You want a story. They always want a story. I have told the fall of craftworlds. I have danced the death of gods. I have worn the face of the Laughing God himself and made an audience of ten thousand weep without shedding a single tear of my own. I am a keeper of endings. It is what I do. But this story this one I do not perform. This one I witnessed. Seven hundred sisters of your Emperor's church came to a world called Parnis. They were devout. Disciplined. Utterly certain that faith was armour enough against anything the galaxy might throw at them. What waited for them in that convent was older than their faith. It had been patient in its cage for longer than your Imperium has existed. And patience, in the dark, is a very particular kind of hunger. They did not die quickly. I will not tell you how they died. What I will tell you in the last moment, seven hundred dying minds reached for the one soul still untouched. Still clean. Still burning. And they poured themselves into her like water into a vessel never meant to hold so much. She survived. Your kind never fail to disappoint me. Tonight is hers. Listen. [Verse 1] Seven hundred voices once sang in this hall, Seven hundred candles burned bright on the wall. Now the smoke is their memory, the ash is their name, And one soul walks out where seven hundred came. She knelt at the altar, she prayed through the night, She called on the Emperor to bring her His light. But the light that came back wasn't gentle or kind It burned through her body and hollowed her mind. [Chorus] Oh, Ephrael what did they make of you. Saint or witch the faithful can't choose. You carry the dead in the depth of your soul, Thrice born and forsaken, you walk this world alone. [Verse 2] The convent is silent no bell, no refrain, Just the creak of a door and the sound of cold rain. She stands at the threshold with blood on her hands, Too holy for mercy, too strange to withstand. Her sisters are watching from somewhere inside her, Seven hundred ghosts that will guide and divide her. She speaks and their voices come out in her breath She lives, and they live through her even in death. [Chorus] Oh, Ephrael what did they make of you Saint or witch the faithful can't choose. You carry the dead in the depth of your soul, Thrice born and forsaken, you walk this world alone. [Bridge] Do you remember the oath that you swore Before the cage opened before you were more The girl in the schola who dreamed of His grace, Do you still see her somewhere in your face They'll hunt you, they'll fear you, they'll call you a lie, The very Imperium will watch you and cry Burn her, bind her, silence that light She is too bright now, too pure, too bright. [Verse 3] Now a stranger walks with her through the cold and the dark, An Aeldari exile the last of his art. Two outcasts together at the end of the age, One a forsaken saint one a player without a stage. The convent falls silent as she pass through the door, Seven hundred candles and then one and no more. And the Harlequin smiled to the dust and the air, For a story this beaut
