The warning came like sickness. Wards in the deep Palace screamed; locks shuddered in their housings; the air tasted of iron. Sisters signed fast and cold. Custodes ran without seeming to.
Aurelia reached the Throne vault and saw the truth like broken glass: the Golden Throne buckled, the great gate it anchored splintering; the Immaterium clawing to get in sideways. The Emperor sat upon that engine and held a broken world together with the weight of His will. Arkhan Land was already shouting at physics and making it behave.
"Go," He said without looking at her. "This is not your fight."
"It is my home," she answered, voice shaking. "And you are my father."
He did not argue because there was no time to. "Then listen: this was to be a road that is not the warp. A web of safe paths. It is open in the wrong places. Hold the pieces while I set the locks."
Her mind went to her father, a way she could do it a no one else. The Emperor knew what she could be capable, with just asking. But there was no time to explain what he knew little, but for now, they focus on the the broken door.
He worked like a maker, not a priest: numbers for stitches, angles for prayers. "Keep it together, focus on what's scattered," He said. "No more. No less."
"I'll hold it," she answered, hands already moving.
Together—His will like iron bands, her presence like a solvent that made ugly seams behave—they stabilized the shattering edges, or picking up broken glass from the floor and trying to put it together. Sisters of Silence burned quietly as nulls; the Ten Thousand made a wall of gold and oath; Mechanicum detachments died in place and called it function. Valdor's voice never rose. Krole's hands said BURN / SMALL / TO SAVE / ALL.
"Who broke it?" she asked between clenched breaths.
"Magnus," He said, not unkindly, not forgiving. "Trying to warn me. Disobedience with love at its root still breaks a door."
She swallowed the answer like fire and worked. It was not hours or days but a grinding campaign—months stretched thin by time‑shear—in which nothing was "fixed," only held: she used her not-so Psyker abilities to stitch the torn rims while the Emperor drove His will inward to rebuild from the far side of the gate. Between shifts at the Throne she armed and supplied the Ten Thousand and the Silent—Nullfire Projectors, Laurel Scuta, Mark Aurelia‑Tempest Plate—so they could buy minutes and corridors in Calastar. There was no final lock to set, only a net of imperfect closures; and when it held enough to keep Terra breathing, the Emperor did not rise. He remained upon the Throne, laboring within the Webway because nowhere else was strong enough to bear Him. And because, they must make sure to retreat their troops from Calastar. The battle was not over, just in a small break.
Later, when the alarms dimmed enough for words, she ventured, "You could have told me."
"I needed you elsewhere," He said. "And you obeyed. Keep the Ten Thousand and the Silent supplied; hold the seams—but you will not go inside."
She bowed her head so He would not see her face. The shard in her hair warmed in sympathy; she commanded it to be only light.