Dark Thread (Part One)

They left the ruins and headed forward along the rutted road behind the Imperium's defensive line.

The sun gradually rose over the horizon. Across the fortifications stretching for kilometers, firing positions cast long shadows in the dawn, while tens of thousands of tents blanketed the earth like bubbles and cooking fires flickered to life.

They passed flag after flag, all of them hanging limp in the increasingly dry, hot air.

The infiltration point was a drainage outlet in an ancient mine tunnel system, roughly three kilometers west of Mount Mishil.

A few days earlier, the position had been exposed by artillery fire and had been heavily guarded ever since.

Besides sentries, a small number of Wizards watched it day and night.

The Orks guarded the exit on the other end just as tightly, but Grakas had no intention of going all the way through.

The captain introduced him to the officer at the outpost, a red-faced brute named Mano.

Mano quietly sent the sentries away, then watched with the captain as Grakas slipped into the drainage outlet through a shattered cliff face.

Darkness, an element that had often appeared in his life, closed around him.

Three kilometers and thirty minutes later, he crawled out through another drainage outlet. He was now not far from the Ork camp.

He extinguished his lantern, tucked it into his pack, and hid it along with his canvas jacket and military boots beneath loose bricks in a canal.

The time he had spent moving through the dark mine tunnels had nearly been enough for him to complete his change of identity.

He was no longer Nickel.

All things considered, he did not possess many true methods of disguise: a pink silk shawl over his desert uniform, felt shoes replacing his military boots, and a sand