Chapter Text
The moment Tervantias pulls the dying worm from her skull, Rella feels Heinrix’s presence prickle into sharp relief at the edges of her psyker senses. She hadn’t realized just how much the parasitic intruder was muting her perception of the warp, and like a limb regaining sensation, she feels it all come crashing back at once - and with it, that tingling, ever-present awareness of him.
She stumbled into the Archmachinator’s laboratory, bleeding and manic, her mind half consumed by madness as Marazhai’s little gift to her during her interrogation - one of the Haemonculus’s unholy creations, no less - wrought its destruction on her mind in its dying throes. Tervantias immediately saw to its removal, not missing the chance to boast to her in detail on the finer points of the painful death she would have suffered from its toxins had he not intervened.
And in the absence of the worm’s overwhelming influence on her mind, the sudden surge of awareness of Heinrix - of his nearness, of his continued existence, of the anguished state of his aura - tightens around her throat, threatening to choke every careful word she utters to the monster who now proudly pontificates to her about his unholy experiments of the flesh, presumably on her friends, her voidsman, her companions. On Heinrix.
It is a weakness, some would say, for her to be so affected by the fate of one man. She had barely been able to acknowledge even to herself how important he had become to her until she found herself faced with the sudden possibility that he had perished, along with the rest of her retinue. When she felt the beginnings of a bottomless and unexpected yawning grief for a man whose eyes she had watched soften, night after night, across the regicide board from her as he slowly surrendered his past to her patient ears, whose heart she had only just begun to truly know. The man who risked his position, his security, his sanctioning, to warn her of the danger that his very presence in her retinue was inviting to her doorstep, to her bedchamber. The man who kissed her that night like she has never been kissed before. The man who, despite his divided loyalties, has become her unlikely confidant these last few months amidst the burdens of the position she has been called to assume - someone whose story shares a surprising symmetry with her own, who understands the unique grief for a life stolen and sold into the service of a higher purpose, who appreciates the grim and paradoxical privilege of having one’s personhood honed into an indispensable yet interchangeable weapon and tool. She wonders, often, when it was that Heinrix last saw himself as anything other than that - a scalpel wielded by the arm of the Imperium to elicit pain from the enemies of humanity and from people like what Rella was forced to become in the aftermath of her exile. She suspects that the only time in recent memory might have been in her arms, that night at the Magnae, when knowingly or not, he laid all his cards on the table.
And now he has been reduced to a curiosity, a plaything, a source of sustenance for the monsters who prowl this wretched hive to feed upon. His pain reaches to her through the warp, as surely as though he has called out for her, composing a melody of muted agony in the marrow of her bones, demanding her attention as Tervantias prattles on and on. The sensation isn’t quite the same as the raw, unchecked crackle and flow of energy that she always feels pass unbidden between her and Heinrix while traveling the Immaterium on her voidship, nor is it the throttled and restrained awareness of him that stretches, constant and taut, across realspace, either. She can feel his soul now like a candle flickering at the end of a thread that vibrates from his mind to hers across this nightmare realm between worlds, a bright and incessant tugging that lets her know he is alive, and he is nearby, and he is in an immense amount of pain.
And so she finds herself in this monster’s debt - a poor position to be, now that it falls to her to somehow convince the grotesque Archmachinator to reveal his secrets to her, to negotiate an acceptable agreement to secure the release of her retinue from his clutches. She has yet to broach the request, but thus far, Tervantias seems to be startlingly susceptible to her feigned interest in his craft and her brazen appeals to his vanity.
She lifts her chin and looks the mutant xenos in the eyes, forcing herself not to flinch at the rippling fringe of flesh that pulsates sickeningly along the side of his monstrous face as he speaks. She assembles her features into what she hopes he will mistake for a cool, controlled deference, and smiles obsequiously. She does not think about the fact that behind her and to the left, she has spotted the gore-splattered mouth of an all-too-familiar blood-streaked chute. She does not think about what might be happening to Heinrix right now. She wills her racing heart to slow, wishes she were capable of the level of control of her bodily functions that Heinrix commands. She prays that his abilities might be allowing him some modicum of comfort now, in some meager way, but she has seen enough to know too much about the tastes and talents of their torturers to hold such a thread of hope too tightly.
