A note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:

Well it's been another good long while since I updated, but… in the intervening time I bought a house? And in my defense, that whole packing up the rental that's literally falling down around your ears / moving / remodeling thing actually takes a lot of time (especially when the entire interior of your new house is Barbie pink?).

I'd seen some time back that someone mentioned in comments that it seemed I'd forgotten some things, skipped over parts and I'll be honest - if I wrote about every one of Pieter and Ellie's days together I'd be writing for the next forty years and still wouldn't be close to being done. I like to focus on critical junctures - on scenes that move the story and develop the characters rather than all of the little details. So as this story moves on, we'll be skipping swathes of time, most of which you can assume is filled with much of the same sort of interactions as have already been described. You don't need to know about Ellie's every High Gothic language lesson. And we'd both be bored to tears if that's all I posted. That being said, many of you have commented something to the effect that you've seen this coming, I just think you didn't realize it'd take this long. To frame the following chapter, this occurs about six months after Chapter 17.

Part 4 - Terra

Chapter 18 - Things That Go Bump

There was a warm breeze moving across her face. She opened her eyes to find its source: a solar wind, cast from an intense and indistant source. Its energy played through the eddies of space as she floated, weightless, and surveyed where she had woken.

It was like gazing into the void: black velvet washed with millions of twinkling stars glowing like candles, some guttering and dim, and some burning brightly in the beyond. Remote and beautiful, they broke the darkness with a legion in pinpoints of light that danced through the endless sky. She looked down at her bare feet, suspended above that same sea of roiling light, which extended above her, and to the left and right as well. She couldn't say why, but the lights mesmerized her, fascinated her; they filled her heart with immeasurable joy.

"They could all be yours, you know," a man said behind her, casually, as if they had been discussing something else and he found it worthy to note. Startled, she turned to find him floating near her, an empty patch of sky at his back, watching her watch the stars play. He had classic, even attractive features, and his bare body glowed with a turbulent, mottled radiance. "Not now, of course," he amended generously, as if she had argued his point, "but time passes more quickly than you'd think."

Though the thought of being able to see this at her leisure was pleasant, it held no real temptation.

"You're a fairly clever little girl," he assured her in a voice that pressed the suggestion, "and certainly powerful enough - or could be, when the time is right."

She laughed at the idea. "What would I ever do with stars?"

He released one 'ha' in reply, though the sound held strangely little mirth. "Look closer," was all he said.

She did, scrutinising the vista before her, focusing on each light for a few seconds before moving on. They moved organically, curiously, familiarly. She had never seen stars pulse with motion like this but it didn't matter. It would've been impossible to mistake what it was: even after countless millennia of evolution, the human mind was still hardwired to recognize some patterns. Awed, breathlessly smiling, she twisted to see him again and barely whispered, "They're… people."

His smile turned her blood cold.

Icy revulsion twisted in her gut in reply, setting off a warning within her body, tensing every muscle. The quirk of her lips melted instantly. This meeting was not what it seemed. Carefully, as if to make no mistake about it, she reiterated, "They're people." When he said nothing, she demanded, "What did you mean?"

"I'm sure you'd find something to do with them," he assured her nonchalantly. "Your kind always do."

"No." She raised her chin stubbornly and stood fast, as if to bar his path to the lights. "No, those are people."

He spat a noise, something like 'fehch,' that dripped with disgust. "Those are souls, child," he informed her with bored contempt, "and they belong to whoever is strong enough to take them."

He was a monster. Maybe he looked like a man, but he wasn't - couldn't be. A bracing breath later, she took a step toward him; except her feet didn't move. She looked down to find that her legs were glowing light, just another flame in the darkness. He stepped in. "Stop," she commanded as loudly and firmly as she could, trying to keep all panic from her voice, and lifted her hand to push him back. But only tiny, spiraling gusts of energy came from her mouth, and her arm was just light. He smiled menacingly, manically, displaying too many teeth and an unwholesome, hungry glint in his eyes.

"You're a soul, child." With a twisting motion of his hand, he rotated her back to face the sky that had so enchanted her as the darkness behind him surged forward. "You belong to whoever is strong enough to take you. Watch."

