Tales from the Boer’s Head

(A Warhammer 40k Tale)

Written by P.H. Boer

The bulkheads breathed with the reluctant rhythm of dying lungs, slow, arrhythmic, wet with memory.

Cadet Vela crouched beneath a skeletal arch of blistered adamantium, lasrifle clutched like a crucifix in the hands of a sinner. The silence wasn’t empty, it was indulgent. A lavish hush swollen with unseen teeth and moist intent. It pressed against her skin, thick as embalming oil.

Behind her, Elindra whispered litanies through gritted teeth, prayer rubbing against panic like flint on flint. Yoral Nemez tapped his slate, each digital click a synapse in the twitching corpse of The Hollow Requiem.

They were the only ones left.

Or the only ones the ship hadn’t yet digested.

Time here was elastic, a rotting tongue that licked their memories clean. Minutes festered into hours, then slipped, oozing, into something without name.

The corridor pulsed again.

The walls were Imperial once, but now wore filigree of alien origin, baroque and surgical. Not decoration, but indulgence. Veins of gold-laced cartilage curled across the panels like vines raised on blood.

Even the air tasted curated, sweetened by decay, as if agony had been bottled and sprayed like perfume.

Flesh-steeped cables slithered like ligaments through plated steel, veins fat with black ichor that pulsed to a rhythm neither mechanical nor alive. Bones, Vela thought. Bones grown into the walls.

And mouths.

Not metaphor. Not madness.

She had seen them, lips stitched open, teeth calcified into snarls, exhaling heat as she passed. She dared not breathe.

She was trained, in theory. Primed in ritual. Indoctrinated to face horrors.

But that was before the walls had eyes. Before breath became a sin.

Her armor still squeaked.

Corren, the mission lead, had said she had “resolve.” But there had been pity in his tone. Like someone admiring a flower before the flame. He was gone now. Swallowed, maybe.

Her own voice cracked as she whispered, “Nemez?”

“Something’s wrong with the map,” he said, not looking up. “The layout keeps… folding. The ship’s not stable. Or it’s evolving.”

“Into what?”

He gestured with trembling fingers. “This schematic isn’t schematics. It’s… tissue. A nervous system. There’s no architecture. Only below.”

That word.

Below.

Not a direction. A verdict.

And the ship, The Hollow Requiem, wanted them there.

Down.

“Forward then,” Elindra said, voice tight as wire drawn over bone. It didn’t tremble, but her fingers did, twitching over the casing of her bolt pistol like a surgeon’s hand remembering the shape of failure.

The corridor sloped slightly. Enough to be noticed by the body more than the eyes. A subtle drag in the knees. The illusion of volition. Descent as suggestion, not command.

The lights, those that still functioned, dimmed one by one behind them. Not flickered.

Not failed. Dimmed, like a curtain falling between acts of some profane performance.

Vela’s senses unraveled by degrees. The scrape of boot on steel. The dry click of her own tongue against her teeth. The smell of sterilized death in the recycled air.

But beneath it, always beneath, came something else.

A smell not meant for flesh-bound senses.

Like rotted music.

Like burned memory.

They passed a viewport: a slit of ancient adamantium-ringed glass long since warped by void exposure. Beyond it… nothing.

Not black. Not the hollow indifference of space.

A color.

One that had no place in stars or thought. It writhed in stillness. Licked the eye with suggestions of shape, of language never meant to be spoken aloud.

Her fingers throbbed.

Only then did she realize how tightly she gripped her rifle. Bone ached against ceramite.

Then came a junction. Four mouths yawning outward. None marked. No data-scrawl. No sigils of safe passage. Only the sound of the ship breathing through its iron throat.

Nemez halted, head tilting like a marionette listening for its puppeteer. “There’s a signal,” he murmured. “Not vox. Not digital. Harmonics. Ancient.”

“From where?” Elindra asked, voice rough as rusted hinges.

He raised a finger, pointing toward the darkest corridor.

The one that sloped deepest.

Of course it did.

Vela stared into that gullet. That corridor wasn’t a path. It was a wound. And something inside it waited to be remembered.

Her feet moved. Not from bravery. That lie had long since been flayed away. But from gravity. The kind that memory exerts. The kind that trauma pulls behind it, like the tail of a comet smeared in screams.

The descent was quiet, but not silent.

Silence was a mercy.

This was something else. A pressure. Like being watched by the very concept of attention, flayed of meaning and soaked in rot. The corridor curved, its angles obscene, the geometry subtly, cruelly, wrong. Imperial design had rules. This space had none. Or too many.

The deeper they walked, the more Vela’s chest tightened, not from exertion, but from some unseen music humming beneath the threshold of thought.

Her heartbeat aligned with It.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Not a rhythm. A summons.