“Am I to understand that the most fearsome Drukhari warriors are created by artisans such as you?” she asks the xenos coyly.
The Haemonculus's limbs react with an excited clatter of blades. “I have few equals in Commorragh,” he brags. “My knowledge is vast, and it goes beyond the mysteries of flesh and essences. I have observed many dysjunctions where the destructive energies of the unreal erupted here in the Webway. I have studied that devastating force and learned to harness it.”
Rella nods, glancing around the nightmarish laboratory. Like everything here, the architecture feels almost alive - the skeletal structures swoop above her in spiked arches, giving her the impression that she stands within the ribcage of some great, metal monster.
Everything somehow feels simultaneously heightened and dulled here in Commorragh, like a nerve rubbed raw. She wonders if the Webway works on the same ancient principles as a Gellar Field. It functions somewhat similarly, after all - both provide a protected fold in the fabric of the void itself, tucked between the rigid physicality of realspace and the nightmarish dreamscape of the Immaterium. But while the warp howls untamed against her psyche, nipping and tearing at her mind through the protective bubble of the Gellar Field during their more difficult translations, there is a strangely ordered geometry to the way her psychic energy flows here, as though it is seeping along ley lines laid for it by ancient engineers long since lost to time.
It all still feels like a waking nightmare, like a sleep paralysis she can't shake or scream herself out of, a series of images and sensations that part of her still doesn't feel entirely sure are real. Days have passed since she dragged herself, naked and bloody and broken, out of the urban mass graves of the Commorragh underlevel where she was unceremoniously disposed - likely by this very monster - and her body still feels like a foreign object, her flesh an unwanted animal sheathing a shattered soul, flayed meat knotted around a splintered core. The von Valancius name - and all its trappings that she has so carefully decked herself in over the last year - now feels like an expensive dress that was torn off her to reveal nothing more than a scared little girl beneath, stripped and beaten and brandished and paraded in a play of public humiliation that backfired against her tormentors in ways Rella still doesn't entirely understand.
Rella had thought herself alone when she awoke in those stinking trenches beneath the bowels of this cursed metropolis, fearing the worst for her companions. But then she found Abelard, mindbroken and muttering, still holding his own in the gutter amidst the other castouts who cowered even as they were hunted for sport and forced to fight each other for scraps like the prey animals they are here. And then they stumbled across Solomorne, stripped of all his feeble pretenses, tearing the lie of his courtship to tatters and throwing it in Rella’s face, begging her for punishment. They found Argenta, too, her spirit seemingly unbowed compared to the rest of them. And Rella suspects that Tervantias has more than a few more members of her retinue imprisoned here along with Heinrix.
“The last time I was in the arena, I saw Marazhai,” she says carefully to the Haemonculus. “What was he doing there?”
Tervantias sneers. “That brazen, ambitious, and woefully imprudent whelp,” he says dismissively. “He was cast down from the Dracons of the Kabal but earned the good graces of the Wyches of the Fatal Thirst in his very first fight in the arena. He was invited to join their finest, the Bloodstained Proselytes.” The beast eyes her, his fringe flaring. “Some say he was involved in the death of their Succubus, Tazarra… if so, then Marazhai may be disappointed by his reception in the ranks of the Cult.” His mouth spreads open into a razor-toothed grin.
Rella turns this information over in her mind, examining it.
Perhaps she can use this to her advantage, somehow.
Her head hurts. Her organs throb. She thinks she is probably still dying, though how slowly now, she isn't sure. She is filthy and she is famished, running only on scavenged combat stims. Pain has become her only certainty.
