Six Ork guardsmen, wrapped in faded silver metal armor, stood motionless before her, like the statues overlooking hundreds of scribes below in the vast copying hall of the Archives Department.
Their iron boots were firmly locked to the aircraft's metal floor, while she had to grip a metal pillar tightly to keep from smashing her head against the bulkhead or falling over when the enormous metal craft took off.
As a Harpy, flying was her natural instinct, but this flight was said to be ten thousand meters above the ground—a height she had never imagined, for that should have been where the gods dwelled.
Yet when she peered through the window, she saw only vast banks of cloud.
There were no magnificent palaces, no fantastical gardens, and certainly no gods.
The interior of this massive transport plane was plain and austere, built to maximize practicality. Its design contained no needless decorations or aesthetic elements meant to please the eye, perfectly displaying the traits of the race to which it belonged.
Simple, brutal, practical.
Dalia Sehira ran one hand through her cropped blond hair. The dust and grease clinging to it made her long even more for her weekly bath in her private compartment.
Yet she had a feeling that the cleanliness she yearned for was the very thing farthest from the minds of those Orks.
When they had taken her from the cell beneath the library, none of them had said another word beyond confirming her name.
Even now, she did not understand why she had been imprisoned.
She had merely discovered a symbol while searching through a document, one connected to an ancient cult that had long since vanished—the Cult of the Veiled Goddess.
And that document had been an official government record, due to be distributed to Harpy