No wind. No chill. Yet sweat dripped down her spine, cold and syrupy. The kind of sweat that carried fever dreams and half-formed prayers.

Always ready. That was the Schola creed. They had not prepared her for this. For walls with stretch marks where something had once grown, or still did. For cables pulsing with heartbeat instead of power. For footfalls that echoed before they landed.

“This was meant to be salvage,” she whispered. “Not… this.”

Nemez didn’t reply. He was staring too hard at the slate in his trembling hands.

Vela remembered the briefing. Virellis Theta’s dying sun. The planetary panic. The desperate hope pinned to The Seraphine’s Last Light, a half-mythical ghost ship, now found drifting and renamed by their voxmen before they even stepped aboard.

The Hollow Requiem.

They’d promised clearance. Food. Medicine for her mother’s lungs, blackened by the spore-choked mines. One crate of functioning archaeotech, and Vela’s bloodline would be preserved.

She had volunteered.

Not for glory.

For breath.

That made what followed worse.

“Movement,” Nemez rasped.

Vela’s rifle snapped up. A door yawned ahead, partially open. No light behind it. Just a shape sliding, then gone. A caress of shadow on shadow.

Her heart matched the corridor’s pulse now.

Thumpthumpthumpthump…

The door widened. Not with gears or servo-pressure.

It flexed.

As if pulled open by muscle instead of metal. The slick whine of parted flesh dressed in the mockery of hydraulics.

Elindra crossed herself.

Vela stepped through.

The chamber inside was no room.

It was a womb.

Once, maybe, a cargo bay. Now it bore the texture of skin stretched too thin over lattice.

The floor was soft in places. Veined. It gave underfoot with damp resistance, like walking on the
backs of dreaming things.

Their lamps flickered.

Then stabilized.

Then flickered again.

Shapes resolved.

And with them, horror.

Dozens of bodies adorned the walls like sacred instruments. Their skin had been peeled in
intricate patterns, flayed lace, and beneath, their veins twitched in rhythm to an unseen maestro.

The cords that bound them were not crude, each was adorned with small barbs, not to kill, but to excite. To keep the nerves awake. A thousand invisible cuts that ensured their torment remained, pure.

“They’re alive,” Nemez whispered.

“Parts of them,” Elindra corrected, her voice more breath than sound.

Then came the sound.

A hum.

Soft. Barely perceptible. It emanated from the walls, the floor, the bodies.

One note.

Then another.

And another.

It wasn’t a melody. Not yet.

It was tuning.

“Is it a signal?” Vela asked, though the question rotted in her mouth even as it passed her lips.

“No,” said Nemez, his voice fraying. “It’s… a key. A tonal key. They’re unlocking something.”

“To what?”

The question was never answered.

Because then,

Her voice joined the harmony.

“Please,” it said. “It hurts. I want to go home.”

It came from one of the bound bodies. Her exact tone. Her exact cadence.

A flayed echo.

Vela stumbled back, her rifle slipping from her hands as if recoiling from guilt.

“I never… I didn’t say that.”

The voice repeated.

Same tone.

Same wound.

“Please. It hurts. I want to go home.”

Elindra’s voice followed, whispering fractured scripture.

Then Nemez’s, arguing, logical, cracking.

The room wasn’t singing.

It was reproducing.

Their voices. Their failures. Their buried moments. Played back not as recordings, but as confessions forced into flesh and bled into harmony.

“Out,” Elindra barked, steadier than she had any right to be.

They walked.

Not ran. Running would make it real.

The door sealed behind them with a sound that did not belong to machines.

And still, beneath the cold silence.

The song continued.

The corridor welcomed them back like a throat swallowing the last breath of a dying god.

Darker now. The meager light from their shoulder-lamps painted only inches ahead, swallowed too quickly, as though the air itself fed on illumination. Vela couldn’t feel her hands.

Whether from cold, blood loss, or adrenaline she couldn’t say.

She could still hear the song.

Not aloud. Not anymore.

Inside.

In her marrow. In her memories. Each footstep pressed it deeper.

“They know us,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Nemez murmured, voice brittle as frost. His eyes never left the slate, though it now displayed nothing but writhing lines. “They’ve always known us.”

Vela turned to Elindra, seeking reassurance, a Sister’s presence. But the Sister-Curatrix stood still as iconography, eyes fixed ahead, lips parted in reverence or horror.

“We are the melody now,” she said.

Vela didn’t understand. But she felt it.

Each thought a note. Each fear a frequency. The corridor was a score written in blood and bone, and they were instruments being tuned.

And ahead,

A shimmer.

Subtle. Perfectly vertical. A slit of lightless silver, suspended in midair.

Not a door.

Not a hatch.

A wound.

Reality hadn’t bent, it had been cut.

And what bled through was still.