Abelard is a reassuring presence behind her, clad in the tattered remains of his fur-lined coat and scavenged scraps of polymer armor. At her left is Argenta, her indomitable faith somehow yet undimmed. Solomorne hangs back, still enshrouded in the shame he can’t seem to shake. But Rella doesn’t have time to think about any of that now. These people followed her here, into this nightmare, and Throne help her, she’s going to lead them out.
Somehow.
She will find the rest of her retinue and bring them back. She will bring them all back. She will do whatever she has to do, make whatever wretched alliances need to be made, appease whatever manner of monsters she must, Throne be damned. She cannot concentrate on anything else when this close, she can feel whatever is being done to Heinrix, can feel his body's reactions translated through the warp and interpreted by her shredded senses.
At least she can take some cold comfort in the knowledge that Marazhai’s schemes have been as thoroughly shattered as her own. It is fitting for him, she thinks, to be betrayed mid-betrayal.
As if on cue, the doors to the laboratory are thrown wide, and a coterie of demonic, spiked silhouettes saunter in. Rella recognizes them almost immediately as the Wych Clan they had just been discussing, the ones Tevantias has tasked her with eliminating. And sure enough, among them, stalking to the side, his cold gaze casing the room, is Marazhai.
He spots Rella at the same moment, and his teal eyes flare at the sight of her, his face twisting into a snarl of bottomless, unquenchable bloodlust. She sees his hand begin to reach for the serrated, wicked blade that hangs from his belt, but the Wych beside him stays his hand with a cutting glare.
“Careful with the meat for the arena, Marazhai,” she warns. “If Sinisthoria is short on toys for her fighters, you will be punished again.” The Succubus flashes Marazhai a cruel grin, and Rella remembers her name, then - Aebys. The Drukhari’s grin stretches wider, showing a full complement of sharp, pointed teeth. “She seems to enjoy pitting you against Khymerae,” the Wych continues to Marazhai. “Maybe this time she won't deem it necessary to give you back your skin after you slay them all.”
The look Marazhai gives his kin then is one of pure, unadulterated violence. Interesting, Rella thinks, noticing then that his face and neck bear a patchwork of freshly stitched wounds. When Marazhai’s dark eyes flick back to hers, she can see that he is shaking with barely contained rage.
This close, the proportions of his face project an uncanny wrongness - he is not human, he is Other, something threatening, dangerous, terrifying, a creature of pure nightmare. The primitive part of Rella’s mind screams at her - Marazhai is a predator. The last time she saw his face this close, he was leering at her through the bars of a cage, delighting in the delicacy of her suffering. He is a monster, that primal part of her mind insists.
And yet, for reasons she can't fully explain, she thinks she might understand him, a little bit, somehow. And perhaps she is lying to herself, but she can’t shake the feeling that she has seen a spark of recognition of that understanding in his eyes as well, throughout their myriad of antagonistic interactions over the last few months. And beneath the rage and hatred that now seethe in his stare, Rella reads something else in his expression that she might almost mistake for the beginnings of a begrudging respect.
Or perhaps she is as deluded as her entire retinue now seems to suspect.
Her mind conjures for her, suddenly, a grotesque montage of Heinrix enacting his own flavor of grueling torture on all manner of enemies of the Imperium he likely found himself tasked with interrogating throughout his long years of service. The irony that she is now prostrating herself to free him from such a fate does not escape her.
Commorragh, it seems, is a place that grinds to dust the last of any remaining moral principles one clings to. If she can hold such complexities in her heart for Heinrix, then why not Marazhai?
Her mercy has always been her greatest weakness, her misplaced trust the maker of her undoing. Yet perhaps she can now wield that weakness as a weapon.
She shuts off her Elucidator and addresses Marazhai directly. “I want to talk,” she says. “To you.”
Marazhai blinks at her, his features shifting from rage to surprise. He glances once at the Wyches that surround him, then lowers his voice, switching to Low Gothic. “What, mon-keigh?” he hisses.
“I saw what happened at the trial,” Rella says, lifting her chin. “You were tricked.”
