Editing Story:Love Can Bloom (section)

===Chapter Fourteen===
	Taldeer stood on a snowy plateau, surrounded by her brothers and sisters of Ulthwe. Lost in thought, she gazed out upon the pristine wilderness. She felt an explosion lift her up, sending her flying backwards. As if out of the blue sky, she was surrounded by Imperial Guard soldiers and tanks. All around Taldeer, her soldiers were crumpling to the ground. The mon-keigh approached her, their illusion disappearing, their features contorting into monsters. The setting sun bathed the sky and ground with red as her army’s blood trickled down the hillside, and the Slaaneshi daemons closed in on her, bloodstained, clawed hands raised to strike. She heard a whisper in her mind, and fell to her knees, trying to vain to shut out the warp-tainted voice. A claw swept down towards her.

She awoke trembling. The Farseer was nestled against LIIVI and, despite being covered a blanket taken from the bed in the corner, was beginning to shiver as a gust of cold morning wind passed through a broken window. She realized, then, that LIIVI had at some point woken up. He was looking at her in a way that only one person in your life could, and Taldeer found herself wishing this moment could last forever.

“Taldeer,” he whispered, pulling her closer, “We must go if you are to escape.”

“Yes, we must,” Taldeer replied, with a resigned tone and quiet sigh.


----


	“Get Gebbett over there with reinforcements and an armored column!”

	“Commissar Gebbett,” the vox operator relayed, “The Hyperion Peaks require reinforcements. The Governor-Militant has ordered that you take an armored column to support its defenders.”

	Lukas Alexander inwardly groaned as Inquisitor Madek walked into the command center.

	“Yes, Inquisitor? I am… busy.”

	“The Inquisition’s priority is to hunt down the traitor assassin, not your petty little war, governor.”

	“Yes, yes. The Inquisition has authority in this matter.”

	Madek slightly smiled to himself. “My… field resources have indicated that your Vindicare,” ignoring Lukas’ curling fist as he continued, “Is currently located in the Pavonian Heartland.”

	“We have seen your “source’s” handiwork in a pile of dismembered Necrons. Tell me, Inquisitor, what have you released onto this world?”

	“I suspect that you already know. Now, I would like guardsmen deployed to the Pavonian Heartland to hunt down the traitor assassin.

	“What could be so important to the Inquisition that the resources of a regiment are needed to find one person?” Lukas Alexander asked, suspicious of Madek’s motives, “And we cannot assist you in that manner in any case. All of our forces are needed to hold our outposts. Your own ‘source’ will have to be-”

	“You misunderstand me. I was not giving you an option.”

	Alexander hesitated for a moment. “Very well, Inquisitor. But do not think that the Emperor cannot see what you are doing to his soldiers.”

	“I do not think the Emperor fails to see even a moment of all we do.”

	Ensuring that the Inquisitor had left, Alexander turned to the vox operator. “Get Ardrin over here. We must… speak.”


----


	Steadily, Human and Eldar advanced across the plains of Kronus towards the Imperial Guard’s stronghold.

	Taldeer halted. “Wait.” She felt the ocean around her begin to heave. “Something is coming.”

	The rumbling of Imperial vehicles and stamping of marching feet filled the air. LIIVI, loading his Exitus rifle, peeked over an outcropping at a chimera, surrounded by guardsmen.

	“Sir!” a guardsman shouted to a lieutenant standing up in a chimera port, “Boot prints, something has been here.”

	“Well, where do they lead?” shouted the officer.

	“Unclear, sir.”

	“Well, get the auspex and scan the area!”

	Taldeer frowned. “Are they hunting for us even among their petty wars?”

	“Eliminating the ranking officer among Imperial Guardsmen should induce a retreat.” A scant fifty meter shot, negligible wind. A simple, quick attack would easily drive off the patrol - for the time. The guardsmen heard loud crack as a sniper shot tore through the spine of the Imperial officer.

	“We’re under attack!”

	“The lieutenant is dead!”

	“Retreat, squad!”

	LIIVI nodded in approval and slung the Exitus rifle over his back.

	“Let us move out, Taldeer.”

	An hour later, as drops of blood dried on the ground a short distance away, a clawed hand pulled its body over piles of boulders. Here there was a scratch on the rock, where a sniper had fired on cowardly guardsmen. An impression in the dirt marked where the sniper had knelt. The Vindicare’s death had been mandated by the highest - the only - authority to which the thing answered. Here there was a faint footstep, in the direction of Victory Bay.

	The Eversor lept after the traitor.


----


	“Sir, we should speak away from the men.” Ardrin’s face was pale. Worried, Alexander pulled him into an empty office.

