Chapter 148 - Striking a Deal
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"You know about parallel worlds?"
The moment Kaelen asked it, he already knew it was a stupid question.
Trazyn the Infinite. An ancient being who had mastered the construction and manipulation of parallel dimensions at the C'tan tier. His entire museum labyrinth ran on folded reality and severed timelines.
Of course he knew about parallel worlds.
As expected, Trazyn only smiled, a faint, unhurried thing on that borrowed mortal face, carrying the weight of a thousand unspoken meanings.
"Of course I do, Mr. Kaelen."
A casual swipe of one finger. Green light burst from his fingertip and bloomed above their heads into a blazing star map projection.
Then the map went mad. It split, overlapped, split again, and within seconds the cabin ceiling was carpeted in a dense sprawl of galaxies, each one almost identical to the last, each one subtly, unmistakably different.
Countless worldlines. Countless galaxies. Suspended in the cramped cabin like the branches of some vast tree hung with living stars.
"My museum, my labyrinth, operates by opening branch paths inside parallel dimensions to fold reality." Trazyn's voice carried a thread of pride he didn't bother to hide. "An exceedingly elegant piece of engineering. It lets me come and go as I please, and it shields the collection from the slow erosion of passing time."
His fingers drifted through the star map, plucking at it like harp strings.
"In these worlds, utterly different events took place. Different choices, different catastrophes, different turning points — and thus the collectibles born from each are precious in their own way. So many exhibits. So many that sometimes even I lose count..."
He paused. His tone shifted, casual, almost bored, but anyone listening could hear the humblebrag underneath.
"The only one I still remember clearly is the time I pocketed an Aeldari craftworld. That vessel came from a reality bubble where the Eldar Empire had risen again. Beautiful beyond measure. The entire ship still shimmered with the light of a time before the Fall."
Kaelen's eyelid twitched.
Pocketed a craftworld. Just how many absurd things had this old monster stashed away?
Trazyn took no notice of his expression. His tone pivoted without warning, sharp as a blade drawn in the dark.
"However—"
His voice dropped to almost nothing. Each word measured, deliberate, as though he were placing weights on a scale one by one.
"A Primarch soul-shard from a parallel world."
The air in the cabin seemed to freeze solid for a heartbeat.
"This is no rotten bone discarded by time. It is no fossil of a dead reality." Trazyn leaned forward slightly. "The essence of a gene Primarch is a Warp entity bound within transcendent flesh. Their souls, at their very core, are condensed reality-code from another dimension."
His words came faster now.
"If the shard in your possession comes from a trajectory where the Primarch never fell, or fell in an entirely different way — then it is without price."
"Its value lies not in raw power. It lies in the unique historical divergence point it contains."
Trazyn drew a slow breath. When he spoke again, his voice had taken on something almost like reverence.
"It can tell me how a single soul's choice causes one worldline to present an entirely different beauty in the reflection of the Warp."
The thought alone was too much for him to contain. His excitement broke the surface plainly, he even slipped into formal address without seeming to notice.
"So, Mr. Kaelen. Would you tell me the story of this soul-shard?"
The Infinite's fingers stroked his staff in slow, idle passes. The green light pulsed bright and dim, bright and dim, a mirror of the restlessness he couldn't quite suppress.
"Your down payment is very tempting. But I would much rather hear the story I do not yet know. That will be the deciding factor — whether you may walk out of here with a complete, uncorrupted clone of the Phoenician."
Kaelen didn't answer immediately.
He poured himself a glass of wine, tipped his head back, and drained it in one swallow. The liquid slid down his throat like a final preparation, lubricating the machinery for what was going to be a very long story.
Trazyn straightened in his seat. He had the look of a connoisseur settling in before a rare performance: attentive, composed, intent.
Kaelen began to speak.
A worldline unlike any other.
Loyalists and traitors swapped in a chaotic tangle, every single detail rewriting galactic fate, sending shockwaves through the entire universe that had never been felt before or since.
It held stories worth singing about and weeping over. Heroism braided with treachery. Despair standing shoulder to shoulder with hope.
In some ways, that worldline's internal logic was more coherent than the one they stood in now. In some ways, its scale dwarfed even the official history.
For 3 hours, Trazyn sat with his eyes closed. Like an old music lover lost inside a symphony, a faint smile resting at the corner of his mouth, there and not there, impossible to pin down.
When Kaelen spoke the last word, silence reclaimed the room.
The Infinite opened his eyes slowly. He extended his tongue and touched the corner of his mouth, like a man savoring the final note of a meal that had been almost unbearably good.
"What a magnificent worldline."
"What do you think, Mr. Trazyn?"
Kaelen's throat was sandpaper. He was running on fumes, but he forced himself to steer things back on track. 3 hours of unbroken storytelling was not a small thing. Right now he felt like he could empty an entire bottle of Macragge vintage without pausing for air.
Trazyn opened his eyes fully.
"Quite excellent."