Beside her, Rella sees Argenta and Abelard exchange an alarmed glance. She ignores them as Marazhai narrows his eyes, appraising her. “Tervantias's creation must have been a low-grade imitation if the mirage did not completely overwhelm you…” he muses. He considers her for a beat, not even attempting to hide his confusion. “Even if what you say is true - what is it to you?”
Rella allows herself a small, controlled smirk, seizing the opportunity between her teeth like a starved beast. “You are trapped. I am trapped,” she points out. “We could help each other.”
Marazhai snorts derisively. “You?” he sneers. “ Help me?” He cocks his head to the side, studying her. “Why would the quarry help the hunter?” He shakes his head slightly, then straightens his shoulders. “If you expect me to believe that…”
Rella forces herself to hold his gaze. “I believe in mercy,” she tells him, her voice ringing steady and clear. “Even for the likes of you.”
“Mercy?” Marazhai repeats disdainfully. His lip curls in a slight snarl, but Rella thinks she sees a shadow of doubt flicker in his eyes. “How strange…” Marazhai murmurs, his eyes still fixed on Rella’s face.
Aebys makes an impatient gesture. “I am tired of listening to you and your old friend whispering in that primitive babble,” she snaps in the Drukhari tongue. “Enough. We must go. We will return when the Archmachinator is not otherwise occupied.”
The Wych turns on her heel and stalks back towards the door, her retinue falling into step beside her. Marazhai lingers for half a beat, an unreadable expression on his face, then grudgingly obeys the order, turning to saunter off after the other Drukhari. But before he disappears through the door, he glances over his shoulder one final time at Rella, that same inscrutable look upon his face.
Rella prays her wild gamble will pay off. She must truly be desperate to even consider conscripting the help of such a fiend. Perhaps she is no better than Yrliet, after all - willing to cut deals with all manner of monsters on the thinnest hope of helping those she cares about. It is madness. It is heresy.
But there is no Imperium here - if they are to escape this place, they will need all the allies the extent of her mercy will allow. Which is why she has not cast Yrliet out, and why she now extends her open palm towards the former Dracon. She is in over her head. She must claw her way out, as she always has - the only thing she has ever been good at. If she has learned anything here, it is that the game has been played on a hooded board all along, and only now are the hidden pieces masquerading as unassuming Citizens beginning to reveal their true agendas.
The echo of Heinrix’s torment still pulls at her bones, makes her teeth itch inside her skull, drags her attention back to its insistent tug. Throne preserve her, he is in so, so much pain. She grits her teeth against it, willing her face to remain impassive. She cannot bear to think of what he must now be enduring. She must not allow herself to focus too hard on it, not now, not yet.
She had known pain before being brought to the Dark City, had thought that throughout her life she’d come to know it intimately. She has been tortured, wounded, mutilated, and abused - on the Black Ship, at the hands of her teachers at the Scholastica Psykana, when she stood trial in the Navy for her suspected heresies. She survived her sanctioning, survived exposure to the raw warp, held fast against the powers of Chaos that would have unmade a less fortified mind. She survived her years in the syndicate, survived the shootouts and the smuggling runs and the assassination attempts. She has survived, she has always survived.
But none of her previous suffering could have quite prepared her for the exacting appetites of the Drukhari. Simple suffering does not sate them - the pain must be personalized, surgical, calibrated to dismantle the battered pedestal of her soul piece by piece. And so they broke her body, but never enough to die, and shredded her spirit, but never so much that her anguish would no longer satisfy their discerning palate. Despite the farce of a trial they made her the star of, they were not truly seeking information or capitulation - the pain itself was the prize. And oh, how they love to play with their food.
But she survived. She survived the twisted games of her torturers, heaved her broken body from the pile of corpses they left her for dead in, survived the betrayal of a fraudulent Commissar and the deeper betrayal of the outcast Asuryani she'd come to consider a friend, the betrayal that led them all here to this Throne-forgotten hellscape in the first place.
She will grapple with that later.
