I. Regent by Writ, Student by Habit
When the fleets burned outward and the Great Crusade found its stride, the Emperor set His house in order. By special writ, He placed Aurelia beside Malcador—coadjutor to the Regent—in the dull, enormous art of keeping an empire breathing. Her days were filled with councils and ledgers: the Administratum's endless tallies, the Council of Terra's dry combats, the grave logic of the Imperial Tithe. Worlds became columns; hope became supply.
Malcador was a guide, right hand, and patient metronome. "Behind every victory," he said, "someone balanced numbers against graves." She learned. Numbers liked her; they moved when she moved. Yet patterns revealed absence as much as order, and one absence sang loudest.
News came late, or not at all. Astropathic choirs strained until voices broke; soul‑bound seers bled from eyes and hands as messages burned through them, many ending their songs blind and shaking. Navigators wrestled the tides with their warp‑eye pinned to the Astronomican, guiding hulls by pain—migraine and nausea, years shaved off with every translation—carrying rumours faster than truth. Message‑tallies still died at the edge of Segmentum lines. The Officio Astra Telepathica did what it could—relay‑forts, choir rotations, null wards and cauteries, pain made into practice—but the Imperium's breath still caught in its throat.
"Communication," she said at last, "is a battle of its own." Malcador looked over the rims of his age and did not disagree.
That night, she went inward. She returned to the quiet notch she had cut into the world as a child without knowing— a pocket rubbed smooth by play and thought. It had been only a refuge; now she tested what it could bear and what it would refuse. When she asked gently, edges appeared; when she changed her mind, they moved. It sat beside the roads others name—the Warp, and that other path only half‑whispered—yet answered to a softer law that felt like hers.
She gave it a name to fit its work: the Basilica Liminalis—a threshold kept for making, where ideas kneel to be measured and time waits outside the door. With the name fixed, the hall steadied and became a little more itself.
The Basilica offered her the temptation of a library without walls. She set rules before she opened a single page:
No Abominable Intelligence.
No minds of iron; no engines that think in men's place.
No weapons by design and think for themselves.
Tools for survival may bite when needed, but bite last.
Only what is asked for. A chapter, not the book. A page, not a century. Only for a time can we answer for. The past is deep; the present must breathe.
"More is always there," she told herself. "I will not drown." She thought of Magnus and loved him more for how the sea had called to him; she loved herself enough to leave the shore unbroken.
She asked the Basilica to remember a particular season of mankind—the locked rooms of the so‑called Dark Age of Technology, without the hubris that broke it. The walls around her became gentle archives: lives and ledgers, workbenches and workshop air, soft flecks of memory drifting like dust in late sun. She asked for communication first—ways to speak across the black without tearing singers apart.
The Basilica answered as if pleased. Patterns coalesced: relay protocols that treated choirs like lungs, not flares; null‑baffled choir sancta that bled feedback into stone instead of soul; phase‑hedged cyphers that refused corruption without requiring a daemon to hold the door; cogitator routes that spread pain thin and spared lives.
She read slowly. A page; a pause. A breath; a blessing. Each leaf turned with a sound like patience. In a single inhalation, she could have known a century. She did not. She learned enough to build, not enough to boast.
"More," whispered the easy part of her mind. "Just a little more. Keep them alive—Astartes, fleet crews, void‑born, the countless unnamed. Ships. Armours. Perhaps—"
She closed the book. "Another time," she told herself, voice steady by decision alone. Fear came then—not of what she had seen, but of how sweet it felt to see, and how swiftly righteousness puts on the mask of hunger. She set the fear where it could be watched and felt human in the watching.
From the constellations braided through her hair, a small green point brightened—as if a sleeping firefly turned in its dream. The shard she had sheltering there—Og'dríada, though she did not know the word C'tan—offered notice, not hunger: a tremor in the Basilica's air that suggested it, too, remembered how signals could cross voids without screaming.
"I will listen," she said, "only to what I asked: ways to speak and keep the speaking kind."
The shard answered in angles and intervals rather than words: hints of lattice‑paths that carried meaning as pressure instead of light; equations that made distance behave; out-of-phase mirrors that passed the handprint of a thought without the heat of a soul. Anyone else would have bled on the edges of such shapes, of such technology, of such secret power. She did not. She made sense because she asked for sense.
"Only what I asked," she reminded both of them. "Not history. Not hunger." The green dimmed to assent, and the Basilica resumed its habit of kindness.
She came back to the worktables and drew like a woman who had seen a better map and chosen only the roads her people had feet for.
Choir‑Forts (Astra Relays): Deep fortress‑bunkers for astropaths in space. Built with null‑baffling and pariah inlays so warp backwash drains into stone, not into singers.
-Use: rotate choirs like shifts, not sacrifices; link to fleet/sector hubs.
-Power for the Imperium: messages that once cost dozens of lives now travel with predictable, low loss—orders and distress calls arrive in time to matter.
Segmentum Lattice: A network plan tying the five Segmenta (Solar, Pacificus, Tempestus, Obscurus, Ultima) into redundant routes.
