Bliss’s awakening was slow and groggy. And, she soon found, stuffy and predictably foul-smelling. An attempt at drinking herself to death had proven futile, leaving her with naught but a mess of empty bottles, some lazy drool on the table of her booth, and a wicked aroma that had permeated the bar, vile enough to make condemning the building a worthy consideration. Bliss winced as she peeled her face off the table, then stretched out in a yawn. In the process, she kicked the legs supporting the table, and in so doing knocked an empty glass off its edge. Lightning-fast reflexes caught the glass as it fell, despite being as impaired by her hangover as she was. But…, she paused. The glass clinked?

  She pulled it up to her face. The glass was empty of alcohol, yes, but not entirely devoid of contents. A metal thread, with some flat iron plates, lined the glass’s bottom. Bliss yawned again, set the glass down, and pulled the thread out of the glass, holding the plates before her eyes. She had to blink twice, then squint, to read what they said.

  And before Silas Hager’s dogtags landed on the floor, Bliss was out the door of the bar entirely, shirtless and barefoot.

  She ran down the immediate street, then backtracked, realizing that was wrong. Once in front of the bar, she scanned the scene a bit, and then picked out the alley Zha led her through previously and sprinted down its passage in a blink. Then at the top of a hill, she looked to her left, saw nothing, then looked right, toward the statue. The streets were empty, save for a lone figure standing before the statue. The left arm of the figure’s jacket flopped about in Pyrras-3’s artificial wind, clearly not being worn on a physical appendage.

  Bliss didn’t run, much as she wanted to. But she was too awestruck for that. Instead, she approached slowly, assuming she was dreaming. Perhaps in a dream, perhaps between life and death. Perhaps anything. As she neared the base of the hill, the figure spoke. “I wanted to be there when you awoke, but you’re hellishly gassy even in your sleep; I just had to get out of that room.”

  Bliss replied by punching the back of the armless shoulder, hard enough to leave a bruise but not more than that. Which, frankly, was being a little generous.

  “Mirena went to prison for that, once, you know,” I said, and turned to Bliss, smiling. Water filled her eyes, and her lips couldn’t stay still. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Frig you,” she hissed, and closed the distance between us in an instant. I fought to keep my footing, embracing her with the one arm I had while she buried her head in the curve of my neck. Bliss pressed herself as hard as she could against me, and if not for my psykematic biomancy my body would have broken trying to keep us on our feet. Bliss sobbed into my shoulders for minutes more before at last pulling her face before mine again. I opened my mouth to speak, but that only sufficed to get my lips to match hers as she smothered ours together, moving her hands to my head. At that point, I could no longer hold her in place; she forced me back, such that she rammed me into the base of my own statue. I grunted as cracks formed in that base as she compressed my body against granite, but that seemed to only steer her zeal onward. Soon thereafter, she literally leapt upon me, subjecting me not only to her might but also her considerable girth, and the one arm available to me fell to her underside to try to hold her up.

  I failed at that, eventually sliding downward against my statue until I was sitting. I then dropped Bliss to my lap while she continued to smother me and suck my lungs dry. Eventually, I began to wonder if I would even survive the encounter. It was not until lights danced between my eyes that Bliss finally let up, letting me gasp for air once. Just once. Then she crushed my head between my statue and her chest, planting her hands on the granite behind me. “You’re going to tell me everything, Callant,” Bliss said then, and even she was panting for breath. “Or I’m going to squeeze it out of you. Got it?”

  I gave her a thumbs’ up. She slowly pulled herself back from me, letting me gasp for air again. “You’re so damn heavy,” I wheezed, then, fighting for any bit of oxygen I could get beneath her. She replied by putting a hand to the side of my skull and pinning me against the granite. “OK, OK, OK,” I pleaded, moments from having my head pasted. “What do you want to know first?”

  Bliss released my head from her grasp, crossed her arms over her chest, and then leaned back a bit, putting more of her weight onto my waist. I groaned in the process. “How. Where.”

  “I…oh. How is tricky. I didn’t think you’d be this aggressive. Where is…also tricky.” Bliss raised a hand toward my face. “Waitwaitwait!” I begged. She put a single finger to my forehead, and evidenced her strength to me by using it to shove my head back against the granite. “How, OK, uhm. Mirena. And the…Luciene’s human. The deserter guy.”

  “Ishmael Kane.”

  “Him. Sacrifice. Sacrifice was everything. Symbolism and meaning are the essence of the Warp, they are vital to interacting with the Immaterium. The daemon was a daemon of self-destruction. You know that already; we destroyed ourselves trying to fight it directly, but that was always the wrong way to go about it. Sacrifice is a virtuous form of self-destruction, meaning instances of it reacted with large Warp-energy spikes wherever the daemon was present,” I explained. Bliss’s expression was flat, emotionless, waiting for a point. “I’ll get there,” I insisted, still panting. She pulled her finger off my forehead and crossed her arms again.