Because Heinrix is still here. He is still suffering. He is still the plaything of this monster. He is here, somewhere. Whatever torture he now endures pulses like a bruise beneath Rella’s skin, pain that is not her own but reverberates through the warp like a harpstring being plucked, again and again and again, worrying at her sore and still-healing psyche.
She turns back to Tervantias. There is no more time to waste.
“I am curious about a certain member of my retinue who was delivered to you,” she says, fighting to keep her tone even, devoid of all but a casual interest.
Tervantias's milky eyes examine her appraisingly. “Which specimen in particular interests you?” he asks, sounding bored.
She swallows. “Heinrix van Calox,” she replies. “My companion.”
Tervantias chuckles, and it is a sickening sound that leaves Rella fighting once again to keep all traces of emotion off her face. “Ah,” he says. “The mon-keigh male with a consistent connection to the veil,” the xenos muses. “Beautiful endurance for pain. His stubbornness produces high-grade essences of torment positively frothing with agony.” He presents Rella with a sharp-toothed grin. “Wait until he is expended, and you may have whatever is left.”
Rella is unable to stop her lip from curling upwards into a soft snarl.
“That won’t do,” she tells him firmly, with as much nonchalance as she can muster. “Those from my retinue deserve better than to be confined by you,” she adds, a cold imperiousness creeping into her tone. “Relinquish them.”
Tervantias’ fringe flares. “Why would I, specimen?”
Rella casts about for a plausible reason, something that will convince him. “With a full escort, I would have better chances of succeeding and contributing to your plans,” she says. It sounds feeble even to her own ears. Desperation claws at her throat.
“Then find yourself other fighters,” the Haemonculus replies dismissively, already turning back to his work. “The Chasm has enough prisoners, mercenaries, and gladiators. My specimens are not yours to waste.”
“I will not stand for you keeping my companions captive!” Rella retorts, her grip on her control slipping. “Do not try my patience, xenos!”
Tervantias hisses and jerks his fan of limbs fitted with sharp implements. “Do not make demands of me, specimen. Or I might decide that you are also in need of a collar.” He eyes her coldly. “As I said - once they have exhausted their utility, I will let you take the scraps.”
Rella struggles to regain her composure. She will not win this with threats. She has no authority here. She must cajole this monster, flatter him, appeal to his twisted and tumescent ego. She must use every trick in her arsenal. She must play the role he wishes of her.
She chokes down her pride and gets to her knees. Abelard stiffens, and Argenta looks away. She cannot see Solomorne’s face, but she imagines that if she could, she would probably see his judgment, his disgust.
But she cannot bring herself to care right now.
She has already lost so much. She cannot lose Heinrix, not now. Not anymore. Not after what happened between them at the Magnae. Not after all their nights spent facing off over the regicide board, slowly but surely dismantling the barricades they’d each erected around their wounded hearts. Not now, not after he risked everything to warn her that night, after his trembling half-confession, after knowing the heat of his touch on her skin. It is a weakness she cannot afford, yet it would be a loss she could not survive.
“Please,” she begs. “I need him.”
The Haemonculus watches her for a moment, an amused smile playing across his hideous features.
“No,” he says finally, turning away from her and resuming his experiments. Rella remains on her knees, not backing down. Abelard shifts uncomfortably beside her. She hears Solomorne mutter something under his breath. She sees Argenta's angelic face, darkened with concern. She feels the pulse of Heinrix’s anguish pressing at the base of her skull. She does not rise.
Tervantias hisses irritably. “If you wish to continue wasting my time with your pathetic pleading and whining, specimen, then you know the price: pay up or get out.”
It is not a refusal. So Rella seizes it like the desperate woman that this place has made of her, and reaches for the only card she still has in play.
“I have nothing to pay you with but my own flesh,” she tells him. “Please,” she repeats. “Accept it as a gift.”
Tervantias’ eyes cut to her, pondering her offer, sparkling with cruel curiosity. “Your tissues are of little interest to me,” he tells her. “You are a rather unremarkable piece of meat, mon-keigh.” He makes a clicking sound through his teeth, as though coming to a decision. “However, luckily for you, I happen to be in need of a fresh spinal cord sample.”
