The Weeping Seraphs

Forms of Address / Cascade of Titles

Chapter Maxim

We see the end. The virtue of foresight. The Neophyte learns that every battle is already lost, at some point, and that courage begins only where one has looked upon one's own death.

We bind the gaze. The virtue of mastery. The gift of sight belongs not to the one who bears it, the Chaplains teach, but to the one who guides it in chains. The Neophyte learns obedience before the will, not before the flesh.

We do not return home. The virtue of endurance. Crusades last centuries. Whoever leaves Orsolax learns to regard it as a grave to which he will never return.

We weep last. The virtue of grief. Grief is duty, but only after the battle. Whoever weeps before the last shot has surrendered one shot too soon.

Distinction

Whoever hears of Psyker supremacy and a mirror of fate thinks of the Thousand Sons. The resemblance is convergent development and not a kinship of geneseed: no Weeping Seraph possesses psychic power. Their blood is that of the Blood Angels, and it is on this blood that they have broken.

Index of Locations of the Fortress-Monastery

Overview

Crusade of the Last Lament

"We end where the visions end, and not one step sooner."

Two thirds of the brothers lost since departure, three battle-barges shot to wrecks. Calvaro leads a fleet that lives on prophecies which come true ever more rarely.

Crusade of the Bound Gaze

"We silence the song of the masks that sings our end."

Ninety years of hunting a single Harlequin troupe that performs the play of the Chapter's fall. The crusade has consumed eleven Vasa and never captured a foe. It is followed by the Ironclad Dreadnought Malvento, and Chaplain Raldoron Serafino leads its masses.

Sword-Brother Ysrael Duraso, leader of the Corvinari. On the moon Velk he had his five Sword-Brothers hold an archway through which the Harlequins danced. Duraso saw that his hour did not lie there, stepped forward and caught the Shadowseer's kiss with his arm. Today he bears the arm in plasteel.

Crusade of the Ashen Hour

"We keep watch at the rift until the rift looks at us."

For 340 years on border worlds that no one holds. The crusade has struck the word for homecoming from its masses and numbers fewer than a hundred brothers.

Sword-Brother Cassiel Grifone, now leader of the Sendini under Aphael. In the Ashen Hour he held a bridge for three days against Heretic Astartes, with a Vasa on his back who, dying, spoke his name without cease. Grifone let him speak. He says it was the only act of mercy open to him.

Crusade of the Withered Vasa

"We fill the crypts until the mirror is sated."

It raids Black Ships and seizes their cargo. 58 years, six ships of the Inquisition destroyed, yet the prisoners die faster than it brings them.

Initiate Azkaellon Volterra, now leader of the Vitrian under Aphael. While boarding a Black Ship he found thirty children in cryo-sleep. He brought all thirty aboard; not one escaped. It is said that he has not spoken of the boarding since.

Crusade Without Trace

"We go where the mirror is silent."

Without sign of life since 912.M41. The Chapter keeps it on its rolls, because no hour has been carved for it.

The Sword-Brothers

A Sword-Brother is raised up when he has survived his hour in the Speculum twice—when, that is, the vision was false. The Chapter honours these brothers and fears them at once, for no one knows what they saw instead.

Neophytes

The Neophyte is chained to an Initiate, wrist to wrist, for one night in the Hall of Counted Hours. In the morning the Initiate carves a tally mark for the Neophyte, as though his death were already certain. Only when the Neophyte is permitted to overwrite the mark himself is he deemed ready.

What This Chapter Lacks

The Weeping Seraphs have no Librarians; their vow abhors the witch within their own ranks. When a battle demands psychic power, a brother opens the reliquary of a Vasa and turns its pain upon the enemy.

High Marshal Ezrin Calvaro

A slender, aged warrior with wholly silver eyes, who reached the Second Stage eighty years ago and has not left it since. He wears blackened master-crafted armour and a power sword whose blade is covered with 306 tally marks—one for each brother he has lost.

"I have seen my hour for eighty years. It does not grow more beautiful." — Ezrin Calvaro

On Thessin he ordered the withdrawal from a fortress that the Speculum showed as lost. The fortress then held for three months against the besiegers, without him. Calvaro calls this his only guilt.

Chapter Master Lucan Ardesi

Founder of the Chapter in 412.M39, a warrior who chose Orsolax as his home and never knew the Speculum. He bore a Thunder Hammer and the first white tear upon his helm.

"I want sons who carry every grief to the end." — Lucan Ardesi

He fell in 538.M39 in the trenches of Orsolax itself, while forcing a tribe of the six realms into submission. His hour lies first in the Hall of Counted Hours.

Marshal Tibero Aphael

Commands the Crusade of the Bound Gaze and the force currently deployed. Tall, his right iris flecked with silver, a single hour on his vambrace. He carries a bolt pistol and a power sword, as well as the reliquary of an old Vasa.

"They dance our shame. I only want to let them finish once." — Tibero Aphael

On Ilyris, Aphael let the Harlequins perform the play up to the second act before he attacked. He says he wanted to know how it ends.

Chaplain Raldoron Serafino

The Chaplain wears a bone helm with a red mask and a crozius whose head is a mirror. He holds fast to the teaching that the Speculum is a window of the Emperor.

"He who knows his end cannot fall away. He has already fallen and stands nonetheless." — Raldoron Serafino

In the Silent Gallery he has led 41 brothers back into service and lost 19. He names both numbers aloud, every year.

