1: The Burning of Ramus

The metal of the guard rail was warm under Val’s palms, the platform heated by the distant sun that Ramus orbited. Below her, the city of Lyris lay, stretching out in the darkness, its lights shining like the stars above. Towering above her was the station, a Raminite Temple, orbiting silently in the darkness. Beyond that, the ink black of space spilled out, stretching on forever. She had watched that black for as long as she could remember, and had grown to trust its silence.
Val was wrong to trust the void. What she thought was peace was an ambush.
The Church of the Specter had given charge of this Temple, a floating megalith, to those who chose peace. Its purpose was both defender and devotion to those who had lost their lives when the imperium eradicated life on Ramus to claim it as their own. They were watchers and prayer-singers, though mainly the latter. The Church relied heavily on the War Born to defend Ramus, though they would never admit it. Every night, Val would climb the stairway to the observatory and look out at the stars. Merchant convoys drifted past, laden with goods from far-off worlds that belonged to the Ramus Alliance. A few War Born warships silently patrolled the skies as well, their presence a nuisance. She breathed in the air, the smell of incense and recycled oxygen filling her lungs - years of ritual candles mixing with oxygen filters.
That night, as Val went to light the candles, something felt off. A small beep began to wail from the command room. Val looked inside. Something had been picked up on the scanners, a whisper of a signature that shouldn't exist.
“Val?” a small voice slipped out from behind the door. She turned to see Lene, the head technician of the lower arrays, peeking around the door. Lene’s religious robes were tucked into a harness, hair cropped into a practical, short cut. “Did you see it?” Lene asked, her hand pointed to the console where the beep continued to go off.
The primary monitor, a semicircle of glass with a hologram map of Ramus and the surrounding system, sat in the room's heart. A small red dot flashed off the north-west hemisphere of Ramus. It was a warp signature, but there were no known warp ways in its vicinity. As they watched, three more red dots appeared next to the original.
“That should be impossible,” whispered Lene.
Val thought of the sermon from last night, High Priest Orrin, voice low and steady: “We are the watchers between the dark and light. We keep watch so that the darkness of war will never claim Ramus again.” She could feel his words settle like ash.
“Signal the council,” Val commanded. Her voice level. It surprised her to hear it steady. They were not soldiers. They were priests. Still, if it came down to a fight, they would give them hell, whatever it was that had alerted the system.
Lene opened the line, and immediately they were bombarded by an onslaught of rapid commands. They were not the first to see the anomaly. Ramus was preparing for a fight. The Council was not taking any chances.
The anomaly grew on the monitor, growing closer as the two watched. Val hailed the emergency channel for the Temple, alerting everyone else aboard to prepare for battle. Not that there was much they could do to prepare. There was little on board in weaponry. Then at last, the anomaly came into range close enough to be identified.
“Psiker frequency,” Lene said, her voice cold and collected, as if reading from a script, her formal training kicking in. “We're picking up four Warstar-sized signatures.” Everyone had heard the legends of the Psikers: organic machine hybrids, built by humanity during their first contact with an alien species. They were the reason that humanity had won that war, leading to the birth of the Imperium. It was said they could even predict the future with their machine minds. What wasn't myth was the destructive power of their living ships.
The alarm began to sound in earnest now, the lights flickered off, then dimmed back on, as the emergency power kicked on. “Three minutes to contact,” Lene said. Her voice finally began to show fear.
Val’s hands went to the small holy pendant below her robes. It was a token of the Specters, a round sphere encircled by two crescents on either side that pointed downward. It was made of brushed steel, a reminder of the vows of peace she had sworn herself to. She had placed her faith in peace. Tonight, that faith felt brittle and small.
“Confirm visual,” Lene said.
Val adjusted the main viewport and focused it on where the Psikers would emerge. For a heartbeat, there were just stars in the lens, the familiar constellations shown peacefully above the planet - and then space tore open as the first Psiker ripped its way into existence, shattering the night.
The first Warstar had arrived.
It wasn't like the hulking, warmachines of the War Born, or the carved, predatory dreadnoughts of the Karnage whose scars were worn like badges of honor. It was tall and slender, with a main eye encircled by a half dozen others that shone brightly with psychic power. Its hull was a matte grey, hiding its organic systems beneath. It retched its way through the opening in space, exiting into existence with a finality that shook Val to her core. The warp route closed behind it with a sickening clash, as if someone had scraped nails across steel.
The Temple had two seconds between comprehension and the sound of the first hit.
“Warning: Unregistered aggressor. Emission—” the array spat more data than the console could digest. “—target locked. Fire incoming.”
The Warstar did not move as a normal ship did. It did not ignite engines or give the momentum of a maneuver. It simply oriented its main eye towards the city of Lyris and released its psychic energy. An angry purple lesion lashed out across the sky, striking the thin protective halo that was the city’s shield. The shield screamed, flickered, then died. The beam, held back by the shield, pierced through, hitting the city. Buildings flared like paper lanterns on a pyre, burning under the radiation of the beam.
