166. The Last Piece

When Titus arrived back in Vox’s room and crawled into her bed, he woke her from an uneasy dream. She slung all her appendages around him and he dropped on top of her with a chuckle. Only half awake, it was not entirely intentional that her mind slipped over. She had dreamed of Celeste. For a moment the two of them regarded the fleeting images of a lost friend. Then they both struggled to push them aside. There was no use in dwelling on this. Corruption could take anyone. Even friends. When it happened, you cut them out of your hearts and, if you were very lucky, had other friends left who could help to tend to the wound.
To get away from these dark thoughts, they reviewed Titus’ conversation with Arrick. Vox was delighted about it and it turned out that she even remembered a few details of what Titus had learned.
When they came to the point where Arrick had talked about his dead lover, Vox remembered what she had learned from him about where children came from and things got very awkward.
Both of them were overwhelmed by the sheer thought of the possibility of having children. After the initial shock, Titus warmed to it and found a happy joy in the prospect. He remembered the children of Vox’s tribe on Thetis and he saw Corven and Xavor every day. Having children of their own seemed an incredibly worthwhile endeavour.
This train of thought was most unpleasantly interrupted by Sanguinius. In the enclosed realm of their minds his disgust and contempt flared like hot plasma when he pointed out that having children clearly involved at least one woman and that between the three of them they had exactly none. Had he shown compassion or pity for them as he laid out the facts, the blow might have been half as bad. This way the information hit home with full force.
To the same extent Titus had been happy about the thought Vox was downcast when her Primarch told them this. She shrank together. Her muted thoughts tried to spiral into themselves and away from the forefather while Titus wrapped himself around her and burned in a steady, cool kind of anger.
After a while, Vox forced herself to re-emerge and turned back to the former topic. Together they contemplated whether to tell Arrick about the connection of their minds.
They both found that they trusted the friend deeply. Not only because of his readiness to sacrifice himself. There was something incredibly solid about the white wolf. A profound loyalty, the conditions for which they had met by happenstance. They decided to confide in him but agreed that he would not learn about the Emperor. This subject was too precarious in too many ways. In the wake of this, they thought about telling the rest of Aegis about their connection but decided against it. If someone asked, they would tell but refrain from advertising the fact.
Soft remorse about the thing with the children lingered between them while they dropped off to sleep but it was mitigated by their situation. Trying to have kids in the middle of a war would have been downright insane. They could dwell on this after Terra.
Until then, they had plenty to do and it started with Hierouba’s succession.
That the spiritual leader of a chapter should become chapter mistress was a rare occurrence but it had happened in the history of the Wings of War twice already. Vox was able to confirm this in the copies of the library they had brought with them. Just naming Saphane as candidate did not make her mistress, however, and the chapter underwent the same, lengthy process as before. 3rd captain Meriar was named as a possible candidate alongside Vox and Saphane while new 1st captain Athara inadvertently sabotaged quick progress by demanding that the whole procedure should be followed to the letter. New to her position she wanted to get things right but her polite pursuit of regularity caused more than one fist to bunch under the table.
In the end, Saphane did not implode on her inauguration and finally, everybody got back to training.
In a way this even included Arrick. He had received the hypno-conditioning for his implants and had learned to move his arms by now. At least sufficiently so that he wanted to try himself in light combat exercises. Sadly, it soon became apparent that he had by no means progressed far enough in controlling the new mechanical appendages that he could use a weapon again. The implants were powerful. Technically, he was stronger than before his injury but he lacked the finesse of movement he had developed in long years of war and preparation for it.
When he left Aegis to their training that first day, clearly upset about the way things had gone, Titus asked Vox for permission to conduct personal training units with him for a while.
She was only too glad to allow this and between the two of them the captain and the shield devised highly specialised and selective training units to get on top of Arrick’s coordination. Titus was glad that the white wolf never mocked him or imputed to him that he was only helping because of his guilty conscience and Arrick highly valued Titus’ input and time. Together, they bit through this hardship. Fighting to become better than before and leave the weakness behind, Titus felt honoured and grateful for the chance to give something he had received himself: A helping hand, a few hours of time and, on the days when there was nothing else to be gained, a shoulder to surreptitiously lean on.
Soon, Titus found that Arrick woke very much the same feeling inside him as Vox had done in their early days together and he had to stop himself from calling the white wolf ‘little brother’. It was Vox who had to remind him that Arrick was more than a hundred years older than he was.
Shortly before they reached their last destination before leaving the Jericho Reach, Arrick was fit enough to take up training with his squad again.
Aegis welcomed their captain back in a warm and quiet manner. He simply dropped back into place among them, mending a crack in the shield of humanity.