	“What is it? Has the Inquisition told Madek-”

	“We were contacted. Discreetly. The Inquisition has finished its investigation of Madek.”

	“The results?”

	“More than half of all Vindicare failures in the past decade have been trained under Madek’s supervision,” Ardrin whispered.

	“Is this mere incompetence on the Inquisitor’s part, or has he-”

	“‘Newly’ uncovered evidence, they said, indicates that he has been involved in the creation of weak, faulty Vindicares. More mewling children than weapons.”

	“He is a traitor!” Alexander exclaimed. “This, is heresy! Have they requested that we end his miserable life?”

	“They explicitly told us to take no action and stay out of his way. Said that an Inquisitorial team would arrive to deal with him.” Ardrin paused for a moment, then continued, “They want the Vindicare captured for ‘evidence’.”

	“When did the Inquisition begin to concern itself with evidence? No,” said he, pacing across the room, “They are trying to hide an embarrassment. One that could, at the least, disrupt Imperial operations on Kronus.”

	“No victory to encourage the men, then, sir?”

	“We shall see to it that there is still something to look to. Assign a unit to - stealthily - survey the Inquisitor. If he acts against us, it will become… necessary to end him. Are they, then, calling off Madek’s assassin?”

	“Sir… the Officio Assassinorum denied any approval for the deployment of an assassin to hunt down the Vindicare traitor.”


----


	Broken and overgrown roads dating from the Imperium’s possession of Kronus stretched across the landscape around Victory Bay. Mysteriously, no other Imperial patrols had been sighted. The silence, with a peculiar sensation on the very edge of her perception, left Taldeer on edge.

	“How can your people live as they do?” Taldeer finally asked.

	“What do you mean?”

	“Your lives are short, and your achievements crumble into dust. The mon-keigh live in fear of each day, knowing that it could snuff out their lives. Fiercely fighting over a planet, only to abandon it and return a millennium later.”

	“Are the Eldar really so different from Humans?” LIIVI replied, pausing to look back at her.

	“No, I suppose that maybe, in the end...” Taldeer trailed off as LIIVI’s visored gaze looked over her shoulder, as his hand reached down to pull out the Exitus pistol.

	“Get down!”

	The assassin, more monster than man, knocked Taldeer to the ground, focused now on a single target. A shot rang out, and a hole was ripped in the Eversor’s leg as it struggled with LIIVI. Its deadly claw hovered mere centimeters from LIIVI’s throat, twitching and inching closer. Acting on impulse, with the grace of an Eldar Farseer, Taldeer seized her spear and thrust it into the back of LIIVI’s attacker. It twisted around, wrenching the spear from the Farseer’s hand and forcing the Vindicare’s pistol to the ground in a single move. Its claw raised, and then, without warning, the assassin sprang away into the brush. LIIVI seized his pistol, scanning for the location of the Eversor with his visor’s spectral imaging. It had disappeared.

	“What was that?” Taldeer breathlessly demanded.

	“An Eversor. The Imperial Guard know now where we are. We must move.”


----


	Victory Bay, as the mon-keigh called it, was unimpressive to the Eldar. Ancient, rocky fortifications and the skeletons of buildings were of little interest when compared to the beauty and awe of an Eldar Craftworld. Even still, Taldeer found the fortifications imposing. 

	“Are you indeed sure that their trench system is not viable?”

	“Any outlets of that system would be well guarded by at least a squad of guardsmen. Despite their losses, Taldeer, I find it unlikely that the key areas of the city are short on soldiers.”

	When considering the abilities of the Eldar to move from one place to another, one may think of harlequins, leaping and dancing around a battlefield, or rangers, leaving hardly a mark on the ground. All Eldar, however, are gifted with graceful movement; trained humans, to a lesser extent. The scarred and pitted wall at the corner of Victory Bay offered a viable sequence of holds to climb, but to be spotted would mean a swift death. As if having practiced it a dozen times over, Taldeer climbed the wall, almost gliding from foothold to foothold. Grabbing the wall’s edge with her arm, Taldeer slung herself over the top. No guardsmen in the immediate area. She gestured to LIIVI to ascend the wall to her.

	With an almost comical clumsiness, compared to the Eldar, LIIVI steadily worked his wall over the top. He situated himself on the ramparts so as to scan the area for any signs of life, but felt a pair of arms slide around his waist.

	“If we shall die here, mon-keigh, hold me for one last time.”

	LIIVI, tenderly, wrapped his arms around her. “I shall perish before I let harm come to you.”

	Seconds ticked past that felt like an eternity. Gazing into Taldeer’s eyes, LIIVI murmured to her, “It is time that we go.”