  “I sacrificed myself on Quintus to save Mirena. That was the start of my downfall, of my corruption, but it also put Mirena on the board of players in the daemon’s game—something none of us, not even the daemon, saw at the time. Soon thereafter, Castecael sacrificed her love for Mirena for us both. Then Ishmael sacrificed himself to save Mirena. A chain of compounding sacrifices, building up a swell of power counter to the daemon’s own. Then Mirena completed the circle, and sacrificed herself for me.”

  “And the swell of power unleashed itself,” Bliss surmised.

  I nodded. “An absolutely colossal pool of energy. More than I had ever used all throughout my life combined,” I started, then shook my head and laughed. “Mirena…always went through life thinking she was insignificant compared to the likes of us—you, me, Silas, Lucene, Zha. No, frig us! She was orders of magnitude more important than any of us idiots bumbling about. ‘Just a woman,’ she’d always say. But she was the one, the only one, that proved more than a match for the daemon. In truth, I don’t think it’s entirely on her shoulders; true to form, when you break it down, the daemon destroyed itself. It gave me the opportunity to save Mirena, setting the whole chain of events in motion. If it didn’t do that, it would have won, and handedly.”

  “Wait, destroyed itself? Cro—” she started, but I threw a pair of fingers to her lips.

  “Don’t say its name!” I insisted. Bliss replied by tossing her lips forward and taking my fingertips into her mouth. “You’re insatiable,” I sighed, but let her have her fun with me. “The daemon is…oh this is going to raise more questions. The daemon is, I believe, trapped in time. Stuck between when it first inhabited me here on Pyrras-3 until the moment of Mirena’s sacrifice on Apotheosis. It always had a bit of foresight, ever foretelling of its eventual victory, yet…nothing beyond that. When Mirena sacrificed herself, when the pool of that sacrificial power was awakened, I reached out to it with my mind, and the only thought on my mind was to be anywhere but there. Unfortunately, the Warp isn’t…spacial. Anywhere can mean here or there as you and I understand it, but it also means…anywhen.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “You time-traveled,” Bliss said, eyes widening as she sat back further down my lap. “Into the future?” she suggested, as an explanation for where I had spent the last three years if not with her.

  “Past. Distant, distant past,” I sighed, shaking my head. “With Mirena, thankfully. Throne, even then, without her I’d have been killed so quickly. No, Mirena and I landed in the frozen wastes of Fenris, home of the Space Wolves, some two-thousand-odd years ago.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And here’s where you respect your elders, Bliss,” I quipped. She looked on at me flatly for a moment, then showed me her version of ‘respect’ by leaning forward to peck her lips to mine again. “That’ll do, I suppose,” I said with a shrug. “But hey, if you were curious about how long Absalom’s curse will last, the answer is: I don’t know! Really frigging long.”

  “Good. Increases the odds that I can have sex with you until the stars go out,” Bliss said, then winked to me. She was truly terrifying at times. And those times were often indeed. “Fenris. As an Inquisitor.”

  “Well, two thousand years ago the war they know as the Months of Shame hadn’t yet happened between us and them. So, we were able to get along. I mean, Mirena and I were still prisoners for…decades. I spent the first few months all but comatose; time-traveling takes its toll on a psyker, you know? But Mirena wouldn’t leave my side, even when threatened by Astartes. Eventually, I was able to negotiate some form of freedom with them. Us siring a child or two to induct into their ranks probably helped.”

  “Glad to know Mirena got some action with you. Two thousand years with her means you’re probably half-ready for a night with me,” Bliss said, smiling coyly and licking her lips over. Then her smile faded. “Where…is…Mirena?”

  I paused, and from that pause Bliss’s expression adopted a frown. She sensed the answer before I said it. “Dead.”

  “I’m…Throne, Callant, I’m—”

  “Two thousand years is a long time, Bliss. Nearer to three thousand, actually, when you account for our lives leading up to Apotheosis. Mirena wanted to be there for me when Apotheosis happened, in case the daemon leapt from my first-mind to my current mind. It didn’t. Ordo Malleus confirmed it—that delay, for what it’s worth, is why I took three years to get here. After that, well…Mirena decided she was ready to rest. She took Absalom’s curative, and went peacefully. She’s with the Emperor now, where she belongs. She has more than earned that rest. Bliss, I’ll be blunt: I do love you. You know I do. But I also love Mirena. If we sleep together, I can’t promise you I won’t be thinking of her. We were husband and wife for millennia. No one else in the Imperium has any idea what that means.”

  Bliss smiled warmly and rose a hand to my cheek. “I’d be concerned if that wasn’t the case, Callant,” she said in a whisper. “It sounds like the onus is on me to make you think of me in bed. And I think I can be…persuasive.”

  “I don’t doubt that, yes,” I admitted.

  “And one day, Callant, if you’ll have me, I’ll figure out what that means too.”

  I paused and met her smile with my own. “What do you mean ‘if?’”

  “So…we’re an item, you and I?” Bliss asked for clarity’s sake. I shrugged and nodded. “Good. Because I so want to sit on your face and chug a bottle of Gleece.”

  “On second thought—”

  “OK, so, wait. You’re the informant, aren’t you? For the Ordo Chronos? You’ve been the one telling them everything,” Bliss understood.