It crept amid the stars, almost unnoticeable in the space between them, until the strange mottling of color he bore infused itself into the places that his emptiness had infected. Dread was building in her. Helpless to stop him, unable to look away, she shouted, "Don't!" half order, half plea; but her voice didn't come.

Then between heartbeats the souls were gone - snuffed out in one unified instant. Her breath caught in her lungs and her stomach dropped. Even the ghostly after-images of the lights had been devoured, leaving nothing but a horrifically blank vista. "No…" even her whisper of despair yielded nothing more than a puff of energy, swirling out from her insubstantial mouth. She fought with all of her might, throwing her will into moving herself to turn and strike him, bellowing her defiance as best she could, but her body of light was silent and paralyzed.

"You'll join them," he said, as if to reassure her, "even now you burn like a beacon in the storm." All in an instant, the single word 'storm' caused a shift in her perception, and the mottling of his light and the blackness became a typhoon, whipping around her, pelting and stinging her with pure, twisted energy. "Others will come, and I can afford to appear generous." He didn't bid her farewell; he simply vanished, leaving her alone, if not for long.

They came from the storm, just beyond visibility, ravenous and circling around her like a pack of wolves. 'Predators will know your fear.' He had told her that. 'Don't be prey.' She fought the terror within herself, knowing that to lose that battle would be to lose to the encroaching daemons, but before she could school herself to calm, one lunged forward. A flash of teeth and claws, it ripped into her thigh, and she screamed soundlessly, but there was, stunningly, no pain. Another quickly followed, slamming her shoulder from behind and tearing off what would have been a hunk of meat if she'd had a body.

Again she felt nothing, and a comfortable warmth encircled her, eased her back from the precipice of mad terror on which she was slipping. "It's a dream," a vaguely familiar voice whispered, so close she could hear it thrumming in her bones, so distinctively human that no storm could drown it out. "Wake up, Ellie."

She gasped a strangled scream, clutching the cloth that wrapped her in her familiar bed, the familiar shadows playing on the wall, a familiar smell hanging in the air - like ether and chlorine and ozone.

She stiffened, every muscle in her body tightening until she shivered uncontrollably, her pulse thready, hyperventilating, nauseous, dizzy, unable to focus but too terrified to let herself drift back to unconsciousness.

An insistent buzz jarred him awake almost at once; he unerringly found the interface on his vox in the dark to receive the communique.

"The hypno-doctrination faltered." Had the Lord Inquisitor been unable to immediately identify the deep voice on the other end, the lack of pretext would have done the job just as well.

He grumbled a choice curse in response as he raised himself up onto his elbows.

"She's awake - unharmed. Go to her."

He passed a hand over his face, throwing the sheet off and swinging his feet to the floor. Reaching for the vox, he all but growled, "Thank you," and ended the connection.

He padded to her room and opened the door without a word.

Like a coiled spring, she shot from her cot and launched herself into his arms, forcing him to either catch or drop her. So he caught, if not quite as capably as he would have, had he expected it, and took a knee to avoid toppling sideways from her momentum. The tiny form shook and sobbed in his arms, gasping a hysterical explanation, garbled with hiccoughs and tears, "Daddy the people - the people were stars and he turned the sky - it was black and not black and the daemons came because I was burning I'm so sorry, daddy, I'm so sorry but I was scared and made out of light and I couldn't - I couldn't." She buried her wet face into his chest as she wept, muffling anything further.

He might not have heard any of it after the first word. He preternaturally stiffened as she spoke, utterly expressionless, gazing down hard at the piteous creature obliviously cleaving to him, his breathing steady by force rather than nature. He remained silent for some long minutes as she cried, and then exhaled all his breath at once and stood up, taking her with him. His room was still dark and the vox winked a missed message as he returned to his bed and lay on his back. She curled on him bodily, resting her head on his shoulder, her fingers reflexively gripping at his collar.