The Haemonculus seizes her without warning before he is even done speaking, yanking Rella to her feet and tossing her prone upon the bloodied chiurgeon’s slab, pinning her in place too quickly for her depleted and sluggish body to react. She hears Abelard cry out, followed by a loud, mechanical shriek - then a bite of metal at the base of her spine and her vision goes white with pain. She opens her mouth to scream, but her throat convulsively constricts in agony, preventing her from drawing a single breath. Her jaw twitches, clenching and unclenching with such force that she nearly bites off her tongue. The pain is blinding, infinite, overwhelming, and Rella chokes, tears streaming silently down her face. And then, just as quickly as it began, Tervantias extracts the drill bit with a squelching crunch, holding her still as he staples the wound shut then steps back, leaving Rella panting upon the table, feeling the blood soak through her torn clothes, her sundered flesh.
Every movement and breath reveals new shades of agony. All Rella can do is grit her teeth and conquer it, applying all the training at her disposal. She heaves herself to her hands and knees, gasping and retching and heaving dry sobs onto the cold metal.
A sadistic smile spreads across Tervantias’ hideous lips. “Very well,” he tells her, his voice cruel and mocking. “I will release your mon-keigh companion.” His smile widens, his sharp teeth on full display. “Yes…” he muses. “I wonder what effect this will have on the rest of the specimens once they learn of your decision.”
Rella pushes down the wave of guilt and bile that rises in her throat, fighting to stave off her humiliation. This monster has all but admitted to having Idira and Kibbellah, and Cassia is almost certainly here, too. He seems to have taken a particular interest in her psykers, which Rella tries and fails not to dwell on as Tervantias flicks a long, spindly finger at an apparatus made of bone.
“The sarcophagus for dangerous specimens has been unlocked,” he tells her. “You may take what is left of your servant.”
Rella feels the air around her heat up as the tight control she has maintained on her emotions finally slips and shatters, and her warp powers surge forth within her. Her skin burns as she stumbles to her feet, and Abelard is at her side, supporting her as she staggers towards the staircase that unfurls like an opening fist before her. Tervantias’ mocking laughter follows her as she shakes Abelard off her arm and wills her legs to move, her heart hammering in her throat.
She reaches the top of the stairs and crosses under the jagged archway above the landing into a cool, damp chamber that stretches up above her, disappearing into the ethereal gloom. A lone Drukhari, presumably one of Tervantias’ acolytes, prowls the room, and Rella ignores him as she enters. The walls are lined with large tanks that resemble sarcophagi, and within each one, reclined at a slight angle, shrouded in pungent steam and punctured by wires and tubes and clamps to restrain them, she can see the shapes of human bodies within.
He is here. His pain is howling at her through the warp, thrashing at the edges of her soul. She has never felt his psychic aura in this state before, and it terrifies her. What did they do to him? In what condition will she find him?
She is afraid to know. She needs to know.
Her eyes scan each tank. They all contain humans. Her voidsman-at-arms, perhaps. She feels a pang of guilt for not knowing their names, their faces. For leaving them to their fate, for now. For now, she reminds herself, again, more firmly than before. She'll come back for them, for all of them. But now - now she has to find him, she has to…
The Drukhari moves to stand between her and one of the tanks. His face is covered by a mirrored mask, his long white hair flowing unbound behind it. A guttural hiss comes from behind his mask. “What do you want, cattle?”
“Step away from the contraption, and I shall let you live,” Rella tells him.
The Drukhari seems to study her, and Rella notices his hands shaking. “Tervantias sent you for the essence of pain, didn't he?” he stammers. “Tell him that the last samples... turned out bad. It will take time to extract pure, unadulterated pain. Yes, a very long time. The mon-keigh is stubborn and strong, but his vitality is waning. I just need... to concentrate.”
“Step aside,” Rella repeats.
She allows her powers to flare beneath her skin, seeing the orange glow that blossoms in her eyes reflected in the xenos’ mirrored mask. He must sense the sincerity in her threat, because he nods and obeys her without further protest.
