The Fitting
Her grandmother had polished the same fitting, and her grandmother before that — a palm-sized boss of gold on the seventh tier of the Throne, worn to a softer shape by four hundred years of her family's cloths, and it was her whole office to keep it bright. No one had ever told her why that fitting and not another. You did not ask the reason for a duty older than the language you'd ask it in.
She climbed at the third bell. Below her the choir was already being counted in — the tally-priest's voice flat as an abacus, nine hundred and forty, nine hundred and forty-one, each number a person who would not see the fourth bell — and she did not listen, the way you do not listen to your own heartbeat. The count was the weather. The count was only what the morning cost.
At the seventh tier she knelt, unrolled her cloths, and began, and the He that filled the chamber went on not-dying above her, as it had every morning of her life and her mother's. She did not look up. You were not forbidden to; you simply learned, young, that there was nothing up there a person could hold in their eyes and still climb at the third bell tomorrow. The gold did not need her. There was no tarnish this deep, no air to tarnish in; the polishing kept nothing bright. It was only the shape her family made, every morning, around a thing that could not be allowed to end, could not be allowed to be touched, and could not — whatever the hymns said — be allowed to rest.
When she finished she climbed down past the count — one thousand and six, one thousand and seven — to find her breakfast, and behind her the fitting shone exactly as it had: tended, useless, perfect, forever.
Head-canon of Warhammer 40,000 — the Golden Throne (no source bridge; an origin fragment) · cold institutional horror. The inverse of [[invincible-still|Still]]: immortality imposed and preserved-perfect against its will — the mug no one is permitted to let crack. Deep-time as damnation, not beauty; the falsification-test piece that proved head-canon reads the world, not the author's mood.