>>96460978
>It was on the hive world of Lavantia that Salafié found the opportunity to slip away from the dynasty's minders for a few precious hours, descending from the spire into the mid-hive where she wandered through streets basked in smog tinted light that shone from kilometer-high transparisteel windows ringing the cavernous space.
>In years past, an excursion of this sort would have presaged one of those gruesome happenings that the Rogue Trader had paid so handsomely to cover up. And indeed, Salafié was more than a little tempted in that direction, for not since her youth had she gone so long without making a new servitor. Yet, now, as she walked among the common folk of the Imperium, the impulse to separate them from the weakness of their flesh simply did not come to her.
>Here, a group of laborers on their way home from a shift in the manufactorum bowed their heads reverently at her passing. There, an old woman made the sign of the Aquila and wished her an Emperor-blessed day. These were wretches that the Salafié of yesteryear would have slain merely for the affront of having seen her face. Twenty-two decades she had spent condemned as a heretic for daring to push the frontiers of science beyond the limits of Imperial dogma, and in those days, there was no outrage of bloodshed that she would not gladly commit against those she saw as her persecutors.
>But with her damnation lifted, this persona of cruel indifference fell away. And though she was still an undying horror that had more in common with the wires in the walls than the men around her, she felt for the first time in two centuries that she was not alone, but was a human among other humans.
>At length, the Priestess smiled. Not a cynical sneer, but an honest, innocent smile speaking to the joy in her heart. How long had it been since she'd really smiled? And thus Salafié resolved that, if only for a little while, she would do her best to prove worthy of the forgiveness she had been offered.