Chapter : A Dance of Alien Fire
Lucien Artor Vale had only one desire now: peace.
He dreamed of it in the rare quiet moments—when the stars hung undisturbed above the trenches, when the wind wasn't carrying screams. He imagined a life tending machines in a backwater manufactorum, or managing grain silos on some agri-world. A life with no lasfire, no officers barking orders, no blood caked under fingernails.
But fate was a cruel storyteller.
He was still "Cassian Vale" to most—the name given by his House for military service, a formality of Imperial bureaucracy. But Lucien… Lucien knew who he truly was. And every time he tried to shrink into the background, some new storm dragged him forward.
This time, it came in the shape of xenos.
The 87th Vendrian had been rerouted to the outer moons of Vardox Theta—a long-forgotten mining colony now under siege. Not by heretics, not by rebels, but by T'au auxiliaries—smooth-armored warriors with strange rifles and impossible tactics.
"They're pushing hard for this sector," Commander Selvan briefed grimly. "Alien tech is all over the field. We're to reinforce the northern plateau. Expect drones. And expect casualties."
Lucien had never fought non-humans before. He had heard whispers—blue-skinned xenos who fought with precision, who offered surrender instead of annihilation. But those stories were as dangerous as the aliens themselves. Hesitate, and you die.
Yet when the dropship's ramp opened, and he stared into the storm-lit alien sky, Lucien felt it again.
That low thrum of fate shifting.
---
The battle unfolded in confusing bursts. The T'au didn't fight like men. Their rifles fired with no flash or sound, only sudden pain. Their drones hovered and struck from impossible angles. Their fireteams moved like machines—synchronized, emotionless.
Lucien barely kept up. His unit was shredded. Sergeant Marga lost her arm in the first volley. Vox signals went dead. The squad broke, scattering into the maze of mineral stacks and shattered mining crawlers.
Lucien ran—not from cowardice, but instinct. Something told him where to go, when to duck, when to leap. A drone's beam seared past where his head had been a moment before. He tripped on a rock—just as a stealth-suited T'au missed him by inches and overextended into a collapsing girder.
The alien struck the ground, stunned.
Lucien fired. The shot wasn't clean—it wasn't even aimed. But it hit the exposed joint in the armor. The xenos spasmed, twitched, and stilled.
Another impossible kill.
He was panting, lasgun overheating. The others would think it was skill again. Another step in the myth of Luck's Shadow.
But Lucien didn't feel victorious. He felt… hollow.
He never wanted this.
He wasn't a soldier.
He wasn't a killer.
But something inside him was.
---
The ring pulsed harder now. Like it hungered. The more danger, the stronger the pull. It didn't just want him to survive—it wanted to shape the battlefield. Enemy drones began to sputter, fire wild, crash without cause. One T'au soldier raised his weapon—only for the power cell to explode in his hands.
Lucien stared, horror dawning.
His presence twisted probability. It bent destiny. Every time he lived, something else broke.
Was that… righteous?
Was that the Emperor's will?
Or something far older?
---
When the fighting ended, the Imperium held the plateau. Barely. Dozens dead. But not Lucien.
He sat alone again, helmet in his lap, watching alien wreckage burn under the moonlight. His thoughts darkened.
He wanted peace.
But fate didn't ask what he wanted.
Somewhere deep in the stars, a legend was being born. One whispered in vox-net static and retold in muddy trenches: of a soldier who walked through death and came out untouched. A shadow of fortune. A curse on the enemy's dice.
They didn't know his name yet.
But soon, all would. Know his name