Gingerly, almost reluctantly, he placed one large hand on her back, the other on her hair, making miniscule motions with his fingertips and rumbling, "Hush, Giselle." She hiccoughed again and the fabric on his shoulder clung to his skin, wet and hot from her tears and the weight of her fevered head. "It's over." He continued his gentle ministrations as the panic slowly leached from her, and her weeping subsided. Some time later, she had fallen back to sleep: a relaxed, recumbent weight on his chest, whispering the Litany of Protection almost as if the prayer were meant for him and not the Emperor.

When he was sure she wouldn't wake from careful movement, he withdrew his hand from her back and, reaching to the nightstand for his vox and pressing a button, he redialed. It buzzed a moment, and then clicked from the other end. When he said nothing, Blackmoon's deep whiskey rasp prompted, "Well?"

"She's asleep," he replied, keeping his voice low. Far from rousing her, though, the sound of his voice compelled her to nuzzle into the resonant vibration in his chest.

"Surprising," the High Lord remarked. "I expected she wouldn't for a week. How did you manage that?"

It was nothing that he did, he knew. His attempts to soothe her had been less than half-hearted and the entire situation toyed with the frayed edge of his nerves. Not bothering to guard his inflection with a telepath of Blackmoon's terrifying skill, he heard irritation curl his tongue with, "She called me 'daddy'."

His mentor was silent for a long moment before pressing, "And?"

"The Sacred Throne am I supposed to do with that?" he snapped back.

"She's an emotionally intelligent child, Pieter. She obviously realizes what she needs - give it to her."

"It'll make her soft," he returned, his fingers tightening in the gossamer spool of her hair as if its texture proved his point.

"She's already soft, son." Ah, there it was - Blackmoon's judicious use of that unsettlingly personal 'son,' as if to highlight the parallel to the dynamic he'd established between them, what felt like eons ago. There was a touch of exasperation in his tone. "It's the only reason your seneschal is having any luck spinning her into silk, and don't roll your eyes like that," the Inquisitor's jaw clenched as he stopped himself doing just that, "you'll destabilize the whole sector." The old man knew him too well.

"It's not the same," he disputed both the explicit and inferred arguments with a mounting frustration matching his father's, mentally cursing the man's obstinate obtuseness.

"Have it your own way, then, Pieter." How many of their conversations had ended in Blackmoon's feint of resignation, wrapped ever in the guise of have it your own way, Pieter? "Spurn her. She'll never again so much as think of you as more than her master."

"And?"

"Think, boy," the High Lord rebuked. "Even a devoted servant can be swayed. But what would a little girl not do," the smoke of the man's voice warmed meaningfully, "for her father's love?"

'How curious,' she thought as she first stirred, drifting satedly in that place between sleep and consciousness, 'the bed is breathing.'

The thought lingered for a few seconds as she scrunched her fingers, wriggled a bit, and yawned. Then her mind focused on that oddity and her reflexes stiffened her like an animal sensing danger. She'd had a nightmare. Had it been so terrifying, now that she could think about it in the light of day? 'Yes,' she decided. It had been the single most frightening thing she'd ever experienced, even accounting for the Black Ship, for fighting the grox, for Sanctioning... Somehow he'd known and come to rescue her. And she'd said it. Oh Throne… She'd been frightened and weak and she called him the one thing that guaranteed that he was going to send her away.

Near petrified, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her gullet, she slowly peered up at him, sending a silent prayer to the Emperor that he was still asleep and she could sneak back to her room without him noticing.

He was already staring down at her with that ubiquitous expression that she couldn't read. She felt her lower lip trembling, bit it to stop it, swallowed hard, and took a bracing breath. "I beg you forgive me, Master-"

"-Father," he offered, cutting her off.

The world stopped spinning.

Her thumping heart went silent.

She stared at him in disbelief.

He seemed to take her silence for confusion and began to clarify, "Only ever when we are alone, Giselle. Anything more puts both of us in dan-"

She threw her arms as far around him as she could and hugged him fiercely, tucking her face into his chest. He froze for half a second, and then carefully placed a hand on her head, his fingers filtering through her hair. "Thank you, Father," her voice trembled with relief and every emotion she'd felt growing within her and secreted away for fear of retribution. Unbidden, a few hot tears leaked down into his tunic and her arms tightened as if she intended to never again let go.