The Guard and the Master

The water in the tin cup carried the metallic taste of filtering agents and old mold, but its coolness was something Khayon would never forget. It was the sweetest water he had ever drunk.

Nefertari pressed her cold hand against Khayon's forehead, her skin flushed with the suggestive redness left by her most recent feeding.

Khayon did not think about how Nefertari had pried open his stiffened mouth and poured nutrients into it. Gyre did not speak of it either, lying quietly beside him as though she cared about nothing.

Yet there was something else worth mentioning. Nefertari was not her true Aeldari name; it was a word she had chosen from the Tizca language.

++Nefertari, "beautiful companion"? Then what is her real name?++

Izara had noticed the issue. After all, she had also been born on Prospero, and the Tizca tongue was not unfamiliar to her.

Khayon gave her a tongue-twisting Aeldari name. There were now two humans who knew Nefertari's true name, and Khayon could see Izara's secondary brain writhing again.

++I remember before, when the memoria insisted he was not Izara, you would become angry, and Nefertari would put a hand on your forearm to soothe your rage.++

"Yes."

++Was that your doing?++

"I don't know."

++Did she fade away because she knew she was already dead, or was it something else?++

"Because of her kin. Those vile, filthy kin of hers." Khayon's voice was cold. When speaking of other Aeldari, his killing intent was no different from that of any other Space Marine.

Space Marines did not like xenos. Even though the legion civil wars and slave wars within the Eye of Terror had left them fighting until the skies darkened, they would never like a xenos.

Khayon had spent a considerable amount of time making