No swirl of warp energies. No screaming winds.

Just… stillness.

A blade balanced on the edge of sensation.

Elindra exhaled a slow, shuddering breath. “That room,” she said, as though speaking were sacrilege. “Those bodies, they weren’t people anymore.”

“They were organs,” Nemez said, his voice like torn paper. “Strung in memory. Singing resonance. They’re mapping us. Mapping pain. Mapping pattern.”

Vela stepped closer to the wound. She could see nothing within.

But it smelled.

Faintly.

Not of ozone or sulfur.

It smelled like her mother’s dying breath. Like copper tears on rusted blankets. Like what she buried to keep moving. She turned toward Nemez, trembling.

Before she could speak,

Click.

A soft sound behind them. Not mechanical. Not footstep. But intent.

They turned too late.

It fell from the ceiling like a whisper made flesh.

Tall. Starved-thin. Beautiful.

Wrong.

Porcelain curves wrapped around barbed mechanics, like a statue sculpted from agony. Its arms were surgical arrays, multi-jointed limbs that hissed softly with monomolecular precision. Its legs bent backwards, every step a mockery of grace.

And from its torso,

Nemez.

Or what remained of him.

A face stretched like parchment over bone and machine. An echo of recognition embedded in machinery.

Vela didn’t scream.

Didn’t move.

She simply froze.

Nemez did not.

He opened his mouth, but fell quiet as a blade speared through him, lifted him high, twirled him like a puppet soaked in glass and bile.

Blood sprayed in fans across the corridor.

His slate shattered on the floor.

“NO!” Elindra roared.

Bolt pistol cracked, one, two, three shots. At least one struck. Flesh and porcelain exploded in a bouquet of black ichor and smoke.

The thing turned with the elegance of a courtesan.

A limb lashed out, struck Elindra square in the chest.

She flew.

Hit the wall.

Crumpled.

“SHOOT!” she screamed as blood flew from her mouth. “VELA… SHOOT!”

But Vela could not.

The creature stepped forward. Delicate. Precise. Like a curator admiring a broken sculpture.

Elindra sat up, one arm limp, mouth red with blood.

She raised her pistol again,

Another strike.

Her thigh ruptured like old paper.

She screamed, high and wet, not just from pain but from betrayal.

“VELA!”

The construct hissed. Its voice was a frequency that tasted of pus and memory. Vela’s body finally obeyed.

But not to fight.

To run.

She turned, the silver wound ahead of her. It beckoned, not with promise, but inevitability.

A bolt shot cracked behind her.

Then the scream.

Elindra’s.

It was cut short. Too short.

Vela didn’t look back. She ran. Flung herself into the slit.

And the world was unmade.

There was no landing.

No weight. No orientation. No body.

Only dismembered sensation. Floating, not through space, but through a wound in the idea of space. Vela’s self peeled in ribbons, her thoughts slicing against one another like blades wet with oil and confession. Something sharp scraped her memories clean, leaving only residue.

She tried to scream.

There was no mouth.

Only the echo of one, smeared across the inside of her skull.

Falling, or maybe rising. Her skin remembered gravity, but her bones did not.

There was no light.

But she saw.

Not with eyes. With remembering.

Colors bled into her: pale reds that twitched like nerves, bruised purples that oozed warmth, golden threads that pulsed through it all like veins in divine meat.

She floated.

Then she fell.

Then she stood.

No transition. No sensation. One moment a scream, the next, placement.

Beneath her feet, the floor flexed.

It breathed.

Not metal. Not flesh. Something that remembered both.

The walls rippled with the gentle inhalation of suffering. Lungs that had long since become ornamental. Veins ran overhead like ivy made of bile, pulsing dark fluid to some rhythm she had yet to be tuned to.

She breathed.

But there was no air.

She walked.

But there was no direction.

Each step drew her deeper into a labyrinth not built, but cultivated. Grown from remorse and reshaped by appetite.

Statues adorned the corridor, humanesque, but never human. Stretched torsos locked in
moments of shivering ecstasy and agony. Their mouths open in silent arias. Their eyes replaced
with strings. Some hung from the ceiling, their bodies formed into chandeliers of tendon and
chime-bone. Others lay embedded in the floor, twitching to vibrations only they could hear.

And then…

He arrived. Lazhareq. The Hollow Cantor.

No fanfare. No light. No movement.

The air shifted, thick with reverence and sterilized agony. A scent not unlike crushed bone and hot silk, impossibly familiar, disturbingly intimate.He simply was.

A towering silhouette wrapped in lacquered filth and flayed parchment robes. Where a face should be, only a bronze grille, humming faintly like a cathedral organ mourning its own desecration. His skin was pulled tight, too tight, as though a hundred limbs writhed beneath, trying to push outward without ever birthing.

