Galatea

“Her mother has perished in service to The Emperor.” The preacher’s voice was dry as though it hadn’t been used for years. He brought news of sorrow but did not seem in the slightest bit concerned as to the effects his words brought with them. Covered from head to toe in a hooded garment stained the deepest of reds, the preacher was no more than a wraith within swathes of fabric. His shriveled form could have once been marvelous, but his wrinkled skin matched the worn paper of the scripture he wore displayed upon his shoulders. “The child is to be released into the care of the Schola Progenium within the day.” The preacher said no more, turning around in a flutter of crimson robes and papers and exiting the building followed by a small retinue of initiates who carried the excessive fabric of his robes. So was the childhood of Galatea Lilias ended, and so was a servant of the Imperium born.

---

The skies which reigned above the shrine world known as Silence II were a cool and dismal grey, as they most often were. Judging by the smell of the air it was liable to rain. It was always liable to rain. From pilgrims who’d come to visit the tombs of martyrs and lesser saints, to solemn natives who wandered aimlessly amongst the endless shrines and graves, all who tread upon the sacred soil of the world’s capital took the planet’s name to heart.

It was only when the piercing and unpleasant sound of a mechanical alarm rang through the eerie marble halls of the Schola Progenium that the unnatural silence was broken. The awful blaring of the alarm was soon accompanied by sounds of the city coming to life for the morning. Church bells chimed in glorious harmony and the sound of drums could be heard in the streets below as average citizens took part of the Carnival of Dawn.

"Up! The breaking dawn waits for no one!" The voice of Jeremiah, the Drill Abbot of dormitory 13C, rang nearly as clear as the morning alarm. "Up with you! Sloth will not be tolerated in these holy halls!"

Thin blankets started to slowly unravel from around the lean forms of forty children. Dormitory 13C was bathed in a harsh white light as the Drill Abbot shouted again, "Alright I expect to see you all dressed and in the chapel for morning prayers before the Carnival of Dawn has come to a close." Jeremiah slammed the door behind him and the room sprung to life. Clothes were pulled from a shared wardrobe; each article was standard issue and perfectly identical, but children often find the strangest things to scrap over.

After the brief squabble over clothing, a line of uniformly dressed children made their way down to where they knew Jeremiah to be waiting for them. Their footsteps echoed off the marble floors and reverberated loudly around the building. It would have been nearly impossible to go unnoticed in the halls of the capital's Schola Progenium.

As expected, the Drill Abbot stood on a raised dais towards the back of the chapel. Despite the gloomy skies above light shone in through the magnificent stained-glass depiction of the God-Emperor, which stood in all its glory just behind Brother Jeremiah. Most assumed it was from an artificial source, while the more faithful of the lot believed it to be the holy light of the God-Emperor himself.

The children learned after hundreds upon hundreds of mornings what was expected of them and dropped to their knees in neat rows. It was one of the few times during the day that the children were silent.

"The Emperor of Mankind is the light and the way," Jeremiah began with practiced ease, "and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor. So it is taught in the Lectio Divinitatus and so it shall always be. Above all, the Emperor will protect."

"The Emperor will protect," the children echoed, some with more heart than others, "May he reign victorious."

Jeremiah smiled and clapped his hands together, "May this be yet another productive day! I'll see you all after breakfast."

Breakfast was, more often than not, much like dressing. There were brief arguments over identical plates before the crew of forty settled down to eat. Mealtimes were the only times during the day where 13C was left mostly unsupervised, and so they took the time to gossip. It was usually mountains upon mountains of dreck, but one rumor stood out above the rest; someone had made mention that Jeremiah was involved with a cult down in the catacombs. Had the Drill Abbot heard these accusations it would have led to incredibly harsh punishments for anyone involved, but, luckily for dormitory 13C, few knew where the Abbot went while the children ate.

Breakfast was followed by rigorous training. The sight of forty children, most under the age of thirteen, with guns and blades would be enough to unnerve most men but it was a daily occurrence out in the grassy courtyard. The sound of steel on steel was clear in the air.

"Galatea Lilias, you are paired with Ezekiel Qurite!" A plain boy ran a hand through his chestnut brown hair and stepped forward with a sigh. A stern faced girl with crystalline blue eyes, only slightly older than the boy, came to meet him.

"Please don't hurt me," Ezekiel spoke in a low and uneasy voice. He'd trained with Galatea only once before and he could still feel the ache in his bones from that day.

"Prayer cleanses the soul, but pain cleanses the body. Both are required for a healthy life." Galatea, so named for her stark white hair, spoke with conviction, "Raise your weapon."

As soon as the younger boy brought his blade up Galatea was on the attack. Blow after blow descended upon his increasingly desperate defenses until she finally knocked the weapon from his hands and leveled her blade at Ezekiel's throat.

"I yield," his hands raised slowly. He took a tentative step back but Galatea stepped forwards with equal pacing. "I said I yield! Let's go again?"