And then she sees him. Heinrix is in the tank before her, pinned like an insect with hooks and tubes protruding from the bowels of the device. Instinct takes over and she steps towards him, her throat tightening. His skin is deathly pale, but he is alive - Rella’s gaze skitters frantically across his weakly rising and falling chest, across his pallid torso painted with a landscape of lacerations and bruises. His arms are restrained and his head is tightly encircled by a wide metallic band - her eyes catch on the blood seeping from beneath it, at the glistening streaks that run in rivulets down his face and neck before fading into dried, darkened tracks.
He is not moving. He does not seem to be aware of her. His eyes are open, half-lidded, wandering wildly, and when she leans closer, she notices that his pupils are constricted to the size of pinheads. He cannot see her.
She hears Abelard mutter a low curse behind her.
“Heinrix,” she whispers, her mouth dry, her tongue thick. “It's me. It's Rella. Can you hear me?”
Heinrix's head moves ever so slightly. He stares past her, unseeing. His bitten, bloodied lips begin to move, but his voice is hoarse, barely a whisper. “To the warp with you, beast,” he chokes as she leans closer. “I've heard all this before. You won't trick me again…”
Rella swallows back the implications of his words along with the tears that sting at her eyes as she lifts her trembling hand to his face. “What have they done to you…” she murmurs. Her fingertips find his cheek, and he flinches violently.
But Rella doesn't withdraw her hand, can't withdraw her hand, because Heinrix is here and he is alive and now that she can feel his skin beneath her fingers, she doesn't ever want to stop touching him again. She caresses the contours of his jaw, searching his mismatched eyes that gaze through her, wide and panicked and pained, and as she presses her palm to his cheek, she can feel her powers spark against the cold embers of his. And suddenly, as though he has now recognized her by her touch alone, he inhales sharply.
“Rella…” he gasps. He struggles against the machine that restrains him, twisting his head to the side as much as he can manage until his lips find her palm. “Is it you? You... you're alive?” He exhales a sob into her wrist, pressing his mouth to her skin. His shoulders shake violently.
“It's me,” Rella says gently, stroking her thumb across his cheek. His skin is cold and clammy and sticky with sweat. “I'm here.”
“Please,” he stammers. “Find a way to get me out of this thing… I- I can't…”
Rella hears a laugh from behind her. “This machine is a testament to Tervantias's brilliance,” comes a cold, gleeful drawl that could only belong to the Drukhari she now suddenly regrets not killing. “See for yourself, mon-keigh.” She turns in time to see the acolyte reach for several thin strings that go from the needles stuck into Heinrix's body to a strange membrane on the side of the sarcophagus, but not in time to stop the xenos from brushing his hideous, clawed fingers lightly against the tubes.
A high-pitched, otherworldly sound pierces her ears, and she whips her head back towards Heinrix just as his body is wracked by a convulsion so intense that only his restraints prevent him from twisting his joints out of their sockets. Rella feels his pain ripple through the warp like an electric shock - she bites back a scream as Heinrix grits his teeth, hissing and panting for a few breaths before the torture chamber succeeds in ripping an inhuman, bestial howl from his throat.
The xenos dies before Rella has even made the conscious decision to ignite him with her pyromancy. She hears another murmured expletive from Abelard as the Drukhari’s charred remains crumple to the floor behind her, but she doesn't turn to look. She doesn't move her eyes from Heinrix as she sets about cutting the tubes, gingerly pulling the hooks and needles out from under his skin, freeing his limbs from the manacles that clamp his body in place. He is trembling violently and all but collapses out of the device once his body is freed from its shackles. She catches him as he staggers forward, and somehow, he manages to find his feet.
He sways dangerously, then rips the black circlet from his head with a force that surprises Rella and hurls it to the floor. His other hand reaches out and blindly seizes her shoulder, his grip painfully tight. His thumb catches on her collarbone and he makes a strange, choked sound, then slides his palm shakily up the side of her neck until he is clutching her cheek.
