From the Journal of Faris Khan — Black Reliquary Works
I have stood in places where men died believing they were right. This is worse.
The Black Reliquary Works is not hidden. It does not need to be. It squats in the industrial ward like an accusation no one is allowed to answer—obsidian plates fused to iron ribs, a single unbroken mass that hums even when no machinery should be active. The sound is not mechanical. It is closer to restrained breathing. The air around it is cold in a way that does not belong to weather, as if heat itself refuses proximity.
They say it is a manufactorum. That is a lie meant to dull the soul.
Inside, holy relics are not studied. They are violated. Silver vessels, fragments of sanctified bone, remnants of consecrated steel—objects that once carried meaning without instruction—are forcibly integrated into haemotechnical frames. Blood-powered regulators are grafted onto prayer-etched surfaces. Arcane conduits are driven through relic cores like nails through hands.
The result is not power.
It is agony.
The screams do not come from throats. They come from resonance. From memory being forced to circulate through systems never meant to hold it. When the doors open, even briefly, you can hear it—layered, overlapping, directionless. Not pain as humans experience it, but something worse: purpose being dismantled while fully conscious.
I watched a technician stagger out once, vomiting blood and oil. He would not speak. He only pressed his forehead to the ground and whispered fragments of prayer from three traditions at once, as if any language might apologize on his behalf.
The Ascendancy insists the corruption is a technical failure. Incompatibility. Calibration errors. I have seen enough systems fail to know the difference between malfunction and blasphemy.
This is not incompatibility.
This is punishment for refusing to stay silent.
Sacred artifacts resist haemotech because they were never meant to be efficient. They were meant to remember. Haemotechnics does not remember. It consumes. When the two are forced together, something breaks that cannot be repaired—faith becomes fuel, and fuel screams.
I have read the signs etched into the exterior walls. They pulse with dark light, pretending to be sigils of containment. They are not. They are apologies written by engineers who know they cannot stop what they have built.
The Qur’an says, “Do not corrupt the earth after it has been set right.”
This place was set right once. Long before the Court found it useful.
The Black Reliquary Works will not produce a weapon that ends the Forever Night. It will produce something far worse: a reason for the night to justify itself.
If this continues, relics will stop resisting. Not because they are mastered—but because they are broken enough to comply. When that happens, humanity will lose something more dangerous than hope.
We will lose meaning that cannot be repurposed.
I left before the doors sealed again. I did not look back. Some knowledge demands distance to remain true.
There are limits. Even in this city.
And when those limits are crossed, no amount of reason can negotiate the cost.