The Weeping Seraphs do not consider themselves renegades, but they do not know whether they are. Their Chaplains are divided on the matter. Raldoron Serafino teaches that the Speculum is a window of the Emperor, and that whoever knows his end is more loyal than any fleet that hunts him. High Marshal Ezrin Calvaro, by contrast, says openly that the Chapter died in 611.M40, and that everything since has been a long echo.

This division has consequences. Twice Calvaro sought to destroy the Speculum; twice the Marshals stood against him, because without the Vasa none of their crusades can win battles any longer. The Chapter numbers 1,640 brothers, more than ever before, and keeps itself alive through a weapon it would itself call sorcery if it saw it in another's hand.

Every Marshal knows of it. The Initiates learn of it when they bear their first reliquary. Some of the brothers refuse to bear one; they are not punished, but they are not promoted. Three Sword Brothers have gone into the Silent Gallery over this in the last fifty years and have not returned.

The Chapter has no answer to the question of what it is. It has only the next hour.

The Second Act

The moon was called Velk and had no air left. Its cities were ruins of white stone, and on the largest square, beneath a sky of stars and the dull light of the gas giant, stood the Harlequins.

Marshal Tibero Aphael watched them through his eye-lenses and counted. Nineteen dancers. A Shadowseer with a mirrored mask. A Fool in black and white, lying on his back upon a fragment of rubble as though asleep.

"They are beginning," said Chaplain Raldoron Serafino over the Chapter frequency. He sounded like someone announcing the reading at a Mass.

The dancers moved. Silently, for here no air carried the sound, and yet Aphael heard music. He heard it in his head, there where the Vasa dwelt. The girl in his reliquary, whom he called Mira because she remembered no other name, had begun to hum.

The play showed a tower. Three dancers in red robes climbed it. At the top stood a mirror made only of light.

"They are showing Hesperon," said Sword Brother Cassiel Grifone. The Sendini lay in the rubble to the left of the square, ten bolters levelled.

"I know," said Aphael.

He had known for ninety years. The troupe always danced the same piece, and they never danced it to the end. On Ilyris they had vanished in the last act. On Thessin in the first. Today, he knew, he would leave them the second.

To his right, Malvento creaked. The Ironclad Dreadnought had not moved since the landing, and the brother in the Sarcophagus had not spoken since he had seen the mirror for the third time. Only the power fist opened and closed slowly, like a hand remembering something.

On the square, the red dancers fell to their knees before the mirror. One after another they looked into it. One after another they clutched at their eyes, and their hands turned silver.

"Marshal," said Initiate Azkaellon Volterra. His voice was young. "The Vitrian are in position. We could take them now—"

"No."

Mira hummed louder. In the reliquary on his backpack Aphael felt her warmth, her fever. She wanted to reach the dancers. The Vasa always wanted that. The Harlequins were to them what light is to moths.

The second act began. A dancer in red armour, without a mask, stepped forward. He carried a child on his back, a child of glass, and the child glowed. The dancer drew a sword and struck at the air, and wherever the blade passed, other dancers collapsed without having been touched.

"That is us," said Raldoron quietly. "They are showing the Vasa."

The glass child on the dancer's back began to shatter. First one crack, then many. The dancer fought on, and the child crumbled piece by piece, until only an empty frame hung on his back. Then he turned, looked at the frame, and wept.

Aphael noticed that Mira had stopped humming.

"Marshal," said Sword Brother Ysrael Duraso. His Corvinari lay behind him, five shadows in the dust. "The Shadowseer is looking at us."

She was looking at him. Through the ruins, through the ceramite of his helm. In her mask Aphael saw himself: a warrior in faded red, with a reliquary on his back in which sat a girl he called Mira. And behind the girl, in the reflection, a crack.

He knew what his hour looked like. He had seen it in the Red Basin, one hundred and twelve years ago. A room of white stone, a child, a light. He had never known whose child.

"Fire," he said.

The bolters of the Sendini spoke. Silently the stones of the square burst apart. The dancers were no longer where the rounds struck; they were already further on, already over the rubble, already among the Vitrian. Aphael opened the reliquary and turned Mira upon the Shadowseer.

Mira refused.

That had never happened before. The Vasa burned when they were aimed, just as promethium burns when it is ignited. But the girl in his reliquary was still, and in his head he heard only a single voice, very quiet:

"They have said how it ends."

The Harlequins killed three brothers of the Vitrian in four heartbeats. Malvento crushed a dancer who was too slow. Grifone fired until his bolter was empty. Then the dancers were gone, all nineteen, through a gate in the air that closed behind them like an eyelid.

On the square lay only the Fool, upon his fragment of rubble, as though still asleep. He was dead. He held a frame of glass in his hand, empty.

Raldoron Serafino knelt down beside Aphael. "She refused."

"Yes."

"The law says a refused vessel is a spent vessel."

Aphael looked at the reliquary. Mira was breathing. Through the silver-glass he saw her face, and her eyes were not silver, as he had feared, but brown, the eyes of a child of Orsolax.

"I know the law," he said.

With his knife he scratched a line into his vambrace. Not for the three dead of the Vitrian, whose hours he would write later. For himself. A second hour.

Raldoron saw it and said nothing.

Aphael closed the reliquary and ordered the withdrawal. The second act was over. The third, he knew now, he would see.