<strong>Shipside - Navigators Dome -&gt; Bridge</strong><br/><br/>Thirty days without sleep, at constant vigil towards the predations of the Empyrean tempest. Thirty days of staring into the swirling impossibilities of the Immaterium, at once awesomely unreal and frightingly real. Thirty days of listening to the hissing static of the Warp, voices accosting you with temptation and damnation, hammering at your desires and fears to forge a blade of doubt in His Grace. Most Navigators scoffed at the notion. They were effectively above such petty emotions. Vendigroth Holt on the other hand, pondered on it. He challenged the Warp, so that it would strengthen his faith, further his resolve, fortify his soul. God Emperor know he would need it on this ship.<br/><br/>As soon as the ship returned into real-space the blast shields of the Navigator's dome began closing, slowly shutting out the light from the sun of this new horizon. It was crucial that there was no sharp lights from this point on. The Primary had been blind for anything but the Immaterium for a month now and as if that wasn't enough his eyes were black as the void he traversed, sensitive to the lights of nearby stars. Blind servants flocked to his throne, withered fingers moving with perfect precision over consoles and unhooking tubes of cables from their master. With a shaking hand Vendigroth reached out and took the delicately engraved inter-communications horn from another servant and pulled it towards himself, coughing dryly and taking a deep breath before he opened the channel to the ship's bridge.<br/><br/>"Welcome to Grace, ladies and gentlemen. Controls are once more yours, Helmsman."<br/><br/>Short, casual but respectful, none of the mystical rites and bellowing of the Imperial Creed. Just the transmission of power from one Noble, Primary Holt, to another, Captain Tristan. Vendigroth disliked being ritualistic in the eye or earshot of others than his kin. He found it a terrible breach of conduct to force his own seemingly quaint rites on the rest of the crew. Up here though, in the domain of his own, he practiced it with fervour. Servants once more flocked around him, lifting his tired body from the plinthed throne and carrying him down the staircase towards the waiting hot bath and his lesser cousins. Thirty days of cold sweat reeked about him. delicate fingers undressed him slowly while the minor navigators read him the reports and numerations of the past thirty days, all numbers cracked out of an ancient logicus cogitator of House Holt installed in the Dome for accurate readings of the ebbs and flow of the Warp for documentation.<br/><br/>"It seems then that the route was stable. As expected from the price we had to pay for it..." He pulled back his hood, revealing his prided hair that adorned his scalp wherever the electoos carved a pattern into it. Most Holtian navigators were completely hairless. "...however I noticed some errors along the way. Prepare the Rites of Astrographica Empyrean." Sliding down into the expansive bath of the lower levels of the Dome, Vendigroth dictated the changes to the mapped warp route to his relatives while the unseeing servants joined him in the waters and began scrubbing him down. A goblet of vintage amasec was handed to him, the price of which a million habworkers could be payed for a year in full. While he sipped it and droned on about the intricate numbers of recalculating the routes candles were lit one by one around them so that the darkness would be broken up slowly, the Primary's dark eyes being slowly weaned to the light.<br/><br/>Once done he was clothed yet again, layer upon layer of new robes being reapplied to his body in silence. He was trying to remember the mantra that his mentor had taught him in his youth in a try to cull the emotional currents of his heart. No use, the memory was too distant. By now the candles were lit by the thousands and his eyes had finally adjusted. It was about time he joined his<em>fellows</em>below. He descended the staircase slowly, feeling the weight of his limbs from the exhausting thirty days. Yet he wanted to move, walk about, anything but sit for a while before he fell into deep sleep for a few hours. Striding out into the light of the bridge he looked around at the others, giving a faint smile with brilliant teeth behind it.<br/><br/>"Good to see that the crew is still... intact." He had almost said human, but the elephant in the room that was the blue xeno had caused him to pause for a moment. "At least then my work was done to some satisfaction."