
They did not flap.
They simply were.
He hovered—then slowly, impossibly, drifted downward.
His feet touched the earth.
And the wings began to fold.
They withdrew into his back, not like appendages, but like secrets being tucked away. The skin behind them closed smoothly. No seam. No scar.
Just flesh.
Just silence.
A child.
No.
An infant.
Forty, maybe fifty centimeters tall.
Naked. Glowing. Alive.
His hair was already wild and gold, tousled like a fire that had forgotten how to go out. His chest rose slowly, calmly. His limbs were absurdly well-muscled, like a statue of a hero compressed into the frame of something divine and ridiculous.
And then—
He opened his eyes.
Ocean-blue.
Clear.
Endless.
They did not blink.
They simply saw.
He said nothing.
He did nothing.
But the world felt it.
Something had arrived.
Something terrible.
Something divine.