Back on Erioch and on several stops in between, Ferone had arranged for 8th company to be released from the quarantine around the Rheelas system. Therefore, another hundred Space Marines awaited them at the Jericho Maw Warp Gate. With this they had gathered all the forces they were going to take along and in theory there was nothing left to do before they left the Jericho Reach.
But when they fell out of the warp, close to the gate and Vox, Titus and Saphane went to the bridge to await Captain Issar of 8th company, surveillance already had a visual on a ship that was all too familiar to Titus.
He had last seen it from the hull of the ‘Lawbringer’ before he had fallen asleep, guarded by a little brother in black and silver armour. The shock about seeing the ‘Fall of Angels’ was showing in his face when he turned to Vox, who mutely nodded for him to take his gauntlet off while she did likewise. Only in their connected minds did he learn what was happening.
Vox was deeply sorry that she had forgotten to prepare Titus for it. The entirety of what Sanguinius had arranged on Erioch had slipped her mind after he had been pushed back.
Here now was the last part of it: With the leverage Ferone and Elaine had been able to remind them about, Sanguinius had forced Inquisitor Zork to arrange for the ‘Fall of Angels’ to meet them for a most disconcerting reason. The revelation was especially disturbing due to the accuracy with which Vox remembered all the details that had led to it. While most of her other memories had been shrouded in time, these had been preserved by Sanguinius and now stood out like grotesquely grown plants in a desert.
Back when Thrax had taken Titus hostage, the first thing he had made him do was to set him down on an unknown daemon world to recover a mysterious sword. When Vox had sat with the former Ultramarine in Thrax’s old chambers before they had fled the ‘Fall of Angels’, she had heard something whisper in the room. Back then she had already suspected that it had been a powerful artefact of daemonic nature but her first concern had been to get the captain to safety. When she had read Laraise’s mind to get leverage on the woman, Vox had learned that Titus had obtained a sword for Thrax and when Titus had been wounded on Erioch and she had healed him, she had seen the artefact in question through his memory.
After all these unremarkable, downright random details, she had found Sanguinius and the angel primarch had put all these pieces together. 
What Titus had obtained for Thrax had been the Anathame. The sword that had mortally wounded Horus and driven his captains to bring him in contact with the warp to maybe heal him. From there, the warmaster had fallen to chaos, had followed his treacherous path and had been annihilated from history by his father.
As Vox had already revealed, Sanguinius carried an echo of Horus within his essence but that was all it was: A faint reverberation of what the brother had been. This alone was insufficient to revive the traitor like Vox planned to do. The sword, however, had been told his name and parts of his blood and essence would be embedded in its structure.
Titus revolted. The strain of keeping silent as they stood hand in hand on the bridge started to shake him physically and for once it was Vox who watched the storm of emotions drift by. Passersby gave them concerned looks but left them undisturbed. 
As they stared at the picture of the dreaded ship, all the reasons why this endeavour was a terrible idea swept over them like a tidal wave. 
Bringing back a traitor, this traitor of all was bad enough. Using a daemonic weapon to sabotage the endeavour, was against all sanity and reason but in Vox there was this certainty. Titus felt how it trickled over to him. Slowly it enveloped him, freezing the hotness of his abhorrence into solid complaisance.
A god without forgiveness.
The Emperor had not forgiven his son.
Horus had to meet his father and receive forgiveness or everything they had been fighting for was doomed anyway. Horrified to feel this happening, Titus watched his wrath congeal and his resistance dwindle. It was not Vox’s intention to do this to him but her conviction was greater than even her concern for him. Necessity and compassion. What made her Vox enveloped him and tamed his defiance. 
Against Sanguinius, he had taken up the fight but this was something from within his beloved. She conceded that Horus was the man she had never met. The traitor who had sacrificed millions of lives for his morbid, insane lust for power. The one who had killed his own brother, tried to kill his father and thrown the imperium of man into ages of darkness.
And yet, she remembered the sadness. 
Innumerable times had she followed Sanguinius to his grave. Eventually she had followed him beyond but never had she been able to shed this sorrow about what had happened. There was bitterness in her but only about the needlessness of the suffering Horus had caused.
Here she stood and she knew a way to atone for at least a little of it. Choosing another path was unthinkable.
It was at this point that Titus’ resistance broke.
She had come to make amends.
Oh, how he loved her and how his love echoed in her soul. The heat and warmth of it spread through their joined minds, unmaking incredible pain and covering the deepest wounds.
A reluctance, bordering on fear of what they were undertaking lingered between them but together they would push through this.
“From here we fall”, they thought while their eyes rested on the ship that could not have been named any more fittingly.
In the face of a world gone wrong, two angels would strike out to resolve a fault they had not caused. They would retrieve the dreaded daemon sword and bring the greatest traitor in history back to the world.
And all they could hope for as they fell was that they would turn out to be able to fly.