Nârik Dreygur

The corridors were built for monsters — brutalist slabs of iron and ceramite sealed with pressure-locks heavier than most tanks. The kind of place that echoed more with silence than footsteps. And yet, something stirred within them now.

Dreygur stood still as stone, unmoving in the passageway.

A figure had passed. Not just another serf or cult-branded tech-thrall — but them. The gait. The presence. That impossible familiarity beneath newer scars or gear. They had walked past him as if unaware, but Nârik Dreygur had not forgotten. Not them. Not the siege. Not the fire. A rasping intake of breath shuddered through the vents of his rebreather, more like a hiss than anything human. He turned, slowly — his scorched armor groaning under its own weight.

"You were there," he said, his voice low and half-synthetic, like molten stone poured through a grate. “At Hydra Cordatus. You watched it burn.”

He took a step forward, the light from above catching on the twisted brass of his shoulder plate — the Iron Warriors’ sigil blackened to near ruin.

“You saw me burn.”

There was no accusation in his voice. No rage. Just the dead certainty of a ghost that had clawed back into reality.

“I remember your eyes. I remember how you ran.” He came to a stop mere paces away. The temperature felt colder despite the hiss of hot air from his damaged pauldrons.

"Tell me," Dreygur asked, tilting his ruined head slightly. “Did you think I died?”

A long pause.

"...You were wrong."