The Infinite's lips curved upward in a slow, unhurried arc. The smile on that mortal face now carried something genuine, a thread of real appreciation.
"It has moved me."
Kaelen let out a quiet, internal breath of relief. His face gave away nothing.
"However." Trazyn raised one finger, and his tone sharpened into something more businesslike. "I want to see that shard with my own eyes."
No preamble. Kaelen reached into the system inventory and pulled out Fulgrim's soul-shard.
The moment it appeared, strange light flooded every corner of the cabin.
The shard floated above Kaelen's open palm, like a piece of solidified starlight, radiating a luster that felt almost holy.
A soul-remnant of the Phoenician from another worldline. Uncorrupted. Complete. A pure crystallization of what that consciousness had once been.
Trazyn's eyes went wide open. He looked exactly like a traveler who had spent 3 days dying of thirst in the desert and just crested a dune to find an oasis below.
His hand reached out without thinking. Those long fingers trembled faintly, reaching for the shard.
Kaelen turned his hand over. The shard vanished.
The Infinite's hand hung frozen in the air. His expression was magnificent.
"What I'm proposing is collateral, Mr. Trazyn." Kaelen spoke without any particular hurry. "Sanguinius's feather as the down payment. And this soul-shard as chattel mortgage against the loan of the cloned Fulgrim."
He let a beat of silence fall. Then he dropped the real payload.
"Don't you want to see it with your own eyes..."
Kaelen leaned forward slightly, dropping his voice, as if sharing something meant only for the two of them.
"A Phoenix reborn, a clone of the Phoenician, fighting his own hideous, fallen serpent-daemon true self?"
The Infinite's pupils expanded.
An uncorrupted Fulgrim, facing the daemon Primarch who had been twisted by Slaanesh into something serpentine and monstrous, this was no ordinary battle. This was 2 worldlines of the same soul colliding head-on in reality.
If he could record that and place it in the museum, it would be the crown jewel of the entire collection.
Trazyn was quiet for a few seconds. Then he looked at Kaelen with a smile that wasn't quite a smile, the sharp gleam in his eyes impossible to read, was he admiring prey, or appraising an exhibit?
"Then how do you intend to guarantee your credibility?"
"Collateral is an unpleasant business, especially with an outsider whose background is entirely unknown. If you run off with the clone, who exactly do I complain to? I can hardly march up to the Golden Throne and demand your Master of Mankind make good on the debt."
Kaelen laughed.
Open. Easy. With just a hint of something roguish underneath.
"Then let's use the Master of Mankind as the benchmark." He settled back in his chair, hands folded over his knees. "Between me and the one sitting on that Golden Throne, who do you think is the better credit risk?"
HISS!
Trazyn drew a sharp, involuntary breath.
That was a vicious question.
Two seconds of silence. Then Trazyn laughed.
There was a rare candor in it.
"At the very least, your credibility exceeds the Master of Mankind's." The Infinite delivered his verdict. "Because you, at minimum, paid a down payment."
He extended his hand. A fingertip curled.
The Sanguinius feather floating above the table was caught in a thread of green light and rose slowly into a transparent cube that materialized from nothing.
The moment the cube sealed, the golden radiance pouring off the feather stopped dead, a fragment of sunlight locked in stasis, perfect and permanent.
"I look forward to it." Trazyn withdrew his hand. "A Primarch soul-shard from a parallel world, fused with an uncorrupted cloned gene Primarch. I wonder what kind of appreciation that combination will produce."
He smacked his lips, like a man anticipating a feast not yet on the table.
"A fine deal. Even if you deceive me in the end, I find I don't particularly mind. After all, you yourself are quite a fine collectible, aren't you?"
Every hair on the back of Kaelen's neck stood up.
What was that look? That was a collector's gaze on an exhibit, a nearly pathological appreciation, edged with longing.
"Pass." Kaelen turned down the dangerous joke without a second's hesitation.
Trazyn blinked. Then he burst out laughing.
"Heh. Only a joke. Don't be so tense."
He rose to his feet and adjusted the mortal captain's uniform, unhurried, precise, graceful as an actor preparing to take the stage. Then he extended his hand toward Kaelen, palm upward, the gesture of an invitation.
"If you don't mind, would you do me the honor of accepting an invitation to tour my museum, Mr. Kaelen?"
The Infinite's tone had shifted entirely. Formal now. Genuine. The voice of one gentleman addressing another.
Kaelen paused for a moment, then stood and straightened his collar.
A personal invitation from Trazyn the Infinite to tour the labyrinth museum. In the entire history of the human Imperium, this was almost certainly a first.
He reached out and took the offered hand, a hand that looked warm, and was not.
"The honor is mine, Grand Collector. Mr. Trazyn."
They looked at each other. Both smiled.
In those smiles lived the quiet satisfaction of a deal well struck, and something else beneath it, a mutual, wordless recognition that each had found the other worth the trouble.
In a transaction that crossed the boundaries of species and faction, there were no losers.
➤ Next: A Shame the Emperor Never Made Female Primarchs
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