Val watched as the beam coiled across the skyline. She saw, with a clarity that made her sick, that it was not simply firing on Lyris. It was hunting. First, it targeted their defensive network, then turned on the shipyards. Next, it set the Cathedral of the Specter on fire - where her order kept their ancient relics, and buried their saints. It was dismantling the city with surgical precision.
Lene leapt to the coms, “Emergency broadcast! Evacuate the Cathedral!” She shouted out into the flames. But it was already too late. The Warstar had moved on, and the Cathedral lay in ruin. Lene bent her head, a silent prayer on her lips for her brothers and sisters who had lost their lives.
Val tried to speak, but she couldn't find her voice. They weren’t soldiers. Instead, she pushed her hand towards the console. They felt heavy and weak, but she forced herself to keep moving. The Temple may have been a place of peace and remembrance, but they had some contingencies. What meager fleet the War Born had at Ramus had already engaged the first Warstar. It was time they backed them.
By the time their meager weapons had targeted the Psiker Warstar, the warp was again opening. Three more holes were ripped from the fabric of space, as three more Warstars exited just in time to support the first Warstar.
“Ramus command—” Lene’s hands flew across the console. “Central relay’s down. The attack took out the grid. We can’t reach them.”
The dismemberment of the city below and the meager fleet above was sickening to watch. It was cold, surgical in its precision. The worst part was the speed of the strike. There had been ten imperial minutes between the first signal and the start of the destruction.
On their second pass, the Psikers began to target the eastern shipyard. The beams tore into the War Born ships as they tried to take off to defend Ramus. Most were still grounded. The Psikers had caught them unaware. Flames billowed upward in ribbons of smoke, filling the sky below with dark clouds, blocking out the few lights that remained in the city.
From somewhere in the battle above Ramus, a voice cracked open across the emergency channel: “This is Captain Merek of the War Born. All personal ships flee this area. Get yourselves to safety. All military ships, this night isn't over yet! We’ll send these…” The line went dead. Val saw one of the War Born ships burst into flames as a beam from one of the Psiker Warstars lanced through its hull. She guessed that it was Merek’s vessel.
Flee. The word hung thick across the static. She knew she wasn't the only Specter tempted to follow the merchant ships as they began to exit the system.
There was a flicker of movement on the viewport. A handful of War Born patrol fighters engaged the Psiker Warstars, diving them like hornets. They were no threat to the Warstars' immense power, but they drew their focus, allowing the civilian ships to escape. With renewed hope and faith, the Specters watched their brave sacrifice, as one by one, they were shot down, but not before the last of the personal ships entered the warp.
“Comms from the Cathedral,” Lene called out, her face grave. “It's from High Priest Orrin.” She said, her voice steady but distant. “He says the relic chambers are intact. All available resources are to help with an evacuation. They want us - “ her voice trailed off.
“Down in the city to help with relics.” Val finished. She had only seen the relics once in her life. And even then, she had only seen a few. But she knew their value. They were not only symbols, but records, maps, treaties of not only their ancestors but the alien species that lived on Ramus before the invasion of the Imperium.
By the time her team had reached the Cathedral, most of Lyris was burning, and the Warstars above had moved on to other cities across the planet. Communication with the rest of Ramus was sparse, as every time they set it up, the Psikers would trace its origins and burn it to the ground within a few minutes.
When they reached the lower sanctuary, the lower bells of the Cathedral were ringing out. It was the first time Val had heard them. The sound was melancholy, bringing sadness to her soul. She saw the High Priest organizing members as they entered the relic rooms.
“They hit the docks,” High Priest Orrin called out as they entered, his voice thinner than Val had ever heard it. He held a scroll belonging to the Specters, the alien race destroyed by the imperium and namesake of the Church. “The grid is out, too. We can’t get any help from above. We’re taking the relics deeper.”
For the next five imperial hours, they worked, moving the relics deeper into the sanctuary and into the crypts below. As they worked, Ramus burned above. The few War Born that were stationed here battled hard to defend the home world, but there was little they could do. In the end, they were only able to slow them down, crippling one of the Warstars.
It was in the second hour that hope was restored. A faint communication came through. “Outer forces have been alerted. The War Born are on their way.” The transmission was cut short, but at least there was hope. Prayers of gratitude were given as the Specters continued their work.
On the sixth hour, Val and the others got word that the War Born fleets were arriving. They rushed outside to watch as the fleets began to enter.
“The War Born fleet,” High Priest Orrin muttered more to himself than to any of the others. “They finally assembled.”
A tear traced a clean line through the ash on Val’s cheek. She couldn’t tell if it was from the joy of seeing their salvation or from the horror of the destruction around her.
The Psiker Warstars, seeing they were well outnumbered now, began to exit into the warp. Dawn broke as the last Warstar disappeared into the darkness of space.