-Use: if a relay falls to storm or war, packets auto‑route the long way round.
-Power: keeps crusade groups synchronized and stops worlds being cut off for months—the first seedbed of secession and heresy.
Chorus‑Spires (Iteritas Antennae): Standard‑pattern receiver masts any forgeworld or hive can mass‑produce (ferrocrete base, sanctified copper crown, ferrite‑null lattice).
-Use: catch astropathic packets from orbital vox‑buoys/Choir‑Forts and rebroadcast them by vox/pict across a system.
-Power: governors, Munitorum clerks, and Astartes get clean updates in days rather than months—even on backwater worlds.
Cipher Rites: Teachable liturgies that wrap astropathic messages in phase‑hedged number‑prayers.
-Use: codifies sendings so daemons can't find purchase; verification hashes survive transit.
-Power: cleaner traffic, fewer corrupted orders, and fewer choir deaths from Perils of the Warp.
Navigator Addenda: Astronomican‑linked addenda for the Navis Nobilite: aligns Choir‑Forts to broadcast low‑band beacon‑harmonics keyed to the Astronomican's phase, stitching "waystone" constellations Navigators can read without overdriving the warp‑eye.
-Use: charts and drills teach helms to ride these lanes—repeatable, humane routes that cut migraines, hemorrhage risk, and translation drift.
-Power: safer translations on long arcs; fewer lost in storm space; fleets keep schedule while the Astronomican and regional Choir‑Forts act together like a lighthouse chain. Choir-Forts use the light of the Astronomican to create repetitive paths.
Aurelian Null‑Materials (Astropath & Beacon Suite):Factory‑honest substances that make warp backwash less effective and keep messages clean.
-Use: line choir vaults, thrones, antennae pedestals, and bulkheads; issued to the Officio Astra Telepathica and key yards.
-Power: faster packet lock, fewer Perils, longer careers for choirs.
Aegis‑Null (Adamant Nullis): dense meta‑ceramic doped with pariah salts; fitted along throne rails and vault ribs.
-Effect: strips daemonic overtones from sendings, shortening acquisition time and preventing spike‑back.
Lux‑Ward Glass (Vitrum Luxward): transparent hexagrammic laminate for view‑ports and instrument faces.
-Effect: converts psychic overpressure to harmless light, improving clarity and reducing choir hemorrhage.
Shipborne Warp‑Aids (Aurelian Patterns): Devices fitted to voidships to smooth translation and ease crews.
-Power: calmer seas in the immaterium; fewer losses in storm space.
Gellar‑Cantor Coupler: bridges a ship's Gellar coil to Astronomican‑keyed beacon harmonics from nearby Choir‑Forts.
-Effect: synchronizes field "song" with safe lanes, cutting turbulence and Navigator strain.
Phase‑Keel Trimmers: dynamic micro‑vanes along the spine that adjust hull phase during translation.
-Effect: reduces shear and drift on entry/exit; fewer catastrophic re‑emergences. Navigator & Astropath Instruments: Personal issue to help specialists survive longer and suffer less.
-Power: humane endurance without dulling the gift.
Solace‑Diadem (Navigator): a null‑filament circlet with gentle cantor nodes.
-Effect: filters spurious harmonics hitting the warp‑eye; lowers migraine and hemorrhage incidence; syncs with Solace‑Thrones when present.
Psalm‑Breather (Astropath): breathing mask and chest‑band that guide cadence during send/receive.
-Effect: spreads load across body rhythms, blunting burn‑through and extending usable voice without loss of fidelity.
Aurelia filed grant writs that looked like modest reforms. The Mechanicum saw diagrams that made sense; the Telepathica saw fewer funerals, and the Navigators could breath easier, all hidden in the calculation of a forgotten age, an ancient being and her own mind gave her; the Council saw line‑items that saved crowns. No one saw the Basilica behind the ink.
"Enough for now," Malcador said one evening, finding her at a balcony with ink on her thumb and too much light in her eyes. He did not ask where she had learned what she offered. He could taste a threshold when he stood on one.
"Enough," she agreed. Her voice made enough sounded like courage.
A year later, a choir in Hydraphur sang a message to Cypra Mundi and lost only three voices where ten would have gone. On Nocturne, a relay fort's pariah stones shaved the worst off a solar storm; the message arrived ragged, alive. A Navigator child on Baal spoke of a new "softness" along a familiar route. On a lunar observatory, an old cogitator learned a new trick and politely refused to overheat when asked to do the work of two.
Back in the Basilica Liminalis, the book waited, patient as tides. She stood with her hands at her sides and did not touch it.
"I could see what I am," she whispered into the kind air. "I could walk backwards until language ran out and forward until maps grew tired." She did not. She believed in her father's silence because belief was easier than breaking it; she loved him because love was the first rule she had ever learned. And obeyed him, because she was made to obey him.
"I will ask later," she said. "For now: enough." The Basilica sounded pleased. The green star among her hair went quiet again.