Hathor Maat

From the upper tiers of the Vault of Glass Echoes, Hathor Maat stood motionless, the edges of his deep blue robes brushing the polished obsidian floor. The air around him shimmered faintly, disturbed by the constant, whispering flickers of divination strands too fine for mortal minds to see. They curled and danced like smoke in a vacuum, threading themselves into the present moment with a subtle hiss.

He had felt it first—a shift in the aether. A gentle warp in the weave of fate, like a missed heartbeat in a metronomic pattern. It was a phenomenon he had encountered only rarely. His kind were taught to see possibility, to weigh futures against futures—but this was not foresight. It was a blind spot. A veil drawn over a singularity.

And at the center of that blank space stood… a figure. Newly arrived, recently brought into the orbit of the XV Legion, and most curiously… not of Prospero.

Maat’s golden eye—unblinking and enhanced by centuries of silent augury—tracked the figure’s movements below. They wandered the grand hall where relics from countless human cultures lay housed: shattered bones of pre-Unity warlords, crystalized thought-records of Old Earth, and one of the last surviving fragments of a Tarellian soul-totem. None of it seemed to surprise the figure. If anything, they moved as though through half-forgotten dreams.

More troubling still, the relics responded. When the outsider reached out—hesitantly, perhaps instinctively—the totems did not resist. One object, a psychometrically sealed reliquary dating back to the Age of Strife, trembled under their touch, as if waking from a long and spiteful slumber. Maat had seen lesser psykers attempt such contact and leave screaming. Yet this one remained whole.

He drew his cowl higher, retreating from the balcony's edge like a shadow melting into deeper shadow. The Librarius records held only scraps of information on this one: no proper designation, no origin worth naming, only a silent passage through the gates of Tizca under sanctioned escort. An anomaly. A tolerated variable.

But anomalies could become omens. And omens—unread—led to ruin. Maat turned without a sound, the whispers of the warp thickening in his wake.

He would speak to them. Not in the open, not before others. Quietly, in the upper chambers, where the past bled through stone and sand in whispers. He would ask questions, seemingly benign: their favorite season, the shape of their dreams, whether they’d ever heard the sky sing before a storm.

And through it all, he would watch.

For not even a Prophet of Dust could read what had no thread in fate… but perhaps, if he pressed hard enough, it might yet unravel.