"You would allow yourself to be taken and forced to reveal anything you knew to an enemy? Coward." Her blade was now beginning to press against Ezekiel's neck and the boy stumbled backwards in a sloppy attempt to distance himself, only to trip and fall to his back. Galatea stood above him, sword at his throat. It was only when she drew a drop of blood and the boy cried out that Jeremiah stepped in.

"Enough!" The Drill Abbot's backhand was enough to send her reeling. Dizzy and disoriented she took a knee to regain her balance.

"I wasn't going to kill him," she muttered, but Jeremiah was too busy tending to Ezekiel to notice her comment.

---

It was later that night at dinner that Ezekiel approached Galatea again. The miniscule wound she'd left him with wasn't even enough to merit a bandage.

"If you're coming to complain about this morning I advise you to keep it to yourself. I was well within the bounds of what is permitted in training."

Ezekiel bit his lip; that hadn't been what he'd come to talk about, but it was pretty close. "No it’s not that. I was hoping maybe you'd be able to give me a bit of help with my technique. How did you disarm me?"

"Ask Brother Jeremiah for assistance if you need it. I will not divert time from prayer for your benefit alone." Galatea returned to her plate, which had been empty for some time, placed it in the dish pit, and walked off in the direction of the chapel.

With a long match she took a few minutes to light the many candles in the chapel, whispering a short prayer over each. When the last wick had been set aflame she jerked her wrist sharply and the match was extinguished.

“When my knees have worn through the floor perhaps I will have learned my place.” The rough and worn fabric of her pants made kneeling particularly uncomfortable, but Galatea showed no signs of this discomfort as she dropped to the floor. “I need no father, for the Emperor protects me. I need no mother, for the church provides for me. Emperor forgive my trespasses upon your word; may my penance satisfy.”

She reached forwards to claim a ceremonial blade, her pale hair falling and obscuring the half-lidded gaze of her teal eyes. Galatea pulled up one of her pant legs to reveal a row upon row of small scars and wounds in varying states of healing. With a wince she drove the bade into the next empty spot as far as she could without causing lasting damage and twisted. Blood dripped down the pale skin of her thigh.

“Pain cleanses the body…”

Monotony. Day after day of training and prayer, day after day of devotion and bloody penance; and so the seldom fair and often violent world went on, awaiting change of any variety to break the routine. Outside, the drumbeats of the Carnival of Dusk rose up into the crisp night air.

---

Despite the many candles that filled the ritual space, an oppressive darkness still seemed to close in from all sides. Light from the flickering flames barely reached the edges of the room, but it still cast its glow far enough to illuminate the skulls which made up the walls of that particular chamber in the catacombs.

A man stood before a makeshift altar of bones and wood. Red candles decorated its surface along with a strange black liquid and a bottle of wine. His form was cloaked in a heavy black robe, the trim of which was covered in the script of a foreign tongue. The hood of his robe obscured his face. Twelve other hooded figures idled in the room, their attention all on the man at the altar who was clearly serving an important purpose.

“Et ego invocabo ad fortitudinem autem perversio facio mea imperatum.” The voice of the man reciting the invocation would have been eerily familiar to the children of 13C. It seemed the rumors floating about the mess hall had some merit to them after all.

Every so often the Drill Abbot was not present to drag the children from bed in the early morning. Some counted this as a blessing and stayed in bed until he showed up, claiming to have not heard the alarm. This was a fairly unlikely lie and was never taken seriously. Jeremiah always showed up eventually but he always looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t had more than a few seconds of sleep. The few who took initiative and began the day in his absence were met with praise.

Jeremiah did not show up that morning, but something else did.

It first became obvious that something was wrong when the ground started to tremble. At first it was a gente shivering which was barely noticeable, but it soon grew into wrathful convulsions that shook the building to its foundations. Parts of the floor began to crack and buckle leaving an uneven terrain for Galatea to navigate.

The young girl had been the only one out of bed at the alarm and the silence of the chapel had been her comfort for many hours. There was no one awake to train with, so she set herself to training of the soul. Galatea’s reading was unreliable at best, yet that didn’t stop the devout child from pulling a book off the wall and doing what she could to recite the scriptures within. There were a few words that her tongue got tangled on that she had to skip over, but that didn’t dishearten her enough to get her to put the book down.

It was only when the ground started to shake that she snapped the ancient tome shut and forced it back into its spot on the shelf. Galatea had half a mind to go check on her peers; but training ranked above compassion, and so she disappeared down the hallway towards the armory. The sound of a scream she recognized was enough to make her pick up the pace.

While Galatea would have normally had great respect for the privacy of her superiors, desperate times called for desperate measures. Jeremiah never left his door locked and, up until that moment, none of the children had been brave enough to so much as try the handle. The door let out a squawk of resistance as it was pushed open. What Galatea saw was enough to cause the blood to drain from her face and to scar her ability to trust for many years to come, but she was in too much of a hurry to linger on what would surely come to mind again in the future.