  “About that Gleece—”

  “So that means you engineered…well, everything, right? You must have sent Thaddeus Scayn to recover yourself here on Pyrras, and induct you into the Inquisition. You would have told people like Caliman and van der Skar what to do, where to go. Throne, no wonder you were so good at slaughtering our foes—who the hell could survive two Blackgar’s fighting against them?”

  “It does sort of diminish the weight of my accomplishments,” I grumbled, for all coincidence and luck in my earlier years was of my own making.

  “Yeah, you must have orchestrated everything for yourself, right? Wow, you're actually kinda lame, huh?” Bliss said, wiggling on my lap.

  “I will have you know you are taunting the now-Lord Inquisitor of the Ordo Chronos,” I informed her.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she brushed that off. “But I guess you put everything together, huh? Even—” she began, and then her eyes widened as her voice trailed off.

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, Bliss.”

  “Sorry? What the hell are you apologizing for? You’re the reason you and I ever met, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know what I expected. Some form of angry shouting, perhaps. Maybe a smack to my face, that it had been by my hands that Bliss had suffered so. Instead, what I got was Bliss kissing me hard enough to put those lights back into my eyes. When the lights faded, I found I had completely collapsed to the ground, laying on my backside. Bliss, meanwhile, had moved toward her earlier desire, and was partially sitting on my lower face, though much of her weight was on her knees on either side of my head. Knowing I was fully at her mercy, then, I did not dare say anything. “You’re a bit weak, old man,” Bliss greeted me as my eyes flitted open, putting her hands on her waist. Just as she sat on the lower half of my head, I could not see hers behind her protruding chest, only able to make out her own two crimson eyes that looked endearingly down at me. “That doesn’t bode well for you tonight.”

  +I’ll make do,+ I answered.

  “Callant Blackgar,” Bliss started. I raised my eyebrows. “Thank you for so-willingly welcoming me into your life. Thank you for being there for me, time and again when I’ve needed you—although you could’ve been a little quicker to come back here. Thank you for coming back here, to me. And thank you for all the Gleece you’re going to let me drink on top of you tonight.”

  +What do you mean ‘all’ of it?+

  “Well, one bottle just isn’t enough for someone as kind and generous as you,” Bliss explained, wiggling her hips atop me. “You deserve some generosity to match.”

  +Bliss.+

  “Yes, Callant?”

  I closed my eyes and sighed to myself, then opened them to her again. +I think this is going to be a wonderful relationship between us.+

  “Oh, no, not wonderful. Blissful,” she said, giggling. “By the way, where is everyone?” she asked, apparently finally realizing that the streets of Pyrras-3 were empty today.

  I reached over a gargantuan thigh to tap my forehead. +I’m very good at giving people reasons not to see me,+ I explained.

  “Huh. A useful skill, certainly. Now, we just need somewhere to shack up where people won’t smell us—me.”

  +I have a place here on Pyrras,+ I explained.

  “Oh, cool. Carry me there,” Bliss demanded.

  +You’re going to make the elderly, one-armed Lord Inquisitor carry you?+

  “Yup. Unless the elderly, one-armed hoity-toity Inquisitor wants me to grind his skull into the ground,” she offered with a shrug. “Don’t worry, Callant; give it a couple months to a few years, and I’m sure I’ll settle down. Maybe. Until then, though, good luck,” she said, and leaned forward to blow me a kiss. Then her eyes softened, and any pretense of happiness faded from her face. “Callant…I thought you died. I thought I killed you.”

  +I’m sorry, Bliss, I am.+

  “I…need you to understand, Callant: I don’t want to live another day without you. Do you know what I’m saying? And…I don’t want to guilt you with that information, but…but you need to know who it is that’s sitting on your face right now.”

  +I know, Bliss. Believe me, I know.+

  Bliss heaved a heavy breath in and out, then nodded to herself. “I think you’re the only one that’s ever known me. That ever could know me. So know this, Callant Blackgar: I am never, ever going to be able to demonstrate how much I love you. All the…play…is just the closest approximation I can manage. You’re more important to me than I am to myself. So if you need anything, if you want anything, any part of me or…any…anything, please, take it. With you, I want to live forever. Without you, not at all. Do you understand?”

  “Bliss,” I said aloud, my voice muffled into her underside. She giggled at the sound and the feeling of that. “After three thousand of years of life without you, I not only understand, I have the same frame of mind that you do. From now on, one of us can’t live without the other. I’m not lasting another day without you.”

  “Good,” Bliss said softly. “Then let’s go find that Gleece. Oh, and uh, what about Zha and Galen?”

  I tried to shrug, but found my shoulders stifled under her thighs. She probably felt my attempted movement, which in the end sufficed to get the response across. +Zha has spent a life in my shadow. I think it’s time she made her own light for herself, and Galen is inclined to follow her to the end of the galaxy, it seems.+

  “So, it’s just us then. Forever.”

  +Just us.+

  “Oh, you’re so screwed,” Bliss giggled, then blurted out a boisterous laugh. “Thanks, Cally. We’re going to have such bliss together.”

  +Cally? Even after three millennia, that’s a new one.+

  “Get used to it.”