"You may call Rowan."
Rowan mimicked her movent, adopting the local customs by returning a sign of the Aquila.
Adhering to the principle that if a system functions, one shouldn't tamper with it, and since Lucia's attitude was so accommodating, he refrained from gilding the lily by explaining his origins.
After all, an interloper from another universe was a concept easily accepted only in a fractured, anomalous reality like the one overseen by his forr clandestine masters. In this universe, it would likely be imdiately interpreted as a daemon spawned from the warp. It would hardly be ideal if, upon hearing the truth, she responded with a lethal leaping strike.
"Forgive , Lord Rowan, but I fear this matter is not yet concluded."
Lucia clearly did not care about Rowan's origins. "These fallen heretics do not comprise the entirety of the enemy. Another detachnt has made for the bridge. Because we were deeply entrenched in combat, we lacked the strength to intercept them."
"Right now, those heretics may be close to achieving their unspeakable objectives. As loyal servants of the God-Emperor, we must proceed imdiately to stop them!"
"That is exactly what I desire."
Rowan nodded in crisp agreent.
However, he surveyed the area, taking in the corpses of the fallen Sisters upon the deck. After a mont of silence, he offered a suggestion: "Though, should we not gather the remains of these Sisters?"
Lucia fell into a mont of hesitation.
Space Marines devoted to Slaanesh operated in a manner that required no elaboration. During the prior savage lee, several Chaos Space Marines had ignored commands, breaking off from the main engagent to seek out solitary amusents throughout the vessel.
Should any wandering Slaaneshi Astartes stumble upon this battlefield, rely imagining what might follow—the sheer desecration her sisters' remains would endure—caused a surge of abhorrent fury to well up from the very depths of Lucia's soul.
"Then, I ask for your assistance in gathering my sisters' remains, that we may cremate them together."
Having weighed the options, Lucia finally spoke. "I pray their souls may return to the Throne."
"Not a problem."
Rowan raised his hand with a sweeping motion. Driven by an invisible telekinetic force, the remains of every Battle Sister within the grand hall levitated into the air, slowly drifting together toward an open clearing.
A mont later, a prothium flar autonomously flew forward, aiming at the clearing. A roaring inferno erupted, entirely engulfing the forms of the martyrs.
Lucia's previously resolute expression shifted into one of profound grief. Her hand tightly gripped the increasingly hot relic rosarius as her lips murmured the litanies of the Ecclesiarchy.
Rowan's expression likewise turned solemn, silently observing the scene unfolding before him.
This Imperium was decaying, declining, teetering on the brink of collapse, drowning in ignorant superstition... yet amidst this absolute despair, brilliant sparks still shone. It was precisely the sacrifices of such heroes that sustained humanity, allowing it to stand firm in this dark galaxy for millennium after millennium.
Within this suffocating silence, punctuated only by the crackle of leaping flas, a sudden anomaly manifested.
The originally crimson flas beca threaded with tendrils of gold, rapidly transmuting into a blinding, auric brilliance. The already searing heat intensified into an agonizing inferno as rolling waves of thermal force swept outward.
Engulfed by the golden fire, the majority of the Sisters' remains swiftly dissolved into nothingness, leaving behind only skeletons bleached to an iridescent white. Amidst the blaze, these bones autonomously shifted into postures of prayer, suffusing the air with an aura of absolute sanctity.
Witnessing this, Lucia could no longer contain herself. The grief she had violently suppressed within her heart surged to the surface.
Clear tears stread from her eyes as she silently dropped to her knees, her vocalized prayers growing ever louder.
"There is no mistaking it, the Golden One is definitively making a scene."
Watching a scene that entirely defied normal causality, Rowan wove a protective layer over himself to repel the rolling waves of heat, and let out a relieved smile.
However, his thoughts quickly pivoted.
The Emperor might have been a man, but the Emperor acting humane was highly improbable.
Given the Master of Mankind's habitual modus operandi of never acting without calculating the absolute benefit, if one claid He was rely manifesting His divinity without an ulterior motive, Rowan—having just recently learned his lesson—would hardly believe it. There was definitively a purpose...
Wait a mont.
Rowan cast his gaze toward Canoness Lucia, who was still praying before the pyre.
Unbeknownst to him, her entire body had also beco bathed in the golden flas alongside the remains of her sisters. The auric light and heat lted her power armor directly, charring and cracking her skin until she resembled a scorched corpse.
Even while enduring such transhuman agony, Lucia maintained her posture of prayer, the hymns spilling from her lips growing ever louder.
By the Throne, a Living Saint!
Rowan's eye twitched.
Living Saints, otherwise known as Greater Daemons of the Emperor, held a transcendent status within the Imperium. They were the ultimate proof of the Emperor's divine power, so impossibly rare that one might never be seen across the entire galaxy. Utterly incorruptible by the foulness of the warp, they could channel various miracles under the Emperor's aegis to annihilate the enemies of mankind.
However, Living Saints did not just manifest on a whim, especially not in this tiline where the Great Rift had yet to tear open, and that stubborn entity upon the Golden Throne could not easily interfere with the material realm.
Watching Lucia desperately enduring within the holy flas, Rowan shook his head with a touch of regret.
According to the Ecclesiarchy's propaganda, a Living Saint possessed every noble quality of humanity, including but not limited to compassion, innocence, purity, incorruptibility, forgiveness, eternal vigilance, rcy to the weak, and absolute rcilessness to the guilty, and so on.
However, in Rowan's eyes, while these were indeed vital elents, none of them compared to the single most critical factor:
—One had to possess sufficient psychic resonance with the Emperor's own power.
It was painfully obvious that Lucia was not fortunate enough to possess such an exceedingly rare aptitude.
It was clear as day: if Rowan did not intervene right this instant, her entire being would be reduced to ash within this violently tyrannical psychic storm, much like the ruins of the Perfect City, Calth, or the Rubric Marines of the Thousand Sons.
Rowan considered this for a brief mont and swiftly made a decision.
If she could be saved, he had to try. The security a Living Saint would provide him was blindingly obvious. Furthermore, having crossed over into this universe without a shred of legitimate identity, having a Living Saint vouch for him would completely eliminate that looming problem.
"However, my current authority over the materium is strictly limited. Any localized manipulation of realspace I impose cannot endure for long against this kind of frenzied psychic torrent..."
"Wait, there is a way."
The decision made, Rowan reached out, thrusting his hand straight through the incandescent flas to grip Lucia's shoulder.
His eyes glazed over with a profound emptiness. Sound, scent, touch, color... the vast majority of his physical senses vanished utterly, leaving behind an absolute void.
Yet within that void, viewing the universe through the perceptual lens of one who dictates the laws of the materium, what Rowan perceived were overlapping, invisible domains of varying ontological weight, blanketing every coordinate of space his mind could touch.
Or, to describe it more precisely using the clinical trics of his previous masters:
—The existential density of reality.
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