Back in dormitory 13C, thirty-eight children faced one otherworldly being and the boy who summoned it. Ezekiel Qurite stood in the center of the room in an ebony robe. His hood was down to reveal his now pale face and bloodshot eyes. His mouth was split into an unnaturally wide grin. If the boy's state wasn't the reason for the cowering children then it was certainly the beast next to him.

The daemon stood a solid seven feet tall and was barely dressed. A plate of black leather made up the corset which covered only one of its breasts while a set of what may have been spandex pants or perhaps unnatural skin covered its shapely legs. The rest of the daemon's skin was a rich and pale lavender colour and its waist-length oilslick hair was up in a high ponytail. It looked to have emerged from a plain human, and further investigation would have revealed Jeremiah's face sliding down one of its arms, leaving a bloody smear on its lovely skin.

The beast lunged forwards, cruel claws extended in the direction of a petrified red-haired girl, and drove those wicked blades into her gut. The ginger's face contorted in pain and a scream of agony tore from her throat before she went limp and the daemon pulled its blood-soaked claws back.

The remaining children screamed and scattered. A few stood and tried to fight but it made little difference. It was a slaughter.

Galatea burst into the room in full armor, wielding a chainblade she'd stolen from Jeremiah's room. Her foray into the Drill Abbot's room revealed more than she was happy to believe. Had she not been in such a rush to come to the aid of her peers, she would have dug further, but she knew what she needed to do and was prepared to bring an end to his life no matter the cost.

Resplendent, magnificent, and practically glowing with faith, Galatea fired the weapon to life and charged. Ezekiel fell nigh instantly. His body was weakened from channeling corrupt power and the daemon he'd brought into the world was still distracted with the thin, dark skinned boy it had been toying with. The feeling of flesh yielding beneath Galatea’s blade was ecstatic. The young warrior had never felt the weight of a proper weapon in her hands and the sheer power of it was giving her a bit of a rush. She didn't even wait to make sure Ezekiel was dead before she continued towards the daemon.

The lilac-skinned beast brushed off Galatea’s attack with ease. At this point nearly all of the children who'd stayed in the room had been massacred. The few who remained alive cowered in a corner, tears streaming down their faces. Their flight from the room was being prevented by the position of the daemon, which was in the process of advancing on Galatea.

The bitter taste of fear started to rise in her throat; she swallowed it as soon as it came up. Her stance widened as she tracked the slinking daemon with her eyes.

"Stance low, blade up, left foot forward," Galatea whispered to herself. The contents of Jeremiah's room may have been rather incriminating but it didn't change the fact that he'd trained her exceptionally well.

The daemon lunged forwards and began its assault. Galatea was immediately on the defensive. Despite the teeth of her chainblade, her swipes glanced effortlessly off the beast's bloody claws. For a fourteen-year-old child she was holding up well, but it was obvious that she was no match for the daemon Ezekiel had summoned. It battered on Galatea’s defenses with seemingly unlimited energy and the girl was beginning to tire.

Her adrenaline spiked for a moment as Ezekiel's Daemon got close enough to land a hit, but the creature was arrogant and rightly so. It drew its inky black tongue up the side of Galatea’s face and let out a sort of clicking purr. Her knuckles went white where they were around the hilt of the blade and she froze in fear.

"I could give you the recognition you long for," the voice of the daemon was a low and sultry hiss, "You could be adored."

Galatea's eyes started to glaze over for only a moment as the charm of the beast began to work its magic, but another figure entering the room took up her attention.

It was all happening so quickly. There was a gloved hand coiled up in the back of her shirt and suddenly she was out of the daemon's grip and flying towards the wall, which she hit with a dull 'thud'.

Galatea groaned and tried to pull herself to her feet, but the pain in her head prevented her from regaining her balance and standing.

The man who had ripped her from the grip of Ezekiel's daemon was performing much better in combat than she had been. They moved like twin whirlpools, each a natural disaster in their own right. It was almost like a dance; the elegant movements all swift and practiced to the music of the clash of blades and claws. It was much like the brief battle between her and Ezekiel himself. It was over in a matter of minutes.

With the creature slain, Galatea tried to scramble towards the door as the rest of the children had done during the fight, but the commanding tone of the stranger pinned her in place.

"You're staying exactly where you are, kid," he was now coming up to her and she tried to find her weapon again but came up unsuccessful, instead grabbing a piece of rubble. Eyes wide and terrified she tried again to stand, "Take it easy, I'm not here to hurt you."

Galatea was shaking but did nothing to slow his approach. The same gloved hand that wrenched her free of the daemon grabbed her by the chin and examined her face.

"You're barely even hurt, that's something." he chuckled to himself before offering a hand to the shaking mess at his feet, "You mind coming with me kid? I got some questions for you."

She took his hand with only the slightest bit of hesitation.

----

There are pivotal moments in everyone's lives, but few can claim to have witnessed a true act of the divine. The man later introduced himself as Alric, and it was much later than that still that he made his identity as an Inquisitor known to the survivor. The debt she owed was one of blood, and one she intended to repay in loyalty.

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-WrightNDesk

-JessTheOtaku

-ImmaChibi