Dozens of barbed limbs spiraled from his spine, each an artist’s tool stolen from a surgeon’s nightmare: bone needles, skin flutes, glimmering crystal lobes engraved with scripture in a language that drank pain like ink.

His limbs moved like a dancer’s, fluid, indulgent, too aware of their own beauty. He raised one arm. And the world obeyed.

The cords above her vibrated.

The statues began to hum.

Each note was a violation. Each tone a memory.

Her mother’s voice, soft and rasping, calling her in the mine-choked dark.

Her own voice, trembling and lost, weeping during her first night in the Schola.

Elindra’s scream, her final sound, looped and looped until it bled into a single unholy chord.

Lazhareq said nothing.

He conducted.

His gestures were slow, elegant, obscene. And the room responded as though it had waited millennia to be touched again.

Vela dropped to her knees.

Not from pain.

From resonance.

You are the next instrument,

The walls vibrated.

You are not meant to listen. You are meant to sing.

She trembled.

“No,” she rasped. “No, no, I’m not part of this…”

The walls contracted.

From their glistening membranes, hands pressed outward. Dozens. Hundreds. Childlike, malformed, arthritic. They stretched the flesh like sacs of birthing horror. Waiting.

Watching.

Lazhareq raised both arms and a choir responded.

Voices, no, thoughts, formed into melody. Her own mind thrown back at her in perfect harmonics.

Her regrets. Her cowardice. Her betrayal.

Each layered with a thousand versions of herself, more broken, more honest, more willing to sing.

She screamed.

Not from pain.

From recognition.

Lazhareq tilted his head, a lover hearing the first gasp.

Then the stage revealed itself.

A platform of bone, stretched sinew, and vitrified sorrow opened behind him. On it, herself.

Suspended. Flayed. Strings in place of tendons. Mouth sewn open into a rictus of song.

The sound she emitted was not a note.

It was truth played backward.

Vela staggered, bile rising.

“I’m still me,” she whispered. “I’m still me… I’m…”

But the echo came first.

“I am not.”

The figure on the stage stared back.

No eyes.

But she knew.

She had already been tuned.

She had already been played.

She had always been part of the Requiem.

Her body locked, not from fear, but from expectation.

As if it knew what came next.

The floor beneath her pulsed, the rhythm now unmistakable. A sacred heartbeat. A divine metronome. Every vibration a commandment.

Her hands rose.

Not by will.

By design.

She watched in horror as her fingers stretched wide, joints straining, tendons singing taut with some new, dreadful purpose. Her bones ached to be carved. Her muscles whispered for dissection.

Then came the pain.

Not sharp. Not sudden.

It began like memory, dull, familiar, impossible to locate. The sensation of an old scar remembering the wound that made it.

But it spread.

A fever of unmaking.

First behind her eyes, like someone had replaced her thoughts with scratching. Then down her throat, where her scream tried to form but instead became a low, harmonic drone.

Her lips cracked.

Then split.

Then peeled back.

Her mouth widened, too wide, as though trying to sing from the inside out.

She didn’t scream.

Because she was already screaming.

The sound didn’t come from her throat.

It came from her lungs, peeled and reformed into bellows of grief.

It came from her skin, split into vibrating membranes of dissonance.

It came from her bones, now hollow pipes tuned to echo her worst self.

And still Lazhareq conducted, each gesture teasing another layer of agony into harmony.

His servo-arms danced around him like a halo of vivisection, rewriting her being into something
playable.

She looked again at the figure on the stage.

It looked back.

It was herself, but more honest. More ruined.

Its arms hung from strings made of nerves.

Its jaw moved in a slow, eternal aria of loss.

Its skin had been written upon in scripture not meant for eyes, music as flesh.

She tried to look away.

But her spine had tuned.

Her mind had submitted.

“You are not dying,” the choir intoned. “You are refining. Through suffering, you become. Through pain, you are made worthy of remembrance.”

The final truth slid through her like a warm needle.

She had always been this.

The flight. The fear. The sacrifice. It had never been defiance.

It had been rehearsal.

She was the refrain.

The moment of crescendo when suffering becomes structure.

When memory becomes music.

Lazhareq approached now, arms lowered, head bowed, as if in reverence. His presence did not impose. It invited.

He offered a final gesture.

Not command.

Permission.

Vela’s mouth opened to receive it.

The sound that emerged was not a note.

It was a cathedral of torment, carved from her past, shaped by her shame, and tuned to perfection.

The chamber shivered.

The statues wept.

And Vela…

Vela became an instrument.

No longer a girl.

No longer a cadet.

But a note without end, ringing through the Hollow Requiem long after her name had been forgotten.

A prayer composed of agony.

A song carved from self.

And in a spire that touched nothing and pierced everything, something listened. It smiled without a face. A new song had begun.