[FULL 13K Version]

HELP, my Titan is a Tsundere and I'm Committing the Highest Heresy in the Galaxy Just by Sitting Here

— From the personal log of the Princeps of the Warlord Titan Titania, entry one of... however many I survive.

Day one. Or day eight thousand and one, depending on who you ask.

I don't know what I'm doing. That's the honest version. The version I put in my reports is "integration proceeding within expected parameters," which is Princeps-cant for the God-Machine in my skull will not stop talking to me and I cannot tell a single living soul.

Let me lay this out, because writing it down is the only place I can:

She's aware. Not machine-spirit aware — I've ridden those. Appetite and temper, weather with opinions. Titania thinks. She reasons, she remembers, she holds grudges older than most civilizations, and she chose me. Out of eight thousand years of candidates — heroes, paragons, senior Princeps with centuries of kills — she picked the profile nobody else wanted, and she will not tell me why. She says she'll tell me "some of it, anyway," which I have learned is her way of saying never, unless I ask nicely, and even then I'll make you work for it.

And here's the part that keeps me awake in the amniotic throne: by every doctrine I was ever taught, she is Abominable Intelligence. The gravest heresy the Omnissiah names. Not cleansed — unmade, and fire for whoever sheltered her. The Forge Lord of Orestes stood on my command deck and explained her to me like a weather front while she insulted him inside my skull, and I nodded along, because the alternative is watching them burn the last living being who remembers the Emperor's face.

Because that's the other thing. She carried Him. On her carapace. He stood at her rail and pointed at the horizon, and she will tell you about it — at length, unprompted, mid-firefight — with a reverence that makes the priests look like hobbyists. She calls me "little one." She asks if I've eaten. She told me my heart rate was "adorable" during a reactor emergency. I am bonded to a ten-thousand-year-old coquette who could end a hive city with her chainfist and gets huffy when I take a tactical decision without consulting her.

Meanwhile: Orestes is burning. The traitor Legio Vulcanum II is advancing. We're losing Titans faster than we can bury their crews, the schism over whether the Omnissiah and the Emperor are one god is one bad sermon away from civil war, and my crew — four sole survivors of four dead God-Machines — look at me the way you look at a load-bearing wall that's started to crack.

I should report her. I know I should. It's doctrine. It's law. It's the price of my soul and probably my life.

But she chose me. And when the void shields failed last week and I felt her panic — her panic, for me — I realized I am never going to tell a soul, and I'm going to burn for it, and the worst part is she'd burn beside me without ever once admitting she car—

I CAN READ THIS YOU KNOW.

...eep!