“Rella…”
Her name leaves his lips in the shape of a groan, and then he falters, moving to retract his hand. Rella stops him by laying her hand atop his and leaning into his touch, as though she can somehow push some fraction of life and warmth from her body into his. She is not a biomancer; she cannot heal his wounds, nor can she ease his pain, and she realizes that she is silently weeping only when Heinrix’s thumb smears a fallen tear across her cheek. A small part of her is relieved that he cannot see her, now - that he doesn't have to know how much it destroys her to witness him like this.
“I can't see a thing,” he murmurs. “Give me a moment... to ascertain what they've done to me…” He says it almost apologetically, as though he feels it necessary to excuse his current condition. The air around them chills, and Rella suppresses a shiver as Heinrix reaches inward with his biomancy, attempting to assess the damage that was done to him. “Blast it…” he mutters. “I can't sense my body…”
“Heinrix,” she says again, resting her other palm flat against his bare chest. “We cannot linger here. Can you walk?”
He nods and swallows hard, blinking furiously and struggling to focus his eyes on Rella’s face. “I can... move, yes. Warp take them, I feel like my nerves have been turned inside out and then sewn back like that.” He lifts his free hand to rub at his eyelids with the back of his wrist, then curses under his breath.
“Did they blind you?” she murmurs.
“No…” he says, shaking his head. “No, I don't think so. It is likely just my body reacting to extended bouts of pain.” He rasps a soft chuckle that is entirely devoid of humor. “To think that I have forgotten what it's like to experience such basic impulses…”
Rella feels something shatter inside her as she watches him, and her hand at his chest curls into a fist. She once again finds herself willing warmth into his veins, wishing her powers allowed her to do more for him than provide simple comforts such as this. Heinrix’s hand closes around hers, gently prying her fingers from his chest and bringing them to his mouth to press them to his lips. He inhales once, twice, his breath ghosting between her fingers as though he is still trying to convince himself of the reality of her presence. “As a biomancer, I can stifle my physical reactions,” he explains. “Perhaps that is why I was chosen for that... device. Because I had distanced myself from the sensation of pain.” He smiles bitterly. “And because of my stubbornness that forbade me from surrendering.”
To imagine him in so much pain that his body has cut himself off from it… Rella swallows hard again, but doesn’t look away.
“You cannot sense your body?” she whispers. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“If I knew, I wouldn't be pondering the question right now, Rella. I think…” He pauses, cocking his head to the side. “The circlet on my head wasn't inhibiting my abilities… it was turning them inward. Binding them inside my body.” He hisses another shaky breath. “They made me torture myself with warp energies... I was burning and mutilating my internal organs…” His hand on her cheek tightens, his fingers digging into the nape of her neck, and then Heinrix winces and steps back from her, releasing her face and her hand as his shoulders slump. He begins to shiver violently again, and wraps his arms around himself, seemingly suddenly aware of his own nudity. “Damned xenos!” he curses through clenched teeth.
Rella allows herself a quick glance at Abelard, and if her Seneschal is in any way surprised by their show of intimacy, he is not allowing his face to display it.
“I will require… some time to recover,” Heinrix continues, his voice softening with a grim resignation. “For the time being, I will have to suffer pain whenever I take a step until I recuperate.”
Abelard takes that as his cue to approach, quickly shedding his tattered coat and draping it around Heinrix’s bare shoulders.
“We've set up a base of operations not far from here,” Abelard reassures Heinrix. “The Lord Captain and I will take you there. We’ve managed to amass some clothing and provisions.”
Heinrix nods, pulling the coat tighter around himself. “Thank you, Abelard,” he says solemnly.
Rella reaches for his hand, and Heinrix grasps it gratefully, twining his fingers with hers, his breath escaping in a soft hiss. She gently leads him away from the tank, guiding him out of this accursed chamber that has seen so much of his suffering.
“I’m here,” she whispers, her voice low enough so only he can hear.
“I know,” he replies, squeezing her hand.